Charlie and Emma Cowell (The Island Love Song) discuss the Greek island of Hydra, reactions from readers in regards to IVF and polyamory plot threads, early onset dementia, and the Parthenon sculptures.

General references:
Leonard Cohen’s Bird On A Wire
The photo of the lady in shadow that Emma took
The Pirate Bar, Hydra

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Emma Cowell: One Last Letter From Greece
Emma Cowell: The House In The Olive Grove
Emma Cowell: The Island Love Song
Emma Cowell: Under The Lemon Tree

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 9th July 2024; published 25th November 2024

Where to find Emma online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:20 The inspiration – the Greek island of Hydra
04:10 The conflict in the book, siblings, and how being on an island makes it more dramatic
06:04 The island as a character
07:41 Why it was important to explore sisterhood and non-chosen family
13:40 Writing Georgia in all her chaos and character progression
18:24 Ella and having to live with your ex having wrote a song about you
20:18 Emma tells us about the songs in the book (they exist!) and her musical background
24:32 Leonard Cohen’s influence in terms of Hydra, and Hydra’s lack of technology
27:51 Emma’s use of the island of Dokos and writing about researching Greek food at The Pirate Bar
34:29 Emma discusses IVF journeys, parenthood, and readers who contact her to thank her for the way she includes fertility and romantic issues. We then move on to a time in Greece where there were very problematic adoptions
40:00 The concept of twin flames
42:32 Emma’s inclusion of early onset dementia
48:27 Why Emma set her ‘present day’ storyline in 2016 – student days and mobile phone usage
51:15 Emma’s thoughts on returning the Elgin marbles/Parthenon sculptures
54:05 What’s next – the book to be named Under The Lemon Tree. This morphs into a longer conversation about how Emma writes and plots
58:52 What Emma cut from The Island Love Song

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 110. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail, and if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today, back on the podcast, is Emma Cowell. We’ll be talking about her latest book, this past summer’s release, The Island Love Song, set on Hydra just off the Greek mainland. Sisters Ella and Georgia are travelling to Hydra to spread their mother’s ashes. In tow is Georgia’s daughter, Phoenix. Ella doesn’t really want to go back to their childhood holiday location, she doesn’t remember the island at all fondly – her beloved boyfriend left her without warning 20 years ago and their previous wonderful time on Hydra was ruined. Ella’s also got this weird foreboding feeling about being on Hydra, which started when she was a child. Meanwhile, Georgia’s got so much going on in life and in her head; she’s got to get this spreading of ashes right, her marriage is not working, she misses her career, Phoenix is off to music college, and she’s got many secrets threatening to spill over – and that is how Georgia’s first POV chapter reads so we get a sense of her. She has planned this trip to the hour. And amongst all of this, the island itself has got a lot of surprises in store. Hello Emma!

Emma: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me back!

Charlie: You are absolutely, absolutely welcome. I’m going to have to ask you about that chapter in a minute… actually, I’m going to note that down quickly.

Emma: [Laughs]. When you were reading it out, I was thinking, ‘oh, poor Georgia!’ She is quite exhausting [both laugh].

Charlie: Well, okay, let’s start on the inspiration, if you can give us the very first kernel of the idea you had for this book.

Emma: It was the island itself. I went to Hydra a couple of years ago when I was actually writing my second book, The House In The Olive Grove, and I went there specifically to research and experience Greek Orthodox Easter because I’d heard that Hydra is one of the greatest places in Greece to experience that. Plus, it was a place where Leonard Cohen used to live, and I’m a huge fan of his music, so it was an ideal place to go. Never been, heard so much about it, and I just fell in love with it. And I’d read so much about it; it’s an island that doesn’t have cars, the only place to get around is on horseback, a pony or a mule or a water taxi. So sitting there on the front with an iced coffee, watching the donkeys and the mules go by and the zoom of the engines, there was its own musical soundtrack, I suppose. And given there is so much musical heritage and pedigree with Leonard Cohen having lived there, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, used to hang out there, and it’s still a haven for musicians and artists, I just thought, this is somewhere very special, and it got under my skin, and I knew I wanted to set a book there, but I didn’t know what the story was. But when you think about the romance of somewhere that you can’t escape very easily, you can’t get about very easily, I suppose that planted a seed that really is a great place for conflict. Imagine being trapped in paradise, but it’s the last place you want to be. And I suppose that burrowed away, as it does in an author’s brain and suddenly sprung forth when I called upon it.

Charlie: Okay, well, I’m going to ask you about a few of those things in a bit that you’ve raised there. The island, I mean, it’s escapist, but also, you’re talking about this conflict factor. You have got, I think, I mean, I have only read One Last Letter From Greece – I haven’t read The House In The Olive Grove – but it did seem to me that there was more conflict in The Island Love Song than One Last Letter From Greece. Am I onto something here? Was this island, Hydra, and the conflict, did that lead you, do you think, to make more of it?

Emma: Definitely. It wasn’t intentional, and I think the way I write or the subjects that come up in my book, it’s rarely intentional, the whole thing, because I’m not a mega plotter. I get a sense of the place and then a character. With Hydra being the basis for my inspiration, then the idea of siblings occurred to me. And if you’re lucky enough to have a great relationship with a sibling, if you have one, that’s fantastic. And I’m friends with twins, and they are the best of friends, however, they also know how to push each other’s buttons. And I thought, if you have same-gender siblings who are so dissimilar, who are not huge fans of each other, and you stick them in Greek paradise that you can’t really easily get about unless you mount a pony or get on a water taxi, how much fun is that for me as a writer to really mess with them? And so the conflict is definitely way more than One Last Letter From Greece. I think in that novel, Sophie is on a quest to unearth a family secret, whereas George and Ella in The island Love Song are doing their very best to keep their secrets buried as deep as they can. And it’s almost as if the island is a bit of a puppeteer, and it forces them into situations. And that was also quite fun to play with, to make the island its own character and give it its own voice as well.

Charlie: Well can you talk more about this, the island being a character? And then we’ll go back to sisters.

