Hello, I'm Hazel Butterfield and this is my show get booked for women's and men's radio station. For today's show. I've put together a little compilation of some of my favourite shows throughout 2021. And I hope you enjoy listening back to these shows as much as I've enjoyed putting it together for you. Now today we have Kelly Blackwell discussing the book the boy in 7 billion. When Kelly's eldest son was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. I think I got it right in 20, thank you. In 2010. And then with a rarer, more aggressive cancer, Langer and cell sarcoma only 18 months later, she embarked on a long, steep learning curve. Since then, an eight year journey through the complexities of pediatric chemotherapy, radiotherapy and bone marrow transplants to to diet, nutrition, herbal and holistic medicine has brought her to realize that the body has the ability to heal itself if given the right nutrition and care. This book is such a thoughtful, in depth, endearing and human look at the whole experience Callie and her son Derren and the whole family went through. I've been on quite a ride. I've had to stop at various parts to kind of compose myself. Callie, hi, thanks for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. Well, I did kind of try and pronounce some of those kind of types of leukemia and cancer, but I thought if I overthought it I'd get it even worse because I mean, you now can probably pronounce so many different medical procedures and terminologies like no one's business. But I'm quite happy that I haven't had to. Yeah, it's good. It's not a bad thing that you can't quite get your tongue around these things. You know, it did become very run of the mill. My day to day conversations were, you know, a lot of medical terminology, which is why I guess it's now kind of primed me for what I do now is that I do have a level of understanding. So yeah, it has its perks. Yeah, I mean I was reading towards the end of the book a few days ago where even the doctors got to a stage where they were like, so what do you think we should Bonkers. Let's start at the beginning. So it's quite a long journey, up and down, roller coaster. You kind of think like the book must be coming to an end at one point and things are kind of getting better or they've got got to an end and it just keeps on going. How's that been oh, well, you know, for me, at the time when you're going through something like that, you just. You. You're in autopilot and you. You just get on with it and you take every. It's really what taught me to take every moment as it came. Not every month as it came every day, but every moment as it came because I realized, you know, you look too far ahead. And I was just thrown around on this roller coaster. And I've likened it many times over the years to, you know, I got on a roller coaster ride that I didn't buy a ticket for and I couldn't get off. And it just kept throwing us around and, you know, putting curve balls at us where we just weren't expecting them. And it was only really, when I looked back, it was only after it had all kind of finished and died down a little bit that I. Well, I had a nervous breakdown and I decided to write a book. And the book was actually very, very cathartic for me because as I wrote each chapter, I was able to almost, you know, turn the page and leave it closed and put it to one side. And it didn't. It was a way of me dealing with everything as well. So, yeah. And actually, even writing it, I had to take a break as well a couple of times because it just got too much for me because I was reliving everything again. And I felt that when I wrote the book, I really, really wanted everybody to fully feel immersed in what I felt. So I had to re. Remember all of those feelings that I had because I wanted to be able to put them across in the book so that you felt you were actually there. You know, I needed everybody to fully understand why I did what I did. And unless they had gone on that journey with, I don't think they would have fully understood what I did, you know. So, yeah, it was something that. Yeah, it was a roller coaster of the truest, truest form. So, I mean. Yeah, I 100% agree. I definitely felt like I was doing it with you. I had to stop reading the book at certain points because I was getting a little bit kind of. I mean, it's upsetting because you just kind of think. I mean, at one point I was going, is she gonna have a breakdown or what? Because you kind of. If you hadn't have had a breakdown, if you hadn't struggled, I was like, that just doesn't seem right. I mean, it felt like a natural progress. This is the sort of thing that you expect for people to be seeing somebody about in terms of ptsd, because it was. It was horrific. And I was reading the parts when, like, Darren was just constantly, like, upbeat and just quite pragmatic about everything. And that actually upset me because you just kind of think, wow, it's just. I mean, it took it out of me reading, because I want. You know, you are. It is quite an endearing read. And you're very honest and you do feel like you're there because of the amount of detail. And I was just like, oh, it's just horrible. And I did actually, at one point, I decided that I had to come away from reading the books. It was at nighttime because I needed to put myself into a state where I felt comfortable to sleep. Yeah. And I then started Googling. I started Googling Derrin. And then I came across Russell Howard. Oh, yeah. Which, you know, I mean, I'd actually come across and watched the thing on YouTube before you'd actually talked about it. Brilliant. Which is a better way to do it. And like, later in the