Get Booked – Author Read Extract Compilation 270223

Welcome to today's Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield. And in store for you this week we have a slightly different Get Booked that's going to involve various extracts, a little bit of a try before you buy vibe to it. We've got lots of different authors out there that have sent in extracts of their book for you to have a quick listen to. I'm going to be wetting your appetite with the shows that are coming up over the next month or so, and a few reviews and a bit of good old chit-chat. First up on today's lineup is Phil Palmer with his book The Session Man: The Tempers, Tantrums, Crazy Experiences with Some of the Absolute Greats. Getting random calls from David Bowie, and I quote, Who has heard of his work and is he free to join him and Iggy Pop in Munich in 2 days' time? 2 years later, having more big named collaborations under his belt than hot dinners. You may not know the name Phil Palmer, but it's hugely likely you've heard him play. The Session Man serves as a fantastic, nostalgic, often endearingly funny insight into the music scene back in the days when Talent and charisma was key, not social media following and TikTok trends. There's lashings of tales on the road, rock and roll stories, parties, narrow escapes, and pretty much, well, everything. Have a quick listen to this. Prologue. It's not every day that you look up to find God staring right back at you, but there he was. Silhouetted by the light of a neon beer sign above his head stood the unmistakable figure of Eric Clapton. It was 1988 and I was in the Mean Fiddler Club in Harlesden playing guitar for Paul Brady, a fiery red-haired singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland. Brady was a great artist, though not always easy to work with due to an explosive temperament. And this was his first London show for a while. Brady was out to impress that night and was pushing the tempos up in an attempt to drive the energy of the gig. We had just completed a series of shows in Ireland to help promote Brady's album True for You, and as a band we were feeling pretty comfortable with the set. London was always a stressful environment for Brady to play. And that night he was really driving things along with the drummer Liam Genocchi doing his very best to keep up. The stress levels only increased as God himself, Eric Clapton, watched us from the back of the room. At the age of 17, Eric's solo in Badge by Cream had been hugely inspirational for me. I had listened to the track so much that I could repeatedly lift the stylus and place it back on the vinyl in the exact spot the solo started. Determined to perfect the solo, I would grab my Echo acoustic guitar, which was actually a 12-string guitar with 6 strings on it, and sit patiently for hours in front of the stereogram until bit by bit my fingers slowly grasped the technique. Years later, faced with one of my idols listening to me, I was beginning to feel a little intimidated by the situation. In the induced panic, my focus waned as I worried if I was inadvertently playing any borrowed licks from himself, and ultimately I left the stage feeling frustrated by my own incompetence. After the show, Eric joined us backstage and I met him for the first time. To help disperse the nervous excitement, Liam attempted to break the ice by repeatedly calling Eric by the name of Derek instead, a typically irreverent reference to Derek and the Dominos. Liam had little respect for reputation or status, having been around the business for longer than he cared to remember, but fortunately Eric was gracefully ignoring the banter and simply smiled politely. It turned out that Eric was there because Brady had asked him to guest on a track that he was recording called "Deep in Your Heart." Eric was very kind that evening, and even though we had little conversation, I got the impression that he was every bit as shy and as unassuming as I was. After Brady's tour concluded, I found myself back in the studio working as a session guitarist with the likes of Swing Out Sister and Howard Jones for the remainder of the year. As a session musician, I was someone called upon by record companies and producers when they needed adept musical skills for use on projects in the studio and on tours. Music studios at the time were very expensive places to be, so record companies typically hired session musicians to be creative, quick, and most importantly, accurate with their musical input. Nowadays, studios can be as cheap as a laptop computer, and artists can take as much time as they need piecing songs together one note at a time if necessary. Up to this point, my career had been a steep learning curve, having already collaborated with the likes of Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Frank Zappa, David Essex, Joan Armour Trading, and a host of other household names. I came from humble beginnings in life, but by my early 20s I had established a reputation as a competent session guitarist. I made my living from being able to quickly and accurately interpret the templates and sometimes obscure concepts set out by artists and producers, and as such I was in demand. It was a period of plenty and of discovery. Musical experimentation was happening spontaneously in studios all over London, and a genre was being born around us. This was an era where talent was still king, a time when authentic showmen and showwomen ruled the stage without the need for theatrical smoke and mirrors to distract audiences from their deficiencies. I felt part of the cutting edge, and it was exciting, challenging, and rewarding. But to be on the front line, you needed to stay in the loop, which meant working flat out, being visible, being available, being flexible, and above all, being able. I just turned 36, and by most standards of musical accomplishment, I was doing pretty well. I had already played and recorded with some of the biggest household names of the time, featured on several worldwide chart hits, and quite literally seen more than a few TV