Emma: It’s something that happened very organically. And in The House In The Olive Grove, the protagonist there, Maria, keeps bees. And I was playing with this magical idea of the bees having their own voice, almost like a Greek chorus. I really enjoyed writing that, and a lot of readers really responded well to the bees and the magic that they were weaving in The House In The Olive Grove. So I didn’t, again, intentionally do it, this island voice; I just imagined playing with the idea, this perception of this idyllic, crystal clear seascape and beautiful holiday paradise, being actually the vessel of the darkest deeds these sisters had ever done, and that it was almost mythological in its voice as well. And that was great fun to play with. And I suppose just messing around with our perceived notions of how perfect island life is. And I’m based in Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly aren’t very far from me, and they are blissful and idyllic, but I have friends who live on the islands that when the fog rolls in and you can’t get off the island, life becomes quite challenging when the mist doesn’t lift for a week, or you can’t go home if you’re there for a holiday. And so Hydra was like that ramped up times 100, really.

Charlie: Okay. Yeah. I got your mythology aspect in the island, which I believe you’re writing about that for book four. Yes, so it was very interesting how you created that and created this ancient old voice within that. Let’s get back to sisters, then. I suppose I want you to just, if you can, tell us, you’ve introduced how you got to the sisters. But why was it particularly important to explore sisterhood in the way that you did?

Emma: All of my writing is about female friendship, versions of love, and sisterhood in whatever form that comes. And I wanted to explore the idea of real, actual sisterhood, but there is no sisterhood between them in that they don’t like each other, they don’t lift each other up, they don’t support each other, although they pretend to or they think they are. Ella is so carefree and spontaneous and lives out of her suitcase, never puts down down roots, almost refuses to, because of the damage from her relationship past. Whereas Georgia is the polar opposite. She militarily controls everything and everyone around her. And so putting them together with their very opposing ways of going about their day and life, you’ve got conflict from the get go. But I think there’s this immovable fact that when you’re related to somebody, you’re thrust together and you don’t actually always like them. I’m very lucky that I’m a huge fan of my brother and have a great extended family and I love it when we all get together with loads of my cousins and you have birthdays and celebrations and yes, you also come together during sad times. And the idea of thrusting Ella and Georgia together to scatter their mother’s ashes – they’re compelled to take part in that rite of passage and it’s the last thing either of them want to do. There’s also beneath that what a parent dying, their last remaining parent dying, means for them. I think it’s Ella who says, ‘I’m at the top of the family tree’, or it’s Georgia, ‘and there’s nobody above me’. And you’re thrust into adulting regardless of what age that happens – and Georgia and Ella are in their thirties and forties – even if it happens in your fifties and sixties, I think it’s that sense of, ‘it’s down to me now to take charge of the family, to be that matriarch figure or an inspiration to the younger members of the family’. It’s really interesting. Family and friendship are very different and they don’t always go hand in hand.

Charlie: That is interesting and yeah, you’ve brought up a line that definitely stuck with me because I think also you’ve got Georgia, Ella and Phoenix going to the island and Anna, the mother has died, but she’s bringing them back together [Emma: yeah] while of course they’re going there, they start the conflict, but ultimately she is the reason they are there and the reason why their relationship ultimately gets a lot better as well.

Emma: Exactly. I think Phoenix is a really interesting character. She’s the youngest, she’s 17, and yet she is wiser, more grounded, and more level headed than Ella and Georgia put together. She’s almost, to an extent, the voice of the reader in watching these two supposed grown up women with lives and careers of their own going head to head, nitpicking at each other and Phoenix just can’t stand it and gets to a point where she really wants to bang their heads together and just says, ‘if you can’t get on, I don’t want to be part of this’. And I as the writer also got to that point, they are driving me crackers. And so Phoenix became almost a bit of my voice and my frustration, but complete enjoyment, of the two sisters. And perhaps she is that relief for the reader that, ‘oh yes, I feel exactly the same. Those two are driving me nuts and I wish they’d just work it out’.

Charlie: That’s interesting, you saying that, with Phoenix I definitely had a very strong image of what she looked like. Now whether that matches yours or not, I don’t know, but the other two, thinking on it, it was a lot more… I want to say ‘blurry’, a lot less definite I suppose. But yeah, with Phoenix you absolutely know who she is, which is lovely to read.

Emma: I love that. Ella and Georgia, I think despite the fact they’re in their thirties and forties, they think that they’ve got their lives worked out and the truth is they haven’t. And for Georgia that realisation when it comes is crushing. I’m in my mid forties so a lot of my friends are dealing with their children leaving, maybe primary school, senior school, the empty nest syndrome is looming, and that’s what George’s experience is with Phoenix. Phoenix is going off to music college and she is very clear about what she wants to do, and Georgia finds herself lost and I think playing with that identity for women as mothers – who am I when I’ve done that part of my life, when that chapter closes, what is left for me? Maybe you’ve started to go back to work, maybe you have gone back to work or maybe you haven’t like Georgia did and gave up everything to raise a child. It’s a really interesting part of a mother’s life, I think, that when you work out what’s beneath that label of ‘mother’, ‘wife’, perhaps, or what you used to do for a living, what defines you and what remains. And Georgia isn’t a huge fan of what’s underneath, so covers it up with this pretence of my life is perfect when it is anything but.

Charlie: Yeah, now she’s forced to think about it, which is good because we only get her thoughts on it through you, effectively, and also obviously Ella’s got a bit of knowledge. But you can see as the reader when you’re reading it, you can see that there’s things that she really wants to push away still.

Emma: Yeah.

Charlie: And yeah, it’s all coming to the fore for her and particularly obviously about her marriage, because I mean, my goodness, Oliver, you make him very obvious for us to see what’s going on. I was like, ‘nah, this is not good’. So, yeah, I do want to stick with the characters in general, but definitely Georgia as well, how you were writing them, because I mentioned the first POV chapter – I was reading your book, I started reading it, I was like, ‘I’m reading an Emma book. Okay, I know I’m going to enjoy this’. And then we get to Georgia’s first chapter, I was like, ‘what is this?’ It took me back. I said, ‘what’s going on here? This is not how Emma writes!’ [Emma laughs.] And then I thought, ‘hang on a minute’, And I thought about it and then I know that the rest of the chapters, from Georgia’s point of view weren’t quite like that. They were much more, I suppose I say, in your regular writing. So, yeah, if you can tell us about the writing of the characters?

