This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to full disclosure, a podcast project conceived in pre-lockdown times,

if you can remember those, and designed largely to let me spend more time than is normally

available in a radio interview format with people whom I find interesting.

That's pretty much the only criteria.

We've cut our wings, clipped our wings somewhat during lockdown,

which obviously sort of limits the chemistry and the interaction between the presenter and the guest.

But I'm nonetheless delighted to welcome this week's guest, Elizabeth Day, who is a writer and a journalist and a sort of podcast royalty as well.

You will know her for a variety of reasons, but most recently what you might call her, philosophy.

So I'll be the millionth person to ask you later, Elizabeth, about about how you can make a success of apparently being a failure. But we'll begin at the beginning. I hadn't realized. You're frighteningly precocious. You got your first newspaper column when you're about four. Yeah, no longer precocious, sadly, because I'm now firmly in my 40s.

But I did get my first newspaper column at the age of 12, actually.

And I then had many years in the wilderness, and I only got my second newspaper column.

Don't jump.

You just jump the formative years from 12 to 30-something. How did you end up with a newspaper column at the age of 12? I mean, I was pretty precocious as a child and I think I sound really annoying. But I always knew that I wanted to write. And I remember I grew up in rural Ireland, in the north of Ireland. And we just so happened to live down the road from Northern Ireland's only health farm.

And there was a guest there who was staying there and the owners of this health farm knew that I wanted to be a journalist, but I'd never met a real life journalist.

And Linda Gilby was a real life local journalist.

And I met her and she was incredibly kind to me.

And she said, if you're serious about wanting to do this as a career, you need to start

right now.

You need to get loads of work experience.

You need to be writing from now.

Great advice.

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