Hello, podcast fan.

Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party.

We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July

for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival.

We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting,

including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane,

and some bloke called Greg James doing his radio four show called

Rewinder. You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free. To book your free

tickets, go to crossedwires.com, forward slash fringe. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

This is a Thinking Aloud podcast from the BBC, and for more details and much, much more about thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co.com.

Hello, as a, an English boy growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s, I had to spend a significant amount of time

explaining that I was not Irish. After all, didn't I go to a school where most of the teachers

were Irish Catholics and attend a church where all three priests were Irish? And spend most of my

time out of school life knocking around with a boy called McNamara,

and drink my first pint of Draft Guinness in a pub called Molly Malones. Well, now, a fine new book

reminded me of another association of the times when with a couple of mates in tow, I'd take the bus up to Alder Hay Hospital in the hope,

and it was often a vain hope, of finding a suitable girlfriend,

a possible wife among the hundreds of young Irish nurses

who'd finished their shifts.

That book is entitled Irish Nurses in the NHS, an oral history. And it's co-authored by

Gronia McPolin and Nea Doshi and Louise Ryan, who is Senior Professor of Sociology at London

Metropolitan University and who now joins me in the studio. Let's begin with a 2021 clip from BBC

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