Emma: It’s really interesting when you say that, and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I haven’t even thought of that first chapter that feels so different and outside what I usually do. Georgia is so specific as a human being, and I suppose not intentionally, but by her nature, she is going to be irritating. It’s hard to love her, and I hope sincerely by the end that readers do understand her and do feel affection and forgive her. But more than that, understand why she behaves and behaved like she did in the past. And, I think when people who are desperately insecure, who are pretending that life is perfect when they know deep down it’s not, behave in a very unpredictable, irrational way, which is absolutely her. So I suppose I needed to give a chunk of that upfront and make the reader feel a certain way. And then the unwritten written challenge for me, although I didn’t again realise I was doing it, was to make people love her and feel something about her. But I suppose as a writer, the fact that someone has a reaction to somebody you’ve written to a character is great! And you know what? You can’t always control the reactions. It might not be what you intended, but it’s better than indifference, surely [chuckles].

Charlie: We’re talking about Georgia and it’s starting to occur to me, and I don’t know if this is ‘right’, as such, in quotes, but it strikes me that actually, she’s got potentially the strongest development over time [Emma: yeah], just with how much she’s dealt with. Yeah.

Emma: Her journey, particularly on the island, on Hydra, is probably the biggest in terms of the steep learning curve she goes on, the realisation, her epiphany about her life, her pretence, this unburdening of all of her darkest secrets. It’s almost like the emancipation of Georgia happens, funnily enough, almost by a monastery right in the middle of the island, at the top of the island on Hydra, which is there and is beautiful. She really does, I think, have the biggest journey to go on from where she starts to where she ends up. And it’s hopeful, but she’s got a lot of work on herself to do. And the great thing is she does acknowledge that and manages to say it out loud, which is a big thing from where she started.

Charlie: I’m going to bring this in here – is she looking at love in her future on the island?

Emma: Not sure if Georgia is that wedded to Hydra, where we end the book. She forgives the island because she forgives herself. So both sisters have this lack of need to be on Hydra, even though it represented such a special part of their childhood, because of what happened to them both individually on the island. Georgia’s quite happy to get away from it for a bit, but is happy to come back and find herself again, and Hydra will always be part of her life. And I think eventually love will be – Georgia’s a terrible romantic, she’s just slightly terrible at romance. So I hope Georgia finds love. There is a character that there’s a bit of a flirtation at the very end of the book and you think, well, next time she comes back, maybe, maybe not. But Georgia needs to really loosen up a lot more to abandon herself to an island fling, who knows?

Charlie: That’s interesting. No, I thought it was a done deal.

Emma: Interesting. Yeah. It’s implied. Maybe you’re more of a romantic than I am, Charlie [Charlie chuckles]. It’s possible. I like the idea of Georgia behaving like Ella and dallying with love and a fling, which is just the last thing Georgia would ever do because she’s quite straight-laced and has very clear parameters about her life, whereas Ella will fling herself wherever her heart takes her. So, yeah. Oh, that’s interesting, you say it’s a done deal. Who knows?

Charlie: [Chuckles.] Well, I feel we should bring Ella in. Can you tell us more about your writing of her? I suppose the same sort of thing, but, yeah, I feel we’ve missed Ella and we shouldn’t.

Emma: Ella. I suppose in a way, she feels like the main character because a lot of it is based around her story. And because a chain of events were set off from this great love affair that she had when she was a teenager that broke her heart to bits, it set off a series of circumstances in her and her sister’s life that changed them forever. And there’s also this idea, that I think came to me as I started writing Ella, if your breakup, the man who broke your heart into a thousand pieces, was a musician, and he wrote about your heartache and it became a worldwide hit, you couldn’t escape your broken heart ever, ever again. And that was great fun. I was just trying to put myself in their shoes – what if you had a love affair with George Harrison and he wrote Something about you, or Robbie Williams and he wrote Angels about you? You can’t move at a wedding or a funeral or a christening for those songs. So that idea, poor old Ella had this great Grammy award-winning song written about her love for this man who abandoned her.

Charlie: I think that would be better than having, like, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. I think that that’s a better situation than that [chuckles].

Emma: I think so. Taylor Swift can do better, surely [chuckles].

Charlie: Well, you said George Harrison, so let’s move on to Harrison and the music, I think. Yeah, I want to ask – the song, and obviously you’ve also got Phoenix’s song as well later on – have you got a melody of this song of Harrison’s, like, in your head? Is it like a fully formed piece of music?

Emma: Yeah, I’ve written it. It is on this hilarious piece of scrap paper that I really ought to write down properly. I play the piano, I’m self taught, so I would never wish to do it in public, ever, and have always sung since I was little and taught myself guitar as well. So I’m quite musical. And I had written the lyrics, obviously, as part of the text in the novel, and I just wanted to bring it to life to see if I could. For goodness sake, I’m such a masochist, as if I don’t have enough to do – yes, let’s write the song! So, yeah, I’ve written it, and it’s a really, as I say, tatty piece of paper that actually I was playing to my sister-in-law once and I left it downstairs on the table and then it was gone and she’d thrown it away, so we rescued it. And it’s probably still slightly splattered with orange peel or something, but I really ought to put it in a safe place. So, yes, it’s written, all of the songs that are featured lyrically in the book I’ve written the melodies for. So, yes, they’re there.

Charlie: Well, there’s an obvious follow up question then – are we ever going to hear these songs?

Emma: Who knows, one day. Never say never. They won’t be sung by me, I can tell you that much. I wouldn’t inflict that on the world.

Charlie: Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, Harrison sings his song sometimes, but he’s also a songwriter. That’s fitting in that way as well.

Emma: He does. or maybe Taylor Swift would like to record Out Of The Darkness, which is the main love song. There we are. That’s a good song about an ex that she can record for me. I’m sure she’s got loads of time on her hands to do that.

Charlie: You say you’re self taught. Can you tell us more about the music that you play yourself?