book, I'm like, oh, yeah, he's in front of 7,000 people. I'm like, oh, honey, it's got 2.1 million views on YouTube at the moment. But I kind of had to step away from it because, mean, horrific for you. But if even me as a reader is just going, it just was breaking my heart. Yeah. It's even my own brother, actually, not very long ago, he. He was doing something and I said to him, I said, you know, have you read my book? And he looked at me and I said, you haven't, have you? He said, I can't. It's just too upsetting. I said, are you serious? I was like, that was my life. Do you understand? You know, But I think as well, what I notice, obviously that was a four year period as well. It was a four year period. And so I had the time to kind of digest and go through everything. And it was very natural progression of everything. Like you say. Whereas when you read it in a book, I mean, I've had people message me and say, I read that in seven hours. I couldn't put it down, you know, And I just think, wow, going through that roller coaster that I did in four years, in seven hours, like, that's a way to like, really, you know, hit home with. With everything that went on. And so, yeah, it's interesting how a lot of people have said that to me and I've had to put it down because it's just too upsetting. And I say, well, you know, it is a happy Ending, at least I can give you that, I can tell you that. So. But I also, for a lot of people, you know, they presume that the ending is what most of the book is about. Well, actually the very, very, you know, the plot twist at the end is, is very much only maybe 20 pages, if that. And the rest of it is really about the journey of navigating pediatric oncology and what goes on in our healthcare system. And again, I absolutely adore the NHS and what it stands for and the people that work within it, but the system itself is incredibly broken. And that's something else that I learned and I think something else that comes along in the book is I saw a lot of holes in the system and I wanted people to understand that they're there because I think only together we can try and fix it and try and protect it as the NHS is what it's supposed to stand for. And so it was. Yeah, most of my book is about my journey and how I changed as a completely different person from pre diagnosis to diagnosis and what that can do to a family and a child. And like you say, Darren was very pragmatic about it, which in its own right, you're right. A 10 to 14 year old boy, he shouldn't even be thinking about his own funeral, let alone being very pragmatic about it, you know, but it certainly was his strengths that pulled me through A lot of the time. There's just the way that he was. It's like I have no right to be down in the dumps or, you know, woe is me. When he was just, he was the one that was experiencing all of this pain physically and I just was in awe of him most of the time, you know, he's an incredible young man and even still, still now he's very, very pragmatic about everything and he has a very different view on the world, which I can totally, you know, I can totally understand. So, yeah, and I'm glad that it's. When people read my book, it also gives them a dose of perspective, which I think a lot of the time we're missing, you know, if our iPhone stops working, it can sometimes be the worst thing in the world and we can't, you know. And you know, you get a dose of perspective like I had and all of a sudden those tiny things don't really matter anym. Realize what truly matters in the world and what is important to fight for, you know. Well, that's the thing. You would never wish this on absolutely anybody, anybody. But I'm sure, there's people listening at the moment and they know full well their kids are spoiled, they don't know they're born, and they would never want anything horrific to happen to them. But because Darren's been through this, he actually appreciates life. He appreciates how much you've got to fight for it. He appreciates, you know, the different sides of humanity that he's had to seen and what to. Actually, I mean, I was watching him on this morning. I mean, he's ridiculously well spoken. He's so. I mean, I think on this morning he was about 14. Was he. He was 17 then. Was he 17? Yeah, he looks very, very young. He still looks very young. Chemotherapy has done him a favor of keeping him young looking. Well, there was something that I saw that was only about a year ago, where he's actually saying that actually, I suppose he's an advocate for cannabis and just the way it comes across, I don't know. I know that he was keen on acting. I don't know if he's had any media training, but he just seems to smash it out the park. Oh, that's just. Yeah, he's. The funny thing is, as well, when it first started, obviously I went on television quite a lot before he did, because even just being the 1 in 7 billion, you know, having the rare cancers that he had, the whole story was looked at by the media anyway, and he was in newspapers before the cannabis, you know, so the cannabis was almost like the cherry on top of the cake. And. And he would say to me, mom, I don't want to. I don't want to go on the tv, I don't want to be filmed. And I go, okay. You know, and we kind of do minimum as we could with him, but when we got him on this morning, he just. I mean, he had a little bit of a bumble at the beginning, but he. Yeah, he came in, into it into his own and he. He's very good in front of the camera and he. Yeah, he. I think he loves it, but it's not something I think he'd want to do every day. But, yeah, he's certainly. I'm very proud of him. I'm very proud of him for being. I mean, the fact that