sets tossed from hotel balconies. With many years already under my belt, I thought I'd experienced most of what the industry had to offer. However, I had no idea of the amazing adventures, experiences, and collaborations that were still to come in my life. These adventures would see me travel the globe with some of the biggest bands in the world and play to TV audiences of billions. Strangely, despite my musical success, I have never thought of myself as any kind of celebrity, so to write a book about my career was not something I had ever really considered. Yet in June of 2016, I started to do just that, and it's an event I remember vividly. I was in São Paulo, Brazil, and it had been a particularly hectic couple of weeks on the road with Eros Ramazzotti. I found myself in yet another hotel room, exhausted and alone at 3 AM. The transfer pickup for the next gig was at 5:30 AM, so I thought it worthwhile to try and get some sleep, no matter how little. I packed my bag, brushed my teeth, and lay on the bed ready for the inevitable wake-up call. Soon after closing my eyes, In a sort of half-sleep, I began seeing images in my vision. Images of my youth, my dad, the house where I lived until the age of 5. Sensations, aromas, the voice of my mum singing, the sound of the old back door of my childhood home slamming in the wind. This was odd. I seemed able to browse through my memories like scenes from a movie. Key moments of my life were appearing to me in intricately detailed sections, details that I thought were long forgotten. The inevitable wake-up call dragged me out of my trance-like state, so I collected my belongings and wearily found the elevator to the lobby. On my way down, I thought about the idea of premonitions and if this was somehow my life flashing before my eyes. A prelude perhaps to some impending personal disaster that was about to happen. Strangely, I calmly resigned myself to it. I was not scared, more disappointed that if this was to be the end, that there were many things I still had left to do. Upon reaching the lobby, I immediately felt the need to tell someone about what had just happened. I began ranting on to one of the backing singers, Chris Costa, who wasted no time in making light of the situation by trying to organize some strong coffee for me. Once on the bus to the airport, I started frantically writing notes on my smartphone and continued relentlessly until finally reaching my seat on the aeroplane, where I crashed into a deep deep sleep. When we reached the next town, I checked into my room, opened my laptop, and copied the text onto it from my phone. I must have stayed there for 12 hours, completely unaware of time or hunger. This process continued during every free moment I had for almost a year. Aided by the internet, it was amazing how much of my life was documented in the public domain. The likes of YouTube provided an incredible resource enabling me to revisit and relive moments and events which at the time passed by for me in the blink of an eye. There are many people, songs, and events referenced in this book, and I would greatly encourage you to search these out on the internet if you can. I hope these will help you better understand the life and experiences that have helped make up my 50-year career as Phil Palmer, Session Man. That was an extract of This Session Man by the author Phil Palmer. Go and find out more and get hold of your copy at philpalmer.com. Coming up on next week's show, we're going to be interviewing the author Philip Ely on his book Pull Yourself Together, Man, that was released on the 31st of January of this year, written for people who sometimes struggle with difficult emotions. For most of us, Philip Ely's latest book encourages readers to build a healthier emotional approach to life. He talks about this goal as a project. It's not quick and easy, but it is achievable. Pull Yourself Together, Man is written as a simple usable guide on how to find some effective rhythms and healthy habits in your life. It offers ideas and thoughts to help people better manage their own emotional health. It contains stories, lists, ideas, as well as top tips and anecdotes. This book is for most people who sometimes struggle with difficult emotions. In truth, that is most of us. Most of us have built up unhealthy thinking habits which hold us back from being the best we can be. This book encourages you to build a healthier emotional approach to life. And it's not just men that need to know about this book, it is women as well. We all need to learn about each other so that we can help each other and have a better understanding of each other. Please make sure you tune in next week to listen to that interview. Next up on our extracts to be read out by our authors, we have Miriam Lanswood talking about Wilder Journeys. This was featured on GetBooked a couple of weeks ago, but a little bit of a reminder. One day in a wilderness life. It was dark when I heard the first sound. I listened to a lone bellbird who slowly awakened the world. Gradually the others began to join it, and there was a beautiful morning chorus. There was no wind and the forest was still, as if everything took a moment to listen. When the music ebbed away, the first light emerged through the trees, so I silently zipped open the tent, for Pieter was still sleeping. Taking off my clothes, I quietly crawled out. My bare feet touched the mossy forest floor. I dressed while looking out at the sky. Finally! I thought. It promised to be a sunny day after 3 days of rain. A little breeze had blown up. It brought fresh, clean air, and there was no smell of moisture in the wind. In the half dark, I found my belt and bow. I tied my hunting belt with my knife around my waist, picked up my bow and quiver, and began to walk towards the top of the valley. I found my way up through the forest. There was big old trees covered in moss, flowers, and mushrooms. Little creeks and streams everywhere. The sun was now rising over the mountaintops and everything was warming up. I walked past fallen logs that