Emma: I love playing songs that I can sing along to. So there is a lot of Beatles around. I got a guitar for Christmas when I was thirteen and I already played a bit of the keyboard and the flute. This is outrageous – I’m going to tell you this very quickly – when I was at junior school, in those days, everyone had to play the recorder. I don’t know why it’s the most useless instrument unless you’re going to be a recorder player when you grow up. I don’t know anyone who is. And then when I was nine or ten, you were encouraged to choose a musical instrument to learn. And I said, ‘I want to learn the saxophone because I love jazz music’. And my grandparents would listen to a lot of swing, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, big band stuff, and I wanted to play the saxophone. And I listened to a lot of, jazz and Charlie Parker as well as a kid. And the teacher said, ‘oh, no, girls don’t play the saxophone. You’ve got the choice between the flute and the violin’, which now, from this vantage point, is the most outrageous thing ever. I really didn’t want to play the flute or the violin. I wanted to play jazz. Anyway, I chose the flute. And so luckily I was quite musical. And then I got a guitar in later years, and I used to sit in my bedroom teaching myself, imagining I was Joni Mitchell, which I definitely was not. And I had this music book that my mum bought me along with the guitar, which was 101 Beatles Songs For Buskers, which were very simplified Beatles songs. So I taught myself the guitar because it had all the finger marks on the keys and just sat there. And I’ve got really small hands, so I can only play things that are D, C, G, A, and E. Anyone who’s musical listening to this, any larger chords I can’t do because my fingers and hands are too tiny [chuckles.] So that’s how I started, tinkering around with music and just always did it. So I still play guitar a bit, but mainly piano. And I would just sing anything and everything.

Charlie: I played, violin. That was one of the choices at school. And, oh, my goodness, it hurts. We did so much pizzicato strings [Emma: oh!] at the start before we moved on. Yeah. Fingers. Ouch. Very much, more than guitar!

Emma: I can imagine. I couldn’t play guitar with steel strings because I’ve tried it once and it’s far too painful. So nylon strings only for me. But yes, I do play a lot of music and it’s a lot of Beatles, Lynyrd Skinhead, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. Really great folk music and a lot of show tunes as well if the mood takes me. I’m a musical theatre freak as well.

Charlie: Well, Leonard Cohen, then, you do mention Bird On A Wire, I believe, in the book [Emma: yeah]. Can you just talk more about him influencing the book in the way that he did and influencing you?

Emma: Yeah, of course. Leonard Cohen – I love his music and I think if people don’t know it very well, it’s easy to dismiss as, miserable and gravelly. And he’s not a singer-singer as such, but his lyrics are absolute poetry to me. And my husband got me into him and I was that person who would dismiss… you know, I knew his version of Hallelujah, which is fabulous, but my husband loves Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, which I pooh-poohed as miserable, gravelly, drain sounding voiced singers, and didn’t listen to a great deal of their music before. And then I did and I fell deeper and deeper in love with Leonard Cohen’s music. And his last two albums he released before he danced died, when his voice is at his lowest and his poetry and his skill is at its highest, I can’t get enough of it. I think my poor Alexa machine – I can’t say that too loud or she’ll probably say, ‘what do you want, for goodness sake, Leonard Cohen?’ because she’s sick of it [Charlie chuckles]. But Hydra felt like a pilgrimage for us to go to, apart from the fact I was doing research for my second novel. And his house is still there and it’s owned by his son and family and they still go there. And there’s a taverna on the island where he is said to have given his first public performance before he was hugely famous and renowned. And there’s a photograph of him and Charmaine Cliff, the writer, who gathered and began this expat community that gathered on Hydra with her then husband, George Johnson, the writer and journalist. And there’s a picture of the two of them, and Leonard’s singing away, and she’s there singing along. There’s also with Leonard and Marianne, this very romantic love affair, on Hydra. And so he wrote Bird On A Wire on Hydra when it got electricity, because there had never been electric wires anywhere. Suddenly, they were all there, and birds would perch along it. So that was very different. And so he wrote Bird On A Wire, inspired by that, so legend has it.

Charlie: What is the reason that Hydra doesn’t have vehicles on the island, do you know?

Emma: I don’t know why. There’s a lot of very winding, narrow, cobbled alleyways all the way up the hill. It’s incredibly steep. So I’ve got to say, hill starts are not my forte. I would not wish to drive on the island. There are emergency vehicles on the island and a rubbish truck, because tourism is such a huge thing, and goodness knows how they get all the way up. I’m sure they don’t. I think people have to bring it down on horseback or on ponies, but they’re very narrow. I don’t think you’d get much more than… I don’t know what kind of car through there – bicycle at best. But no, bikes are banned as well, so it’s just all very safe and lovely. And clean, which makes the air so clean as well, and the light pristine because it’s so unpolluted.

Charlie: It’s definitely a good place to set a novel, certainly. I’ve written it down as a location I would like to go to.

Emma: Go. I urge you [both chuckle].

Charlie: So, I mean, I’m gonna fit this in here before we move to a thing from what you said, and I’ve got a question from it, etcetera. The island of… is it [pronounces] ‘Dokoes’, ‘Dokohs’?

Emma: Yes, Dokos.

Charlie: Yeah. Can you tell us about that, and you using that? I think they – Harrison and Ella – fish there, and he’s got this little hut, cabin, place. Yeah.

Emma: Yeah, so Dokos island is the only place in any of my books I’ve never set foot, which made me feel very uncomfortable slightly, writing about it. But I looked at it – I can see it from across the water. And actually, a friend of mine who lives on Hydra has a place on Dokos, and explained to me about this very basic, almost like a lean-to that she has, and she takes her grandchildren over there on the boat and goes fishing. And it’s all very Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, just simple living. And I loved the idea of an escape because Hydra gets incredibly busy in the season, really, from Greek Easter, until October. Ferries come in every day filled with day trippers. And then I remember sitting on the front when I first went there, and several ferries come in a day, and hundreds of people pile off and you think, ‘how are they all going to fit on this island? Where are they all going?’ And then everyone disappears and you’re like, ‘well, it was almost as if that never happened’. And then an hour or two later, another lot come and another lot; you think some are leaving, but it’s busy. But that’s to be expected on the Greek islands. So the idea of an escape across the water to this slightly barren, different, kind of paradise was very appealing. And for someone creative, like Harrison, he goes away to write songs, to find peace and to come up with creative ideas, I get it, because when life is busy or I’m sitting in Cornwall trying to write and the phone’s going and I can hear boat engines outside or people chatting or someone’s pressure washing their patio, and you think, ‘oh, where can I go for some peace and quiet?’ So I think we all feel like that sometimes; and I used to feel it when I lived in London years ago – there’s no escape from this hum and this buzz of life. So when you take all of that away, especially if you’re creative, it’s like your mind and your soul can breathe again. And then ideas appear uninterrupted. So I sent him across the water to a little island that I’ve only stared at but never been to.