he didn't go to high school, he spent seven months in high school. That was it, you know, the last seven months. And he's. He's so articulate, so intelligent, and I'm so very proud of him, of who he's become and what he stands for and what he wants to fight for and what he wants to do in his life. You know, it's. Yeah. Very unique. Yes. Yeah. And I do very much feel that our journeys have purposely put us on this path. You know, I would never have got into doing what I'm doing had Derren not taken me on that journey with him. And likewise for him, I don't think he would have ever found his passion had it not been for that either. So as much as, you know, I wish it had never happened, I'm glad that it did. You know, looking back in hindsight, I'm glad that it did because the way that it changed our life's trajectory, I would never want to go back to my pre cancer life. Derren, B.C. what we call it. Well, if you, if you think about it though, if. If you hadn't have gone through what you and your whole family went through, then you wouldn't have found out what you found out about the procedures, about the benefits of, of cannabis and the clean living and the alternative therapies, which means you wouldn't have been able to have helped so many other people. And I think because of the way Darren is, it has attracted more people as well because of his personable attitude and his outlook. And sometimes you've just got to accept that you were dealt a hand, but you were dealt it for a reason and you really ran with it. Yeah, absolutely. And that's another thing, you know, throughout our journey is that I had to. I had to find a meaning. I had to find a reason for things. And although I couldn't find the meaning or the reason at the time, I had to have faith that there was one. Because, you know, I think you can if you don't, if you don't fully accept that everything happens for a reason, including the bad and actually especially the bad, because that's how we can appreciate the good. And it's only when those things happen to you and how you deal with them, you know, it allows you to appreciate things a lot more. And yeah, it's very interesting going through all of that with him and seeing, you know, where it took us and, and the fact that we did both have faith that all of this was for a reason, whatever that was, we just didn't know what that was. Well, today on Get Booked, we have Alcohol Reconsidered Education for Moderation by Leslie Miller and Catherine Kell Clark. It's available on Amazon, the ebook at $8.99 and paperback is 9.99. This book, Alcohol Education for Moderation enables you to reevaluate your relationship with alcohol, enabling you to make positive, realistic and sustainable changes without asserting a notion of abstinence or even being preachy. It's about being informed, improving well being and productivity by making positive changes, addressing what is possibly going on, and making a decision to alter our relationship with alcohol to better our attitude towards life and quite importantly, ourselves. Guilt, shame, tiredness, mood swings, etc. Are so prevalent in our daily lives and over consumption really does its part in contributing to this. I will happily and openly state that I know I drink more than I should, as I'm sure many of you listening now could say the same. I love drinking and the social aspects of it and have no intention of giving up, but I am keen to make tweaks to help maintain a better state of mental well being, which I'm sure you would all love to do. Let's get stuck into this. Lesley hi, Good morning, Hazel. Thank you for joining us here on Get Booked for Men's and Women's Radio Station. Thank you very much for having me. Now, I've been storming through this book and I mean, I know I said in the intro it's not preachy, it really isn't. It's bizarre. I found it weirdly entertaining, especially going back into the research elements and there's quite a lot of nostalgia in there as well. And you kind of relate to the readers on such a fantastic level that I think, and I hope that it's going to get through to people. Well, thank you very much. You know, kind of when we wrote the book, we were really well aware that, you know, the pandemic brought lots of different challenges for different people. And we're aware that kind of people, we use alcohol in lots of different ways and it's a really complicated question that why do I drink? And you'll know from reading it, Kate, Kel Clark and myself both had our own issues with sort of finding that line between having a drink to relieve some of the social pressure or going out with our friends to it becoming something that we relied on to deal with maybe some of the more negative emotions which obviously a lot of people will have experienced over the past year. But of course it's quite difficult when you write a book. You know, I'd read a lot of books myself that were all a bit like, oh, I don't touch a drop again and I'm never going to drink again. And I found that quite difficult myself to relate to. So this is really kind of based on our own experiences. Well, it's about knowledge being power, isn't it? And making an informed decision. And I'm such a strong believer in encouraging people to not take a particular route that they've heard about. You know, get the knowledge about whatever it is you want to change and form your own path. You know, if abstinence is the only way for you, or you think that's what you'd like to do, then do it. If you want to cut down, then just make informed decisions. Don't kind of restrict yourself in a particular route that you should be taking. It's. Although I say knowledge is power, sometimes ignorance is