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Simon and Lee are joined by Kate Bee, founder of The Sober School, for a conversation that opens with the rock-bottom mythology of AA before sliding into personal history: Lee traces his unusual relationship with drink back to growing up in a pub in the mid-80s, and on through the British ladette culture he lived through at university in the 90s, complete with Zoe Ball and Bacardi Breezers. Kate maps the particular shame attached to women's drinking, drawing the three of them into a digression on Julia Kristeva's abject and the quietly respectable, middle-class drinkers no news report ever pictures, with Simon noting how his wife Lil's brush with an alcohol-tracking app in Italy preceded Kate's email by mere days. The episode closes on what Kate found to replace alcohol's pleasure once she gave it up: smaller gatherings, an early exit, and the relief of just being herself the next morning.

Mentioned

• The Sober School – sobriety support for women who don't want AA or rehab, founded by the episode's guest, Kate Bee, ten years ago out of her own experience quitting drinking
• "Take Your Time" – Nirvana; song that prompts a singalong at the top of the episode
• Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) – raised as a model of recovery that doesn't suit everyone; its rock-bottom narrative and "anonymous" framing discussed as barriers for some
• Zoe Ball – British TV and radio presenter; cited as an exemplar of 90s British ladette culture, noted as now sober
• The Spice Girls – pop group raised as a possible comparison to ladette culture, then dismissed as not quite fitting
• Bacardi Breezers – alcopop brand discussed as a 90s drinks-industry product aimed at women
• Julia Kristeva – French feminist philosopher; her concept of "the abject" used to discuss the language ("messy," "sloppy") applied to women's drinking
• Joe Rogan – podcast host referenced jokingly as a contrast to this podcast's tone

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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A face full of acupuncture needles and a sourdough microbiologist on a country road in Sardinia: this week Simon and Lee cover a lot of ground. The main story is a hitchhiking adventure from an agriturismo near Tempio – Lil's first time ever, Simon's first in perhaps thirty-five years – that ends with a chance encounter so improbable it needs several minutes of recounting before either of them quite believes it. From there the conversation opens into what happens to your assumptions about people when you're somewhere unfamiliar, and what it means to feel genuinely lucky rather than merely privileged.

Mentioned

• Mary Shelley – 19th-century English author; referenced when the acupuncture needles prompt a comparison to a scene from a horror novel
• Chega – Portuguese far-right political party; mentioned as a Portuguese equivalent of Fratelli d'Italia and Reform UK
• Fratelli d'Italia – Italian far-right political party; cited as a European parallel to Chega
• Reform UK – British populist party; mentioned as a point of comparison.

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Back from his travels and biking to work in Coventry, Simon clocks two encounters with men radiating pure confrontational energy – and wonders aloud what it must cost to move through the world that way. The conversation rolls into territory neither of them usually treads: class, inherited masculinity, and whether any of us really choose who we become. Along the way, Lee recalls a boy on the bonnet of a Capri saying "Miller" with such effortless swagger that six-year-old him wanted to be that person on the spot – and a woman's answer to the question "who would protect you?" lands like a wriggly thing under an upturned rock.

Mentioned

• Zebra crossing – the UK term for a black-and-white striped pedestrian crossing; the setting for Simon's two confrontational encounters that open the episode
• Ford Capri – long-nosed British sports car from the 1970s and 80s; Lee recalls sitting on the bonnet of one as a child when a boy walked past and addressed him by his last name with striking swagger
• Rough Guide (TV series) – late-80s/90s travel and youth culture magazine show; referenced when trying to place the era of a viral clip about men and protection
• Naples / Napoli – Simon spent six weeks there; he recalls young boys walking deliberately into his path as a kind of confrontational test, contrasting it with the encounter back in Coventry
• New Zealand – Simon grew up there; notes that the kind of masculine confrontation they're discussing isn't unique to the UK
• Jefrey Miller – Lee's dog (one F in Jefrey); cited as an example of animal threat-response: snapped at by a spaniel he knows well, he barked back immediately, then moved on without residue

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon and Lee open with friendship: Simon has spent the day building a clay oven in Sardinia with Igor and Moreno and finds himself moved by the sheer fact of having people like that in his life. From there the conversation turns to a harder question - whether either of them can actually ask for help when it really counts - and two stories emerge: Lee's account of a yoga acquaintance who showed up with a kindness he couldn't receive, and Simon's retelling of a moment when Lil found herself trapped in a long hug from a friend's partner that felt vampiric rather than warm. The episode closes on a mix-up between a work anniversary and thirty years of marriage, and the one piece of advice Lee has yet to take himself.

Mentioned

• Walt Whitman – 19th-century American poet; referenced as "Uncle Walt" alongside his phrase "we contain multitudes," offered as a gentle counterweight to a moment of harsh self-assessment
• LinkedIn – professional networking platform; the source of an automated work anniversary notification that sets off the episode's closing exchange

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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A Devo earworm at a Sardinian birthday party is the unlikely start of a conversation about what expertise actually is. Lee draws on Collins and Evans's distinction between interactional and contributory expertise, and the two probe whether AI is simply the pinnacle of sounding like it knows what it's doing, and what that means for the hours both of them have put into embodied practices. Simon ends up confessing to late-night vibe coding, somewhere in the murky territory between hating it and loving it.