Charlie: Well, I think it worked very well. I think you possibly want to go to Dokos just to check there’s not a novel there waiting for you.

Emma: Well, it’s always possible. I always think there’s a novel idea [chuckles], an idea for a novel, at every turn and with Greece at every corner, or with somebody I spot. There’s a lady, a character, Zena, in the novel, and if anyone’s followed my social media, they will have seen me put a picture of this lady that I spotted after a long lunch. And she was in widow’s weeds, dressed in black, with a stick, and walking towards the sunlight, her silhouette was even more pronounced, even though she was dressed head to toe in black with this fabulous hat on. And so I followed her and took a photograph of her, slightly stalked her up an alleyway. But her figure, the way she walked, the pace she walked, inspired that character. And I knew, before I knew that there would be a Zena, I thought, I’m going to write her, and I don’t know what, but I’ll make up her life. And so, yeah.

Charlie: Okay. I know that you’ve said that your research is mostly being in a taverna and eating and [Emma: staring!] people watching. Yes. I mean, it seems to be working quite well at the moment, so…

Emma: Well, you know, I write a lot about food in my novels as well, because I think to any culture in the world, if we want to understand someone’s culture, truly, food is the best way to start. And for my experience of the Greek culture, food is so important and made with such love. And lunches last for so many hours. And goodness in our day jobs, our lives, when we grab a sandwich and sit at our laptops and cover our keyboards and crumbs and really never stop – this, all right, romanticised, version of a lunch or a dinner that’s made from scratch and with your family and loved ones around a table, that’s so simple and such an element of my life, our lives that we’ve lost. So to take part in that experience it first-hand from my Greek friends here and abroad, feels like the biggest treat in the world to have somebody want to feed you. And sometimes strangers want to feed me, which I love, and I accept.

Charlie: I know that food is a big part of your work. Kind of jumping on from this – the Hydra Pirate Bar.

Emma: Yes.

Charlie: That’s one thing I wasn’t so good with picturing when I was reading. But you’ve got Wendy in this bar, and I noticed in your acknowledgments you talk about a Wendy.

Emma: Yeah.

Charlie: Was it important to you to include some kind of nod to real people in the book?

Emma: Definitely. Hydra is a very small community. Wendy opened The Pirate Bar with her ex-husband back in the day when Eric Clapton and all these rock stars would come and sit there and eat her roast chicken that she was cooking up in the kitchen. And Wendy, is from the same part of south London as I am, and I’d heard about her through a friend, and she said, ‘oh, my God, you’ve got to find Wendy. She’s from Croydon and she runs The Pirate Bar’. I was like, ‘you are kidding. On this little Greek island in the middle of the sea, there is someone from Croydon running the iconic Pirate Bar’. And lo and behold, she is. And, actually, her son Zeus and his wife Fiona – I love the fact that she has a son called Zeus, it’s so iconic – they run the bar and Wendy comes along. And I had drinks with her when I was last on Hydra. We were chatting and I said, ‘I’ve got to put you in this book somewhere, Wendy. I have to’. And I sent her a message when I’d finished the book and sent her a little picture of the passage that she features in, and she howled. She loved it. And they’re trying to stop my book in The Pirate Bar on Hydra. But it’s a bar. They serve fantastic food. And it’s one of those iconic places that has been there since the sixties, and still is there, it’s still in the same family. And it is very busy. It’s hard to get a seat, but it’s worth it. And when you’ve got one, you can sit and play backgammon, have breakfast, then it becomes lunch and just stay all day. And I’ve done that a lot of times.

Charlie: Yeah, so the backgammon’s a thing as well. All right.

Emma: Oh, it certainly is a thing. I’m very competitive as well, as my friends and my husbands will testify to. So, yes, backgammon tournaments are always in train.

Charlie: Listeners link to The Pirate Bar is obviously in the show notes. The exploration and celebration of every possible version of parenthood. Why was this important to you?

Emma: Because parenthood, like motherhood, isn’t always straightforward for everybody. And the more it’s written about, the less stigma becomes attached to it. In my first novel, One Last Letter From Greece, I did write about my experience of unsuccessful IVF and baby loss, because I’ve had friends go through IVF who don’t tell anybody. And I understand that and I respect that, but I was trying to work out in my head what it is about our society and our culture that lets women feel like a failure when they need a helping hand to do what they would like to do in terms of fertility. And there’s this very hidden stigma, and then it applies to miscarriage and baby loss. So exploring further on from that, what chosen family and what adoptive families look like – every version of parenthood, motherhood, fatherhood. It’s really important to say these things out loud on a page, albeit. And I think adoption is something that I thought about a great deal during The Island Love Song. And I have friends who’ve adopted and who have been adopted. And again, it’s another stigma about shame, embarrassment. So it’s normalising it in a way, it opens a conversation. And I may have said to you before, particularly about IVF, which is in my first novel, and it is mentioned in The Island Love Song very briefly – it isn’t the story thread – but I had an email from a reader who had been through several rounds of IVF, hadn’t told any of her friends, but because she’d seen the friendship between two women in One Last Letter From Greece, their support for each other, she told all her friends just before she embarked on her next round of IVF, and they were all coming with her, to her appointments. And having been through it myself, albeit unsuccessfully – that support, your village around you, holding you up and rooting for you, is so vital to your mental state when you feel under such emotional pressure that you’re already putting yourself under, but also the physical pressure that that process puts you under. So I’m glad she called her village and rallied them, and that means such a lot. So if you write about something that’s taboo, that is stigmatised, and it helps someone or supports somebody, then that’s really important to me to be as authentic and truthful as I can about women’s issues and wider issues.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s a testament to what books can do sometimes.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely, and I wasn’t prepared for that at all when I started writing. The idea that readers would reach out and say, I enjoyed it, or this helped me, or just did that. In The House In The Olive Grove, one of the characters is in a polyamorous relationship, and it’s not a big deal, it’s not a storyline as such, it’s just who she is, she’s a very bohemian artist, but she’s married but they have relationships outside of their marriage. I had an email from a woman who is polyamorous saying, ‘you didn’t make it a big, awful, sordid drama. It was so refreshing to have a character written that normalised that’, because she said, ‘that’s my community, and we don’t get that’. Again, complete surprise. How can you ever be prepared for that as an author? So it is the greatest gift and one of the greatest joys that, yes, I was ill-prepared for the tears I would shed over those amazing emails.