bliss as well, isn't it? Well, definitely, definitely. So, I mean, I would kind of take on it from kind of the experience we've had from doing research, both from talking to our friends and sort of the actual research and is. People drink for different reasons. So it stands to reason that there are different solutions to this problem because we hear a lot in the news, possibly about people who are on the really sharp end who found themselves in really hot water with their drinking and kind of stopping completely for them is completely appropriate. But there's a whole group of people sort of somewhere in the middle of this sliding scale who have found themselves drinking too much. But, you know, they're not sleeping on park benches, you know, kind of, they're holding their lives together, they've got busy careers, they're looking after family members, they're not dropping any balls. They don't identify as being alcohol alcoholics as such. But you know where it's finding that line, isn't it? Because of the way alcohol works, it's very easy to find ourselves going from having, you know, a few drinks per evening and because of how it works, to find ourselves drinking increasingly more. And as time goes on. So we kind of. Our approach is we're not anti alcohol and we're not anti sobriety. But, you know, we are aware that a lot of people can gain a lot of benefits, both physical with a physical health and mental health, just by cutting back. So, you know, kind of we try not to be as presumptuous as to knowing exactly what people are doing. And we try to help people find. This is more of a starting point, I'd say, than an end is to really just start thinking about it in a bit more detail. Well, I think to make more informed decisions. Sorry, Hazel. Yeah, completely. And I think I've always, you know, enjoyed a drink. I think I sometimes blame my northern upbringing on it, but, you know, I'm sure My friends from Birmingham, you know, blame their Midland upbringing and my friends from London blame their London upbringing because of the choice and the variety and the accessibility, you know. You know, we're all incredibly different and yet we behave the same. And I know that especially over the last 18 months, people have drunk a damn fight more. Whether it's just to stay calm and to relax, especially when they're schooling their children as well as doing a full time job or worried because they've lost a job or furlough. And the last thing you want to do is get so wound up while teaching your kids that you're making life even more unpleasant in this unprecedented time. And I hate that word after the last 18 months. But you know, now that the pandemic seems to be in theory coming to an end, we need to relearn different habits. I mean, if you think about it, what I find absolutely bizarre in terms of over consumption is, you know, there were so many memes going around, especially in the pandemic about people over drinking and drinking at 8 o' clock and shoving, you know, Sellotape in a tea bag to the side of the cup when really you had quite a lot of Merlot in there and whatnot. And it was a bit of a joke in for people's birthday. You know, you have cards that say let's go get smashed and make some mistakes and whatnot, but you wouldn't see cards going, hey, it's your birthday, let's shoot up and get off our face because she wouldn't be allowed. And it's just, it's socially acceptable. It certainly is. I mean, we live in a society where it's so entrenched in everything that we do. You know, if you go to do your supermarket shopping and it's there on the shelves, it's there on social media, you know, we, we play a part in ourselves, don't. We are promoting it and normalizing it and yeah, you can kind of, you can kind of understand, I mean homeschooling, if you've ever had that experience was enough to drive anyone to drink. But you know, kind of it's again, it's those comments that we use and we share and we normalize. I don't think we realize how many people are actually, you know, it's becoming a bit more of an issue. We don't tend to talk about the issues that our drinking does. The more negative side of it we tend to keep to ourselves, whereas we're quite happy sharing, you know, when we're all dressed up Going out for a night, night out, things like that. Whereas we don't really talk about maybe some of the negative impacts. In fact, sometimes I don't even think we're really aware of how alcohol. You know, we drink sometimes to alleviate the anxiety, whereas it can actually cause anxiety. And we don't tend to talk about those issues quite as readily. Well, yeah, my friend calls it the fear when, you know, you've had possibly a bit too much to drink over the weekend and then, you know, come Sunday evening, on Monday morning, like, I'm fearful about how much sleep I didn't get, how much money I've spent, how much time I possibly didn't spend with my children, where I could have done. And there is. It really does impact us in so many different ways, the wellbeing elements. I mean, the thing is, we want immediate gratification. We're kind of a nation of. Sometimes we think, oh, this is going to hurt tomorrow. But I'm going to enjoy it now because it's what I need right now. Yeah. And that's part of partly how alcohol works. You know, it does work for those first few drinks, sort of alleviating anxiety and it makes us feel relaxed. But then because of how it works in a drug, it makes it more difficult when you've had one or two drinks to then stop. You know, you might have heard people say, no, I've got no off switch. And once they've had one, we want more. And sometimes it can, you know, we then need more of it to get