seemed to be smoking. The damp was spiraling upwards to the sky. I smelled the tree ferns and their old fronds and tried to detect a scent of wild animals. Where would the goats go, I wondered? Surely not in the thick bushes I found myself in. Every sensible animal would go to the river to move freely over the big round rocks in the riverbed. I climbed down a steep bank covered in ferns and young trees, holding my bow in one hand while the other shielded my face from all the sweeping branches. When I came to the valley floor, I quickly moved into the shade, for I knew everything is more visible in the sunshine. The white rocks had been washed clean by thousands of years of pure water. My eyes fell on a shiny green stone. I picked it up and marvelled at the patterns inside. Nature creates the most perfect pieces of art, I thought. I wanted to take it home, but instead I placed the green stone onto a big boulder. I'd learned never to accumulate anything apart from bare necessities, because we had to carry everything we owned. I followed the river upstream and only stopped when I saw a big patch of snowberries. I put my bow on the ground, kneeled, and ate as many berries as I could stomach. Where are the goats? I thought when I had finished my breakfast and set off again, following the edge of the forest. Stop thinking too much, I told myself, for animals can hear your thought. Let everything and everybody forget I am here. Then I realized nobody in the world knew where I was, or even aware of which part of the country we were in. We had no phone, no emergency beacon, no machine of any kind, not even a clock. Nothing monitored in which valley we were. If we had died, nobody would have had any idea where to look for our bodies. This thought didn't make me afraid. It rather Rather, I felt more alert, for I could not afford an accident. I climbed up a big branch of an old tree so that the animals could not smell my scent. The wind would keep my whereabouts secret. I was in a huge river valley with forest on every side. Some tree ferns were growing in the lower valley, but it was mostly beech trees at this higher elevation. From my viewpoint in the tree, I could look into the distance. The river was meandering down the mountain. Right below me was a smooth rock face, and a bit further on was a log jam with a little pool. Behind the dam were big round boulders fallen from the mountaintops. Snowberries for breakfast had filled my stomach, but after some hours roaming, I felt hungry again. Food was on my mind all the time. What part of the animal shall I eat first? I imagined how happy Pieter would be if I came back with a goat. We had not eaten meat for a week, and the wild animals were our staple food. If I failed, we would have to eat again the food supplies we had brought with us, which was rice and beans and flour to make bread. Since we had first set off in the wild a year ago, I had mostly failed as a hunter. Consequently, we had eaten beans every day. Pieter did his best to make varied meals by adding many herbs and spices. But it was not easy to eat the same thing so often. Those first few months I had tramped around for countless hours without seeing any animals. On the rare occasion that I did see some in the distance, they had smelt me and disappeared without trace. I'd come back sometimes almost in tears for not seeing any sign, or for shooting and missing, or for shooting and wounding, or losing expensive arrows. I sat down around the fire, silent and empty-handed. The predecessor of success is always failure, I learned. Instead of hunting in that first winter, I had tried my best at setting traps for possums. These were small marsupials, a nocturnal animal introduced from Australia. Without natural predators, this species has quickly become a so-called pest. Most people regarded them as rats. Without knowing that possums are very nutritious and tasty too. During the past year in the wilderness, I had learned to wait, and today this skill was used again. I sat very quietly in my old tree. The one who wins in the wilderness is the one with patience, I knew. The ability to wait is the ability to hunt. The sun shining through the branches made beautiful moving patterns on the ground. A little breeze over the water turned the leaves ever so slightly. The leaves went from green to yellow and many colours in between. And all around me the scene was like a big moving kaleidoscope. Maybe there are no wild animals here. Maybe I should have gone up that other side creek, I thought. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Maybe they had smelled me already. Doubt was overshadowing my mind. I waited for 10 minutes, maybe 30, maybe an hour. Time had no relevance out here in the wilderness. It felt as if we were living in a different world. 4 days' walk from here, where the road started, was the beginning of the human world, and here in the deserted mountains was the wilderness. The two did not seem to be connected. There was no clock here. There was nothing to indicate the days of the week. There was only a natural pattern, days lengthening and seasons changing. There was nobody counting minutes, measuring time, comparing one with the other, and who created a progressing future in which things were supposed to be better than now. Two Paradise ducks flew into the valley with much commotion. Why were they calling out, I wondered? What had they seen, and why were they disturbed? Were they being chased away by another animal? I kept very still, and at first they did not see me. But when I leaned over to watch them, the branch on which I sat moved, and it wasn't long before their keen little bird eyes spotted me, and the male began a warning sign. I didn't want to tell the birds anything, that there was danger in the valley. "Don't worry," I called back in bird language, imitating the consoling female call. After a few of my "mhm, mhm," the female joined me and the male paradise duck stopped calling. It was silent for a while. I closed my eyes. I waited. Time seemed to stop altogether. Then I finally