Charlie: Yeah, you’ve also got – something else that was in my head to bring up – you’ve said in your acknowledgments, you’re also looking at the displacement and division of Greek families in history. That was also important as well?

Emma: There’s really fascinating articles that I unearthed online about the result of displacements of families through adoption or after conflict. And there was a period of time where the adoption laws in Greece were quite flimsy, which had given way to illegal trafficking of babies, particularly after the Second World War and other conflicts. So that was really striking to me, and I’ve tucked some of that away perhaps for another day, way down the line, there were some incredible news reports and although the laws have since changed, the fact that there are a community of children all over the world – and this isn’t just applicable to Greece, several other countries around the world, I have no doubt – that don’t know their heritage, that money would have been changed hands, that they are then brought up with no idea of their biological heritage or history, their medical heritage or history. And that’s fascinating. And that whole push pull between nurture and nature, therefore, is explored definitely in The Island Love Song. And again, like love and all versions of love and families, is a rich space for conflict and drama, for sure.

Charlie: You said about the mythology, and I know you’ve got paranormal elements, there’s slight paranormal elements in this book and you’ve done that before. Can you tell us about this focus you’ve got on the twins and twin flames and the phenomena there?

Emma: I’m slightly obsessed with ghosts and spiritual things and myths and legends of Greek mythology, so I always have been fascinated since I was little, particularly with the Greek legends. Twin flame phenomena is really interesting. I stumbled across it down some research rabbit hole online; goodness knows what I put into the search engine. But anyway, I stumbled across this idea – this applies to romantic love – that two people are meant to be together, are just not only soul mates, but they were once one soul and they’ve been divided into two, and the idea of the twin flame phenomena is that they go through each life finding their way back to each other, which is so romantic! Slightly bonkers as well, if you’re very cynical, but fascinating in the idea that you are meant for one person, which I don’t know that I entirely believe, but that’s what I stumbled across in my research. And then, weirdly, after writing the book, I realised that there is a Greek mythological element to twin flames and this idea of splitting the soul in two, and those people are destined to be together. A lot of the Greek myths are about destiny and fate, and I end up writing a lot about that, not by design, but just because I’m fascinated with it. But I remember putting on my personal Facebook page when I was writing this, ‘if anyone has experience of twin flames or understanding of it, I’m really interested to know’, because I wanted to try and understand if this was something that was widely known about, because I didn’t really know about it before. The amount of private messages I had from friends and people who believed in it, but weren’t actually with the person they believed to be their twin flame, hence why they didn’t reply publicly, it was gripping, dramatic reading, and validated that idea of utter, destined, soulmates. So, yeah, that was fun to write about.

Charlie: I’m not going to be surprised at some point in the future if you’re on a panel with Jennifer Saint, the way you’re going with your mythology [Emma says, ‘ oh really’ and chuckles]. Yeah, you’re going to be talking about mythology at some point, Greek mythology, definitely. Another thing that we absolutely have to bring up. You have included young, early onset dementia [Emma: yeah] in Harrison, and something I didn’t catch on to, I thought at one time he was forgetting something because Phoenix was there and he was having a lightbulb moment. Another time I thought he was just in his head thinking, ‘oh, my goodness, Ella’s back’, etcetera. Can you tell us about your inclusion of this and its importance?

Emma: I wanted to, I suppose, shine a light on dementia and early onset dementia. Again, I don’t know how I stumbled across it – I knew, of course, that younger people got dementia or developed it, and I think I’d heard this heartbreaking interview on the radio a while ago about a man who was in his forties and his wife had dementia and had no idea who he was, it had accelerated so quickly. And my late mother-in-law had Alzheimer’s. I’m so thankful we didn’t get to the point before she died that she didn’t know who her children were or didn’t know that she still recognised everybody. So the idea of someone who relies on their thought process for a living, in that he is a lyricist and a songwriter who is utterly dependent on coming up with creative ideas, remembering them, seeing them through, and then putting them to the side and picking them up the next day or the next month; to have somebody who is challenged in that way, that they have an affliction, that they know one day – it is so heartbreaking to write – that one day Harrison would sit at a piano and wouldn’t know what to do… for someone who lived for music is so heartbreaking. And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people whose lives are afflicted by dementia or Alzheimer’s, but for early onset dementia, seems additionally cruel to any kind of that memory illness; we’d call it an illness because it’s not something you can catch. It is just so horrifying to have somebody – and I have friends who have family who’ve had dementia, has lived through it – the idea that someone is stripped away, layer by layer, in front of you until they no longer how to dress themselves, feed themselves, no longer know who loves them. It’s the ultimate heartbreak. I feel sorry for my characters sometimes, I really put them through the wringer. But it was… I don’t want to say fun, because there’s nothing fun about that topic, but to challenge this love affair that comes back together after so long that it’s just not plain sailing. Because I think that’s the reality – life is life, and although love is a huge part of that, it doesn’t always have a happy ending, you don’t always get what you want. So to tie everything up in a neat, merry little bow just isn’t my kind of writing. There’s always hope, goodness, there’s always hope. And in the real world, outside of my stories, and, to an extent, in The Island Love Song, there are such strides being made in treatments and research for Alzheimer’s and dementia. And Harrison, in fact, does have the means to be able to take part in clinical trials with drugs that can delay the onset of memory loss. But, gosh, you hope in ten plus 20 years that nobody has to watch a loved one fade before their eyes in that way.

Charlie: Absolutely. Have you had anyone contact you about this portrayal of early onset or anything?

Emma: Not yet, no. I’m braced for it. But I know young, early onset dementia, doesn’t affect a huge amount of the population – of course, dementia and Alzheimer’s does in the more elderly populations – so I haven’t. But I took great care to understand what that was like. There is amazing resources online from the Alzheimer’s and dementia associations and charities. So I did an awful lot of research about symptoms, about delays, these incredible drugs that are available to delay that memory loss in young, early onset, specifically. So it’s that responsibility, Charlie, you know, when you write something that could jar with somebody, could resonate with somebody, you realise, or I realise, as time goes on – this is my third book, I’m writing my fourth – that there are such power in words and there is such a responsibility to do it justice. And for me, that begins with Greece and the Greek community, that I treat that with the utmost respect and love that it deserves and that I have for the Greek culture and country and language and food and religion, everything that goes with beautiful Greece. And then the issues that you write about, you have a real duty of care to write responsibly, as much as you can, without stymieing creativity. But if you’re going to write about something, one has to do it justice.

