My guest is Marina Hyde.

Marina Hyde is a columnist at The Guardian and has just published a new collection of her most recent columns in The Guardian called What Just Happened Dispatches from Turbulent Times.

Welcome to the podcast, Marina.

Thank you very much for having me, Paul.

Right.

Well, I know from your colleague at The Guardian, Raphael Bar,

that this is not your, maybe your favourite activity talking on podcasts. So I'm particularly

grateful that you've taken the time. Thank you. Oh, no. I mean, I don't mind it so much. I'm just

I'm one of these very unfashionable people who never really does any form of broadcast,

because I feel like I'm just a writer and

that's that. So I, you know, I also think I'm terribly bad at it. So I'm apologising in advance

to your listeners. Right. Okay. Well, what's it like to be known as the funniest writer in Britain

as Catlin Maratha is in the back of your book? I'm convincing. I'm convincing, Paul.

Very nice, but unconfensing.

But it's, you know, I mean, it's funny in a way.

It's funny that since the sort of Brexit vote,

I would say, is when my columns particularly,

or the politics column rather, particularly took off.

And I wonder in a weird way whether, you know,

humour was in some ways the most rational response to it. I mean, humour is a very good defensive response in ordinary life, I find, anyway, and perhaps to the political situation.

It just seemed, I suppose it's funny because it seems, it has in millions of ways been deadly serious, but in many ways it's been very suited to trying to write jokes about it

in some ways.

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