heard something in the distance. "Määä, määä." My heart missed a beat. Where was this small goat? I held my breath and waited for a second call. Upriver or the side branch? I climbed down the tree as quickly as I could and ran over the rock face to the river. I stood still to listen again, but nothing came. Määä, määä, I bleated, imitating the mother goat. Let me know where you are, I thought. The mother had obviously walked a little far away from her young one who was bleating to find her. They were separated long enough for me to hear in which direction they were roaming. I climbed up the bank and struggled through the forest. The wind had brought down many trees and I had to climb over and under big logs. I was careful not to hurt myself in my haste. The bleating appeared closer and closer and my heart was in my throat. When I was around 20 meters away from the animal, I began to move very silently. I knew which branches would break, and my feet found stones to step on. Then through the vegetation I could see some goats climbing up a side stream. One billy was on a big rock, and 3 nannies and 4 kids were in the grass near the water. I squatted down. My hands were shaking while I nervously took an arrow out of my quiver. I clicked an arrow onto the string. I exhaled and I felt calm. I decided on the small billy goat that was closest to me. I drew the bow and let it go in one movement. The arrow flew straight and fast into the heart of the young goat. When he fell to the ground, the others ran into the thicket. With adrenaline racing through my body, I ran to the dying goat. Young animals know when to give up, and soon the life ebbed out of him. He was black and white, little brown colouring on his back. His eyes were blue. I stroked the little creature and I felt sorry for taking his life. His coat was healthy and shiny, and for a moment he felt like a little pet goat that I would carry home. But alas, we were in the wild and we were surviving off the meat of the dead animals. I picked him up and draped him carefully over my shoulders. He was soft and innocent, but this was the law of nature. Living and dying is a cycle of the universe. "With life comes death, with death comes life. I too was innocent." We had food now and the bodies would become stronger and healthier. Because he died, we survived. I absolutely love this. It's like as if Get Booked did Audible with past guests and future guests as well. So you are listening to a very special edition of today's Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield, where we are playing out Various extracts of the books that are either released or soon to be released, read out by the authors, who, many of whom are past guests on Get Booked. I hope you're enjoying this. And next up, we do have The Art of Enough, read by the author Becky Hall. Do you ever feel like you aren't enough and you're overwhelmed by too many demands? Concerned about overconsumption and the climate crisis? You are definitely not alone. The art of enough is the challenge of our age. In a world full of pressure to be more, do more, and consume more, this practical guidebook will help you find your own version of enough. Enough is a springboard for self-belief, a healthy work pace, and sustainable living so you can move from striving to thriving. Weaving together ideas, stories, and practices, The Art of Enough offers 7 ways to ease away from the pull of scarcity and excess towards flourishing with enough, finding the balance and boundaries we all need for ourselves and for our world. This Next is the author Becky Hall with a reading from The Art of Enough. An extract from The Art of Enough by Becky Hall. Why we need the art of enough. Picture the scene. I'm sitting opposite Kate, a senior leader who I'm coaching. She's telling me that despite her external success and glittering career path, Nothing she does can make her feel good enough. No matter how hard she works or how many accolades she receives, which are plentiful, she cannot shake her fear that she is an imposter waiting to be discovered. This drives her to work relentlessly to achieve a goal which never feels within reach. Kate is stuck in a mindset convinced that she lacks what she needs. She has no permission to rest and her inner landscape is full of fear. A serial overachiever, she's tired and nothing she does takes her insecurity away. In her mind, she simply cannot be enough. Now let's zoom in on Omar. Omar is working from home during one of COVID-19's lockdowns. He has a demanding job and lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his wife and their 1-year-old son. Omar describes his working life to me. He's at his desk by 7 AM, has back-to-back online meetings throughout the day, during which a stream of emails fills his inbox. He takes an hour to be with his wife and son in the early evening before returning to work late into the evening. He feels overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of what he has to do and unable to give himself permission to stop stop either. Understandably, Omar is nearly burnt out with tiredness. It's as if he can never do enough. And then let's turn our focus to our planet. Our house is on fire, Greta Thunberg said in Davos in 2019. The IPCC report released in October 2018 gives our planet just 12 years to radically alter our carbon usage and emissions to stem catastrophic climate change. Our oceans are now host to plastic islands the size of countries. According to UNICEF, across 86% of the UK, children are breathing dangerous levels of toxic air. We're at the start of the 6th mass extinction, where thousands of habitats and species are on the verge of extinction, driven by ecocide. And yet our response as individuals, societies, and institutions is not creating change at sufficient speed. It's as if we don't know how to stop. We can't seem to have enough. These stories aren't unusual. I've worked to support people and teams for over 20 years. People working hard to give the best of themselves to businesses, universities, charities, institutions, and