Charlie: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, yeah, you say early on set is rarer than when people are older, but you’re bringing a more readers to know about it anyway, which is a good thing.

Emma: There’s always that opportunity to shine a light on something that people may not know about, and that is a great privilege to be able, to have a platform to do that. So if somebody learns about that and goes and researches it, then that is fantastic.

Charlie: Yep, and that is the way to get more research in the medical community and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You never know what could happen.

Emma: Yeah, exactly.

Charlie: I thought it was interesting – very, very different topic – you picked 2016 for the present day story. Why was this?

Emma: I’m not very good at counting [Charlie chuckles], so my editors really have to do the maths for me. I wanted a very specific time when Ella and Harrison had met. And funnily enough, it was when I was at drama college in Guildford, around that time, so I could write Guildford, and I knew it very well as a 17, 18, 19 year old in Surrey. But it needed to be a time when mobile phones weren’t everywhere, because when you’re setting up a relationship with somebody who abandons another, and they have no means of quickly and speedily contacting each other, it needed to be at a time when nobody had a mobile phone. So that is a very unfascinating, answer to your question! It needed to be then, they needed to be that age, which meant the present day couldn’t be the present day now – it was just a present day, but it was 2016.

Charlie: Okay. All right. Of course I thought, oh, was it to get around Brexit…

Emma: Oh, anything to get around not having to write about Brexit. But I think that’s a minefield in its own. No, it was just simply they needed to not have mobile phones, that was it. No social media, nothing.

Charlie: And Ella still manages to hold out until the end with the phones anyway, so.

Emma: I know. Can you imagine living off grid? Actually, my brother-in-law doesn’t have a phone, which is complete insanity to me. He got rid of his phone about five or six years ago. And I mean, it’s so freeing and liberating, but he also has a bunch of people who work for him, so they are on their phones all the time, fielding calls and messages for him like poor carrier pigeons, while he wanders about the world saying how freeing and liberating it is for him, which I’m sure it is, but not for everyone else around him. And he’s impossible to get hold of, so that’s annoying. But, I’m sure I would love not to be glued to my phone or have to use it, but it is necessary, unfortunately.

Charlie: Is that the brother-in-law I think you’re meaning [Emma: yes], in which case you’re quite shocked by that revelation about the mobile phone.

Emma: Are you?

Charlie: Yes, that’s quite surprising.

Emma: Yeah, I know, but he’s lucky enough to have people who work for him who can take messages and field calls with good news and bad news and, yeah. So he doesn’t have interrupted evenings with bleeps and blings and rings, which is lovely.

Charlie: No, absolutely. Absolutely. You mention the Elgin marbles [Emma: yes] and the Parthenon in one line, which I like, because I’m very much of the same opinion as you on that [Emma: yeah]. And then you do end your acknowledgments with them. Can you see a return happening anytime soon?

Emma: We have a new government in the UK [Charlie: true], and for them, I’m sure it is not top of the priority list, but it just, to me, seems like one of the easiest, simplest things to do. A, because it’s right, and B, because why on earth not? I don’t understand the reason of keeping the Parthenon sculptures, the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum, put them back in the empty spaces in Athens, and it would just make no difference to anybody’s life in the United Kingdom, in England, in London, zero difference. How about in the British Museum, we have empty spaces where they once stood [Charlie: yeah]. How about that for a powerful symbolism of diplomacy and doing what’s right? And the idea that we have a new government, this idea of everyone’s voted for change – let’s take a lead on something that is so easy to get rid of, a verbal conflict, a historical conflict. It’s done. Who’s going to take to the streets to protest that we’ve returned them to their home in Greece. I’m sure there’ll be somebody, but it makes no sense to me after all these years, why on earth we just can’t send them. Not send them, return them to where they’re supposed to be.

Charlie: I like your idea of the empty spaces. I mean, we can also make replicas, can’t we? We could just have that. That’d be fine.

Emma: It’s just senseless and it’s just a problem – anytime there’s a Greek ministerial visit, that is going to be a topic. How about you guys talk about other things that you can do to work together to celebrate cultures and unions and historical support between our countries. That is always going to be the elephant in the room. Get rid of it right away. And there’s the symbolism for the UK government doing what is right, putting them back where they belong and we have the empty spaces in our museum in London to say that’s the symbol of us doing the right thing. You got me started there, Charlie, I was off! [Charlie laughs.]

Charlie: That’s all right. While we’re on the subject, can we do the same with the Benin Bronzes and everything else, please.

Emma: While we’re at it! Yeah, it’s just I think whenever I mention it on social media and when I was writing about it, and actually finishing The Island Love Song was when there was a Greek state visit to see our former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the Elgin marbles, which I can’t bear to call them, the Parthenon sculptures, were brought up, and I believe Rishi Sunak cancelled the visit, not because of that, they claim, but it’s interesting. So it seems such a petty nonsense to hold on to it.

Charlie: So back to you, then. What is next? I think you’re going with twins and mythology a little bit more?

Emma: Yes, I am. I’m writing about twins and on my mood board that I always make when I write, I’ve got Apollo and Artemis as inspiration. Now, I’m not leaning into the whole mythology retelling at all, but, as I’ve said before, mythology is very important to me, has been from the get go. And twins are really important in Greek mythology, those two god and goddesses. So I’m writing about a male and female set of twins, and it’s set on a different Greek island this time. And so there will be elements of mythology, perhaps not as much as The Island Love Song. It creeps its way in, I can’t help it. And as I said before, I don’t plot like crazy – I come up with the place, the ideas, the story. I know how it ends. It’s all the bits in the middle I don’t know, but I quite enjoy, and I put that in speech marks, ‘enjoy’ the process of the characters leading me where they do, until I need to tell them to stop and tell me where they intend to go, because I need to catch up. So it’s based on twins.

Charlie: Interesting writing process.

