Hello, welcome to the podcast of Shortcuts. I'm Josie Long and today's episode is about

coming back to yourself, about going right back to the beginnings, understanding your past

selves and in doing so I read my diary from when I was 13 and oh wow, being 13, that's one

version of yourself.

This is shortcuts.

Brief encounters, true stories, radio adventures, and found sound.

Volume 3, issue 4, girls' lasagna gets a little bit of cheesecake on it.

Today, I've always had a little diary and a pen.

Meeting myself coming back.

Cheeky chappy, full of energy, ready to go play and do something impulsive and bouncing all over the place.

There are some moments in my life where I feel like I'm really myself, I'm really living,

coming back to what I most care about when I'm cycling in the rain or jumping into a cold pool or holding both my children close to me.

But not every instance of coming back to yourself feels that edifying.

And I was talking about diarising with a friend of mine who's a

comedian who makes beautiful shows. And he read me some of it. And it was so beautifully wrought.

And when I got home, I thought, well, I kept a diary that same Edinburgh Fringe. Mine probably

will have details of all the different shows I saw and the people that I knew

and the friendships I had and I found my diary and I had about two entries for the entire month

and both of them were like, feeling really tired, don't really want to write much, sorry I haven't

written for a while, some of the shows are good, most are bad, saw three shows, they were all

wonderful.

Just this scant, hurried, apologetic thing, which I feel like would be the title of my memoir.

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