governments that they work for. And what I've noticed is that so many people are out of balance. It's as if we're on a seesaw the whole time, swinging between too much and not enough, oscillating from one extreme to the other. Our inner lives tormented by a lack of inner balance, our outer lives swamped by complexity, while at a meta level, the very ecosystem of our planet is pushed to breaking point. I believe that finding the art of enough From the inside out is the challenge of our age. My book attempts to explore these three fundamental questions: Why are we so out of balance in so many areas of our lives? How can we find a way of leading our 21st century lives fruitfully within the limits of enough? What becomes possible for us when we learn to be, do, and have Enough. What is enough? Here's what I mean by enough. Enough is a state of being and a way of living. With enough, we learn how to live within the natural limits of our lives, and this sets us free to flourish. Enough is resourced by love and and abundance. When we believe we are enough, we can find freedom and flow that allows us to shine. From a state of being enough, we can put in boundaries— sorry, from a state of being enough, we can put in place boundaries so that what we do is enough. We allow ourselves to live and work at a sustainable pace and contribute to making the world a better place for everyone. Enough is a way of living that welcomes the clarity that boundaries can give us and appreciates the renewable power of our resources. Enough gives us the wisdom to follow the natural patterns of growth and transformation that go way beyond always needing more and recognize when we have enough. Enough connects us to each other and to the planet that we share. One of the concerns that people have expressed to me about the concept of enough is that it represents mediocrity, settling for average, not trying hard. I think the reverse is true. Enough allows us each to stand on the fertile ground, well-rooted and well-resourced, so that we can flourish with creativity and brilliance. From our place of enough, we can grow to be the right size, connecting and contributing to others and our environment so that we can do amazing things. We move from the ever-hungry, never-satisfied state of striving to a state of fullness from which we can thrive. Far from being mediocre, Enough is a springboard to a healthy and sustainable life. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis suggests that the world is one living organism held together by interconnected complexity. The famous idea in Gaia is that everything is connected through a series of networked self-organizing systems, so that when a butterfly flaps its wings in America, it can set off a chain of, of mini changes that can result in a thunderstorm storm in Africa, which in turn can trigger a hurricane in Asia. In self-organizing systems, change starts with small disturbances, like a butterfly flapping its wings, which eventually become amplified by the connected networks within the system to affect big changes elsewhere, like a thunderstorm. In the same way, I believe that enough starts with each of us on the inside. For us, small internal changes are the place to start. I have a hunch that there is a deep interconnection between our individual feelings of not being enough and our experience of being overstretched in our daily lives in service of doing enough, and our inability to stop consuming too much to say We have enough. That how we feel on the inside is deeply connected to how much we feel we need to do, and ultimately how we can live sustainably together without harming the planet. That was The Art of Enough, read by the author Becky Hall. Absolutely fantastic book. I thoroughly Enjoyed reading that one and indeed having Becky Hall on one of our shows in 2022. Get Booked is all about talking to authors, chatting about anything and everything books related, and all the joy, enlightenment, and escape that good books can provide. Sit back, let us entertain you with a different guest each week, sharing who they are, what they do, and what inspires them, apart from today's show where we have collated extracts of books read by the authors. I'm thoroughly loving listening to all of these. I hope you are too. A little bit of a try before you buy. And if you want to catch up on previous shows, you can at womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked and on our SoundCloud. Next up, we have a reading from last week's guest, Christiana Spence, with The Fear. Over the years, I realized that masochism is more complex than being simply a trauma response or merely a form of flight or freeze when faced with danger. It was something I really chased, however unconsciously. It was something that on some level I wanted to experience again and again, as if I would somehow know more or feel more if if I kept chasing what I could not have and was not supposed to want. It was an act of rebellion, a search for impossible freedom. My life felt empty without the extremes of emotion, the turbulence of toxic love. I missed it whenever it was gone. I was addicted to it in a way, and this desire would eclipse my own sense of self-preservation and sense. In some attempt to understand and override whatever was compelling me to be this way, I first looked to Sigmund Freud, who explored masochism as a challenge to what he termed the the pleasure principle, essentially the will to self-preservation and life itself. Why did people do things, often many times over and compulsively, which were obviously bad for them? Why did some people seem to chase pain and their own destruction? He developed a theory of what is known as the death drive, the idea that even though we as humans have a will to live, we also have a will to die, to retreat from life, and crucially, to have some control over that eventuality. The organism seeks to die in its own way, he wrote, and as death is inevitable and a part of life itself, people are also affected by the desire to define their own ends, their own