Emma: Oh, God, don’t get me started on that, it’s not interesting, it’s like torture. I don’t know why I can’t find a pain-free way of doing it. I just plot better than I did, which is a terrible grammatical sentence. I plot more than I did. I’m just not that fastidious because it feels like a waste of time if the character takes me somewhere else, and sometimes they do, and I like to be surprised. It’s fun-ish.

Charlie: So have any of your endings changed because of that, because of them taking you somewhere else, or do you always manage to reign them back in?

Emma: The endings haven’t changed because I always know where the book ends. I suppose I think in quite a filmic way, so I see the end scene when the camera pans away, probably out to sea somewhere romantic and gorgeous – it’s just the bits along the way. And the early onset dementia idea came out of the blue, completely out of the blue, because things were tying up with Harrison and Ella, and I thought, this is all very merry and jolly, and this doesn’t feel like a “me” book for everything to be… not joyful, because I do have a lot of joy and a lot of hope… just all a bit too neat and convenient. So I went away and I walked back in the room and I said to my husband, ‘I’m giving Harrison dementia!’ [Charlie laughs.] He went, ‘what?’ I said, ‘I heard something about it. I need to go and research. I need to think about it, but I think I’m going to do that’. And he’s like, ‘ruthless!’ So I did. Sorry, Harrison.

Charlie: All right. That’s interesting. Well, you saying about that, then – did you get this idea about dementia after you had already started writing Harrison forgetting things?

Emma: You know, it’s really hard to remember. I don’t know if I was that far through the story when the idea occurred to me, or whether… it’s such a fog. It’s so interesting. I’m writing the book now that will be out next summer, so I am so engrossed in that bunch of people that it’s hard to even recall through the mists of time, Charlie, what it was like writing that storyline. But I reckon I’d come up with the idea almost on the final straight of the book. And then I went back and peppered some moments which were very straightforward to be able to do during his exchanges with Ella and with everybody. So I probably think it was that way around. It’s impossible to remember because I wrote and rewrote this book what feels like a hundred times over, only because in my first draft, I got three quarters of the way through it – so around 75,000 words in the first draft, my first draft has usually about 100,000 or 120,000 – and I’d written it in the present tense in the first person, and something wasn’t clicking, something wasn’t working in the story. And I, looked at it, I reread it and thought, it’s got to be in third person and in the past tense. So back I went and to the beginning to execute one of the most uncreative, soul destroying experiences of my life, to change 75,000 words from ‘I’ into ‘she’ from ‘me’… oh, it was endless. However, it was exactly what needed to be happening with the book, and it flowed much better – it was the right decision. I just wish that I could have waved a wand and fast-forwarded a few months of just delete, change, delete. Oh, it was torture. Anyway, we got there.

Charlie: Well, I’ve asked this question a few people, and it can be very, very interesting hearing the answers, and I think it might be in your case as well. Was there anything that you cut that was particularly something that we might like to know about from when you were editing it and rewriting?

Emma: Ooh, that is really interesting. Again, it’s hard to remember [Charlie: sure], but I’m quite certain that there is a folder on my laptop, within the folder called The Island Love Song, that has paragraphs and things that I’ve cut and pasted and plonked in there under the guise that I will use it again. I never will. I won’t open the folder called The Island Love Song again. What do I need to do that for? I don’t think there’s anything significant around the characters that would have happened, that I removed. Everything I intended to happen to them is in the book. Just trying to recall… no, it’s not… Oh, yes. Okay, I’ve got one. Georgia had twins, and Phoenix, [Charlie: wow] and I cut the twins out. There you are. Gosh, I’d forgotten that until that very second. So Georgia had two other children and Phoenix at the beginning, and she had an au pair because she’s very wealthy, she married a very wealthy man. So the idea that that might a) alienate a reader and like her even less, and you can’t come back from that one, I think if you dislike her, because she’s spoilt and privileged, that’s hard to turn around. And secondly, with the young twins who were little, there was a lot of twin admin, like, what are we going to do with the twins when they go to Hydra? How often is she going to have to speak to them when she speaks to her husband, like, he’s going to have to speak, she’s going to have to call the au pair. So I just got rid of the twins completely and maybe I’d realised that about halfway through, deleted the twins, bye, gone.

Charlie: Not that I’ve known about them before this, but I can see how it works without them. Sorry, twins, sorry. We’ve killed you off.

Emma: I know, but the twins live on different ones in my next novel, so obviously that was a thing that burrowed into my head and they’ve returned. It just didn’t need it and I think as I go on book by book, I become so aware of self-editing. If I took that away, does it change the story in any way, shape or form? If the answer is no, delete, goodbye, the end. So, yeah, sorry, they were called Liam and Lucas. Sweet little twins who were five years old. They were deleted. They were horrors as well. They were quite fun to write. I really enjoyed one of them spluttering Georgia’s perfect kitchen with spaghetti bolognaise in one scene [Charlie laughs], which, well it’s Georgia’s worst nightmare. So they were great fun, but no, they’re in that folder. I might go and look at it after we finish speaking.

Charlie: Well, thank you for this masterclass in killing your darlings. That’s very good [laughs].

Emma: I know! Murdering characters! So ruthless – I told you I was ruthless with people, giving them terrible afflictions and just deleting them. There you are.

Charlie: Well, I’m going to go back to that party episode, Emma, I think this psychological thriller is happening in your future at some point [laughs].

Emma: Oh, it’s not intended, but I’m obviously much darker than you first thought, Charlie, when we spoke originally, all those years ago [Charlie chuckles].

Charlie: Emma, it has been fantastic having you back. And, yeah, I’ve got to get myself a copy of The House In The Olive Grove. Yes, I’ve got to get a copy of that because I am looking forward to book four and I’m looking forward to book five, actually, I’m looking forward to book six. We’ll talk about those another time when you’ve written them, I think.

Emma: Well, that’s hilarious. You know what? I’ll just quickly say that I had no idea a while ago how book four ended, but I came up with an idea for book five and six, complete with endings and the whole idea for it. In the meantime, I’m trying to write a book that I have no clue how it ends. So that is how my brain works.

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, as long as it’s all written down, that’s the thing, isn’t it?

Emma: Exactly.

Charlie: Emma, this has been fantastic. Thank you.

Emma: Thank you for your support and for having me back.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time, and if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! The Worm Hole Podcast episode 110, was recorded on the 9th July and published on the 25th November 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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