The Bugle, Audio Newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4,351 of the bugle.

I'm Andy Zaltzman,

live from the shed of phenomenal factivitiveness here in South London.

We have hiatus the crap out of the last few weeks,

but we're back, and better than ever,

or better than we've been over the last few weeks

when we've not been recording, I hope at least.

And we are here to hold September 2 account on behalf of all humanity. Summer is over. Autumn is shuffling into place here in London, and winter isn't that far off. Spring is doing some early preliminary training and next summer is already starting to put some plans in place. So we do need to get going and to help me catch up on what is happening on this once happy planet of ours. I mean, admittedly that is going back quite a while. I think to just before the first single-celled organism thought, I won out, I'm going to divorce myself and everything started going south. Anyway, I'm joined by, from Switzerland, bringing unquenchable neutrality and the sound of mountain goats frolicking on ski lifts, it's Alice

Fraser. Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy, hello buglers.

Definitely have been on hiatus, putting the haya into hiatus.

I'm here in the fine Alps of Switzerland,

and I'm running a writers retreat,

which is basically hide and seek with a bunch of writers.

I approach they retreat.

They're a shy creature.

I just want to help you with your structure.

No, it's been genuinely, it's genuinely been very lovely.

And I feel quite relaxed, as relaxed as you can while juggling 12 writers and two babies.

That's a dangerous...

I don't know, is that the right balance of writers to babies in terms of...

...