destruction, or at least to entertain the fantasy that they can control the contours of their own life. Freud also wrote about the compulsion to repeat, which he saw as a drive distinct from the pleasure principle. Here, by repeating experiences, people transform their relationship to those original experiences and often diminish the power that the root memory or fear has on them. In a sense, by reclaiming a traumatic memory, for example, by repeating it on one's own terms, one may diminish its power and hold. In particular, Freud wrote about the repeated departure in relationship to masochistic pleasure, which is less evident because it is the opposite of good sense, which assumes the sad and painful form of a repeated Fletcher. He discusses a childhood game in which the child expresses and so learns about the tragic nature of human experience, about the loss inherent to life itself. Finding the object is never other than finding it once more. The encounter with the object of love masks and erases what truly constitutes the object in itself: its loss. The object is lost not by misfortune or chance, but by its essence. Love is held by a thread, he says. Something at the very heart of the drive opposes its full satisfaction. The experience of the loss constitutes the object, and so be it. We cure evil with evil, poke a painful tooth with the tip of our tongue, derive pleasure from the loss of— if that is what love means. In this primary, immanent, or radical form, masochism is wed to the generic form of melancholy. Sexuality takes its revenge and invests at the very heart of that that which gives its birth its own limit. The impossibility of satisfaction, the deferred fulfillment of desire— in short, disappointed love— ceased to contravene the desired aim, to become the aim itself. This melancholic nature that expresses itself in repeated departure, in a sort of indulgence in the tragedy of love and loss, and indeed life itself, can begin to explain why we as humans become involved in compulsive patterns of pain and self-denial in reaction to fear. It also gives insight into the role of fantasy in contrived masochistic situations or cycles, in which pleasure is derived from the control one has over a scenario, rather than just the scenario itself. The masochist, after all, is typically, on some level, in control of the painful situation they seem to submit themselves to. They are the architects of their own pain and humiliation, and so that pain may feel like a form of empowerment, however counterintuitive. They do not have to fear what they are in some ways in control of or emotionally detached from. As Jacques André has written of this phenomenon, the perversion repeats the actual bodily attack. It conserves the tight and monotonous rhythm of the traumatic neurosis, yet it— yet the fact that the pain is staged and sexualized marks the distance the subject has taken. We repeat painful things that have been done to us, with the crucial difference that in this new situation we have some level of distance or control that we did not have before. Although many of Freud's theories have been challenged in the century since they were published, this idea about masochistic behaviors following childhood trauma in particular resonates with more recent research into PTSD and how the mind becomes stuck in a loop, in a sense, in a dysregulated fight-or-flight mode where responses become defined by past trauma. In this sense, the traumatized individual is prone to cyclical behavior in which any lasting release or peace from from anxiety and anguish is hard to access. Therein, addictive or compulsive behaviors in which the individual repeats a contrived version of the original trauma becomes a default behavior very hard to escape from. Moreover, one not need necessarily have experienced a particular trauma to act this way. If Freud was correct in picking up on the inherent tragedy of life, that we lose it ultimately and that we lose those we need and love,, then we can understand trauma in a far wider sense, for the purpose of understanding seemingly masochistic practices. Masochism, in this way, is a logical response to human existence, which is tragic and fleeting. By embracing the suffering in a ritualistic and symbolic way, we confront and meditate on this melancholic truth. We accept our fates and selves for what they are: precarious and vulnerable. Jacques Lacan developed his own theory of jouissance in response to Freud's ideas, which provide further insight into the phenomenon of masochism insofar as desire itself is compulsive and somewhat detached from the satisfaction of one's needs. As Nietzsche also said, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love. Lacan, following Freud, understood that desire, whether sexual or otherwise, is far more complex than fulfilling one's basic needs or finding straightforward pleasure. We do not always want what we need, and vice versa. There is pleasure to be found in the striving itself, in the tension of the chase and the ambivalence and even fear it may cause. As he wrote, the subject does not simply satisfy desire, he enjoys desiring, and this is an essential dimension of his jouissance. We want what we cannot have, what we are not allowed, what is not good or right. We want bad and harmful things. Why? Evidently, there is neuroticism interconnected with surrender and even chasing of ambivalence, chaos, and precarity, of loss itself. There is also something compelling about indulging in the behavior of the femme fatale, for instance, to be the siren, the death wish, the doomed romantic, the fallen woman. It is an act of rebellion. There is something tempting and satisfying about giving into these things and therefore surrendering to chaos. In another person and oneself. There is something about admitting one's fallibility, one's weakness, one's worthlessness even, and perhaps a peace to be found. We can still understand this behaviour as a form of fight or flight, a perpetuation of unresolved trauma through cycles of pain and relief, which can be