Mentioned

• Devo's "Whip It" (1980) – new wave song; came up when a community group with the acronym WIP sparked a group singalong at a birthday party in Sardegna
• WIP – community organisation in Sardegna; the acronym's unusual capitalisation convention (only the first letter uppercase) became a topic in itself
• UK Government White Paper on Post-16 Skills – published by DSIT in November; prompted reflection on what specialism and expertise mean in the age of AI
• Rethinking Expertise (Harry Collins and Robert Evans) – academic book introducing the distinction between interactional expertise (talking the talk) and contributory expertise (advancing a field through practice)
• Malcolm Gladwell / 10,000 hours – the idea that mastery requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; cited and gently questioned
• Lord of the Flies (William Golding) – briefly referenced as a comic false attribution when trying to recall Gladwell's name
• Vibe coding – AI-assisted web development; tried late one night building an interactive front page, with mixed feelings about it
• Claude – AI assistant; mentioned as the tool used for writing template-heavy applications

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon is recording from Sassari, where the barn doors have just gone in and the pace of life feels unrecognisably slow. A conversation about loitering with intent – a legal phrase that turns out to be untranslatable into Portuguese – opens into a wide-ranging examination of third spaces, billionaires, and the frictionlessness of modern commerce: what the UK has lost, and why. Lee's account of an unplanned evening in Lisbon, ending with the three of them eavesdropping on an orchestra rehearsing through a church door, becomes the episode's counterpoint and its argument: that the best days are the ones that just keep opening.

Mentioned

• Sassari – city in Sardinia; Simon is recording from there mid-renovation on a place he has in the city
• Minority Report – Tom Cruise film involving pre-crime; cited as the logical endpoint of loitering with intent as a thought crime
• Cocktail – Tom Cruise film initially named instead of Minority Report; the mix-up launches a long digression
• Bryan Brown – Australian actor who appeared in Cocktail with Tom Cruise; his character's fate in the film briefly discussed
• Richard Chamberlain – actor; mentioned in connection with Cocktail and then The Thorn Birds and Shogun
• The Thorn Birds – TV miniseries; Richard Chamberlain connection discussed
• Shogun – TV miniseries; Richard Chamberlain confirmed as lead [?] – transcript garbled here
• Doctor Kildare – TV series; Richard Chamberlain's earlier role, mentioned in passing
• Jason Bourne / The Bourne series – Matt Damon spy franchise; invoked as another example of a character who wakes without his memory [?] – conversation unclear on whether the Bourne / Chamberlain thread was resolved
• Tilted Arc – Richard Serra sculpture [transcript says "Richard Sarah"] installed in Federal Plaza, New York; designed to bifurcate the plaza and force pedestrians around it; cited as an example of productive friction in public space
• Richard Sennett – writer and sociologist; invoked for his writing on friction in urban spaces and city life
• Too Good To Go – food waste app; compared between Coventry (mostly chain confectionery) and Sassari (independent grocers and green goods)
• Lievetta – artisan bakery in Sassari; slow-fermented, whole-grain bread; discussed as a surprising success in a city used to plainer loaves
• Keir Starmer – mentioned briefly as the kind of figure who has a public life in the institutional sense
• Pink Street – famous nightclub street in Lisbon; described as culturally hollowed out after the last Portuguese-owned venue closed
• Lucas – cocktail maker at a Lisbon bar; produced Japanese plum hooch from under the counter for an impromptu drink [last name unknown]
• Gilles – owner of a Lisbon restaurant serving Cabo Verdean cuisine through a Portuguese lens; met during the same unplanned evening
• Cabo Verde / Cape Verdean cuisine – the culinary tradition of Gilles's restaurant; described as African food filtered through Portuguese flavours

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon opens with a psychology experiment about misattributed arousal -- cross a rickety bridge feeling anxious, and you might mistake that adrenaline for attraction to whoever meets you on the other side -- and uses it as a prompt to ask Lee what emotions he feels most commonly. Lee lands on shame and guilt as uniquely useless (false friends that teach nothing, unlike anxiety or joy), then describes the untrammeled, leg-kicking happiness that sometimes overtakes him on a train crossing the River Tamar. The conversation moves through Grindr statistics at Republican conventions, a sudden bout of rage, and a father's urgent text that turned out to be about Peppa Pig.

Mentioned

- Grindr – gay hookup app; cited in connection with reported spikes in usage during Republican Party conventions, used to illustrate how shame can hide behind public moralising about LGBTQIA+ rights
- Republican Party conventions – referenced in relation to the Grindr statistics and the argument that political shamelessness often conceals private shame
- River Tamar – river in the southwest of England; the train crossing it is the setting for a description of sudden, involuntary joy
- Corvids – bird family; mentioned to explain why a magpie on the balcony had worked out how to use a tit feeder designed to exclude larger birds
- Peppa Pig – children's animated series; the actual subject of an "urgent" text from a parent, which arrived mid-meeting and caused several minutes of low-level panic
- Netflix – streaming platform; the medium through which Peppa Pig became a domestic emergency

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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