Hello everyone and welcome to our first episode of Postcards from Midlife of the New Year. We're all

ready to go to have a little chat and a catch-up about what's been happening in the Candideon

Helping households, and we're going to also be sharing what we're looking forward to in 2026

some of the promises rather than resolutions that we've made to ourselves, as well as some of the ways we are keeping ourselves jolly during this rather dismal and dreary time of year. Did you notice I said that, I said those two awful words, in a very perky voice, Lorraine. You are quite perky today. It's a bit too much. It's because you're recording in a new room, isn't it? Oh, yes. All professional and over-excited. I'm glad you're perky because we did have, we've already had a monoson.

Yes.

We've had that last week, haven't we?

We were filled with negativity after Christmas because there's been Christmas exhaustion, grumpy husbands.

You've got no sense of humour dried January, awful men threatening World War, terrible social media news and we got all of that out of

the system before we started recording so you'll be thankful for that listeners 2026 is going to be

our brilliant year um do you know i'm going to bring it to you trish it's going to be a brilliant year

because it's the year of the fire horse oh for god's sake right and anyone who knows me

would say that is practically my spirit animal anything with the word fire in it so it's all

about energy change growth okay well i like the energy change and growth but i just can't deal

with the waffling on you don't want some some astrology then? You did the astrology. You're not doing it again. You did it. You did it just before Christmas. There's only so much that barminess I can take. But focusing on the positive, do you want to tell me some of your good news moments from the last month or so since we hit the airways around

what's been some of the jolly things we're not doing the misery moaning no we did have a joint

jolly moment didn't we because we were invited to a very special preview by the women's

prize for fiction of hamlet now this is maggie o'farrell's book been made into a film which is going

to win all the awards has already started to win the award. It's directed by Chloe Zau, and Jesse Buckley is just amazing in it. Now, Hamlet, the book, which Maggie wrote, came out actually the year we started the podcast, and I remember us both raving about it at the time. Anyway, we went to a little preview weeks before it came out,

cried our eyes, I mean, really ugly cried our eyes out all the way through it.

And it's just such a special film because it was made almost all by women,

even though Spielberg.

Yes.

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