addictive and compulsive. Trauma is not unusual. In fact, trauma is usually a part of life. We are primed to live with and react to it, and such a life may inevitably involve suffering. This fact perhaps helped to— helps to explain why people are set up to lean into their own suffering to some degree, in some effort to reconcile with it and learn to live with it. Freud intuited this existential state when he wrote about the death drive, which was an articulation of behaviors he had observed in his own clients. It seems clear now, as then, that we do not always want what is good for us or other people. We indulge in our dark sides, our shadows, because they offer us some feeling of connection, of truth even, about ourselves and our experiences and our capacities to relate to others in whatever way feels right. They allow us to repeat what we don't understand, what we have loved and lost, what we need but can't have, what has hurt us, confused us, entrapped us. We make peace with our own ends before death itself has come. We meet it halfway. We tease it with self-destructive behaviours, with submission on our own terms. And therein lies both the beauty and madness of being alive and wanting. That was The Fear by Christiane Spence, a philosophical memoir about the deepest and most primal of human emotions, how it controls us all, and how we try to control one another when the stakes are so high. You can get hold of this book on Amazon on paperback for £12.99. Go and get it! Now our final extract today is from the author Victoria Knox, a past guest on Get Booked back in 2022, and she has released a new series, Neither Despise Nor Fear. You can get hold of this on Amazon. Just type in V.M. Knox. She is the best-selling author of the Clement Wisdom series, and now comes a thrilling new Cold War espionage series. 1965, and Alistair Quinn is 16, making a sudden and life-changing decision. He runs away from his prestigious North London school and heads straight for the bright lights of Soho. In a brothel there he meets a prominent politician and a Soviet KGB officer, one MI5 and the CIA hope to turn double agent. Recruited into MI5, he becomes embroiled in a high-stakes mission of deception, treachery and death where no one is who they seem, not even the closest relative. Neither despise nor fear. Tallinn, Soviet-controlled Estonia, 6th of September, 1965. Dieter Stecker switched off his desk lamp. He'd worked late and now he was alone in the design office. He looked out through the glass partition of his private office his gaze settling on the door to the corridor. Beyond it, he knew the guard Boris would be waiting to escort him out of the building. Dieter stared at the long blue print filing cabinet in the centre of the outer office, then licked his dry lips. The silent office seemed to surround and envelop him, creeping over his clammy skin and making his pulse rate rise. It was now or never. He got up, reached for his coat and hat on the stand behind his desk, and put them on. From the corner of his eye, he saw Boris's broad face peering through the glass— small glass panel in the door to the outer hall. Dieter swallowed hard. Grasping his briefcase, he closed his office door. He knew Boris would be waiting for him in the corridor. Flicking a glance at the door, he went straight to the middle drawer and withdrew the top blueprint. Folding it quickly, he dropped it into his briefcase locked the filing cabinet and turned to leave. 'Good evening, Boris. You're working late tonight, Herr Stecker.' Dieter smiled. Boris was the only man who referred to him by his German title. Dieter hadn't been in his native land since the end of the war. With the expansion of the Soviet Union and the descent of the Iron Curtain, he and thousands of others in the Eastern and Baltic States were cut off from the rest of Europe. They walked together along the grey linoleum hall and down a flight of stairs. Boris opened the door to the outside. A cool wind blew in and Dieter buttoned his coat. 'Have a good night, Herr Stecker. See you tomorrow.' Dieter lifted his hand in acknowledgement but didn't turn around. He strode towards his small car. In the Soviet Union it was a privilege to have a car, a mark of respect for his 20 years of service with the Soviet-run electronic equipment factory. Sitting behind the wheel of his new Moskvich 403 car, he closed the door and placed the key into the ignition. 'Just one night,' he muttered, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He drove in silence. Half an hour later, he parked outside his unit block in the Russian Quarter of Tallinn and took the stairs to his home on the second floor, a one-bedroom apartment. As he climbed the stairs, the handle of his briefcase in his grasp felt like a death sentence. Since the recent loss of his wife, his elderly neighbours had made it their business to keep an eye on him. They were quiet and polite people, but of late they had taken to cooking meals for him and insisted on bringing whatever they'd cooked into his kitchen. While he was grateful for the gesture, he knew they had a telephone, and people with telephones were informants for the KGB. As he reached the second floor, he heard their front door click open. 'Good evening,' he said, lifting his hat. The woman nodded to him, then closed her front door. Dieter fumbled for his entry key. Unlocking his door, he switched on the lights, then closed the door to the stairwell. Leaning against the door, he held his breath and waited to see if his neighbour would knock. Two minutes passed, then three. Not tonight. Removing his hat, he walked into his sitting room and drew the curtains, then slumped into his chair. Too late now for doubts, he thought, his eye on the briefcase beside the hatstand in the hall. He sat in the stillness for some time, trying to quell the rising nausea. 'Everything the same, and it will be all right,' he whispered. With his mind on the enormity of what he'd done, he went into the kitchen, switched on his radio, and prepared his dinner. 'Everything the same,' he repeated, slicing some cabbage, although he wasn't hungry. It hadn't been exactly how he'd foreseen it, but with his neighbours' increasing inquisitiveness and the arrival of the new KGB officer Major Vladkov to the factory, he knew the time had come. Vladkov was younger than the previous security officer, and with a new broom had come tougher measures. While the sausage sizzled in the pan, he laid the blueprint out on his kitchen table, then went to the tea caddy and lifting the lid, retrieved the miniature camera hidden between the loose black leaves. Frank Quinn had given it to him months previously, but until this night, Dieter hadn't used it. 10 minutes later, he'd taken 4 photographs of the blueprint for a new portable microwave device that could jam all electronic equipment. Returning the camera to the tea caddy, he folded the blueprint and placed it in his satchel. Half an hour later he ate his dinner, the briefcase still in his field of vision. Just one night. No one will know, he told himself. But despite a scheduled visit to Finland in 2 days, it would be another month before his bi-monthly rendezvous in Finland with his British contact, Frank Quinn of British Intelligence, and until then he needed a safe place to secrete the film. At precisely 8 o'clock Dieter walked into his office. Juri, his deputy manager, was already at his drawing board. 'Good morning, Juri,' Dieter said. 'Could you go down to supplies and get me 2 extra rolls of adhesive tape? I see we are nearly out.' 'Of course, Gottfried Insecker.' Dieter smiled, reached for the cabinet key and bent to unlock the filing cabinet. Although he couldn't see Juri, he sensed the young man was watching him. Straightening, he smiled at him, then walked towards his private office. As soon as Yuri had left, Dieter replaced the blueprints. The day was long and tedious. Dieter had felt the nervous tension of his actions all day. He'd also been careful to follow his daily routine, but nothing had been said, and it appeared no one had noticed anything unusual. Despite this, he worried about Yuri. The young man was a fervent and devoted member of the Communist Party, but even he hadn't shown any sign of suspicion. In fact, Yuri was always happy the day before Dieter's regular trips into Finland to inspect the electronic monitoring and surveillance equipment at the dams that lay on the border between Finland and the Soviet Union. Yuri would be in charge for the day. It was a routine they had followed for some time, and Dieter's loyalty to the USSR had never been in question. Even the KGB men who always accompanied him on the ferry to Tallinn, from Tallinn to Helsinki, chattered to him like a flock of friend. But since the death of his wife Gisela, Dieter knew his regular trips to Finland would be questioned, especially in view of his work. The Soviet authorities had permitted him to travel to the West while ever Gisela was alive. Now, with no family to remain in the East during his absences, they would consider him a defection risk, and he surmised his ease of travel out of the Soviet Union would soon be terminated. 'Good night, Juri. Don't stay too late,' Dieter said. He had one last task before he left. He wanted the young man to see him lock the filing cabinet. That accomplished, he handed the key to Juri. 'Thank you, Gottfried Hinzstecker. I won't.' Dieter left the office to join Boris in the corridor. 'Off to Helsinki tomorrow?' Boris asked. 'Yes. Always plenty to do,' Dieter answered. 'Good night, Boris.' The day dawned cool but fine and the half-hour passage across the Baltic to Helsinki was calm. The sun came and went behind clouds that knew nothing of borders. Dieter usually enjoyed the crossing, no matter the weather, but today every time someone moved or sat closer to him his muscles tensed. He was relieved when the ferry finally berthed. He walked down the gangway with his two guards. While he could enter Finland, his guards could not. They would remain at the terminal until his return in the evening. Dieter didn't know how they spent their day, and he didn't care. Striding away, he walked into town, taking the paths that led through the park between Helsinki's two major thoroughfares. Crossing the Poijoesplanadi, he entered the café attached to the Kamp Hotel and ordered a hot chocolate drink and a cloudberry cake, a treat not available to him in Soviet-controlled Estonia. It was a routine he'd been careful to follow on every visit in preparation for this day, in case unknown Soviet eyes were watching. He sat in a booth at the rear of the café, his gaze scanning the people present, his eye on the door to the street. He withdrew the envelope containing the film from his briefcase and addressed it. Careful not to overstay his time there, he finished the hot chocolate and placed the cake in his briefcase. He grasped his coat and hat, then took the rear connecting door into the hotel foyer to hand the envelope to the concierge for posting. Returning to the café, he left by the front door. 20 minutes later, he entered the railway station and bought a ticket for the 10 o'clock train to the border town of Yvaintra. He leaned his head back on the seat as the plane as the train pulled away from the platform. Closing his eyes, he thought back on the man to whom he'd sent the envelope, a man in Norway he hadn't seen in over 20 years, and a man who owed Dieter his life. Well, that concludes today's rather special edition of Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield, for women's and men's radio station. We've heard readings from Phil Palmer, Harmer with his book Session Men. We've heard Miriam Lanswood, one of the authors from Wilder Journeys. We've had Christiana Spence reading from her book The Fear, and Becky Hall, the author of The Art of Enough. And last but most definitely not least, V.M. Knox with Neither Despise Nor Thank you so much for listening in today. I hope it's whet your appetite as to what you should be putting on your TBRs. Join us next week for another Get Booked show where we will be talking to Philip Eley.