the same effects from it. So it's very easy to go from having that one or two drinks to its Westlake quite quickly. Oh, yeah. I mean, how many times have you said hair of the dog? Too many. Too many times. About two decades, Hazel. I was doing hair of the dog for yes. Yeah, I can imagine. Do you know what? I was reading the section about advertising and how youths are targeted in your book. And what I mean about when I said in the introduction about how it was quite nostalgic, is I was thinking back to all the times, you know, when I was 16, 17, 18, where I was drinking pints because, you know, it was that female empowerment and it's like. It's like going back in time and just remembering how progressive we thought we were. Or when I would go shopping in Sainsbury's with my mum. And each. Each shopping trip I was treated to the latest Alco Pop that basically was like pineapple juice. And it was. They were dressed up like Beetlejuice, spongebob you name. I mean, you look back at it now and you think, those alcohol pops were not targeted for 18, 19 year olds because they were wanting to be grown ups. I mean, I had them on my windowsill. Well, it was certainly, you know, kind of at that time it was all sort of girl power, wasn't it? So we see it as a bit of a cliche now, those things, but back in the day, we were challenging the norms, you know. You know, in the olden days, ladies would have a little, you know, half a pint was the norm. And so my generation were all about sort of showing who was boss and showing that we could do anything men could do and those kind of things. And yeah, of course, the Alco Pops go down quite easily. And then it sort of progressed to, you know, the lager through the early years. And then it gets more sophisticated onto the wine. Yeah. So it's easy to see how it. Think about it. Alco Pops went away priming us to be addicted to alcohol. It's like, let's get them in. Let's basically give them all the stuff that they normally have, like iron brew, because they had alcoholic iron brew. At one point they're like, get them in, get them interested in alcohol and then, you know, progressively they'll move on to the less sweet stuff, the less childlike, focused alcohol. And you just kind of think, wow, that's appalling, isn't it? Well, far be it to cast aspersions on the drinks industry. So in the book we do look at, we want people to come to their own conclusions. But of course, if you give a child a glass of wine, they'd spit out straight away, you know, because it doesn't taste that appealing. But when you think to the Alco Pops that we were drinking, you know, in our youth, the Hooch and things like that, they're all quite sweet. Get us into the groove and then we progress on to drinking more sophisticated, more complex drinks. Well, yeah, you didn't find many, many people over the age of 16 drinking 2020 in Hooch, did you? It was predominantly reserved for the under 16s who were hanging out, sharing a 10 pack of Regal, you know, among 30 people, school discos, hanging out in the park, that kind of, that kind of thing. Yeah. And then, then of course, there's so much to do with our association. So I think we were, you know, the people who did the marketing of the Wine o', Clock, you know, just did such a fantastic job because, you know, most of my friends all then got really Quite heavily into wine and. Yeah, I mean, you've seen it. The pink drinks, you know, they're all very. Quite alluring. They're all very, you know, appealing. It's been very well marketed to get us really hooked, like. And sinker into it. Well, that is what I mean about knowledge is power as well, because I'm fully aware that, you know, you will see more women buying the little tins of pink gin and tonic than you will blokes. However, when you actually see that it is targeted, just you kind of feel like you're being duped a little bit. Knowledge really is power and you just. I mean, as I said before, I. I do like drinking. I love the social aspects of it and I'm a huge fan of cooking. And the idea of cooking three or four dishes without a glass of Merlot in hand, or Bordeaux or whatever it is, depending on what I'm cooking, it feels perfectly acceptable because I'm doing something hearty. I mean, I'm baking scones. How on earth could I be possibly doing something socially unacceptable? I don't know. There's that image, isn't there, as well, of cooking. You're doing a nice cooking, you have a nice little drink to go with it. And, you know, like we say, we're not anti alcohol. I think there's a lot of pleasure in that. I think it's. It's when it's you drinking on your emotions or when you're drinking a significant amount. Like I was. I mean, I was getting through a bottle of wine a night, which was bad enough, but once I started getting into the second bottle, you know, then I had to really start questioning, you know, is this really what's promoted and what's advertised? You know, is it the imagery or that? You know, it's not really showing me sat dealing with anxiety or just drinking because I've had a stressful day at work. So to me there is. There's still pleasure to be had with alcohol. We still like going out with our friends and like that social side or. Yeah, definitely cooking, you know, that's a nice thing to do and have a drink with it. But when it comes to. Sorry, Hazel. It's just when it comes to becoming, when you're relying on it daily and when you're drinking, you know, significantly more than you should, then you really are damaging your health then. And bizarrely, it goes hand in hand with when something terrible happens. I was reading the section in your book about, and I hope you don't mind, it's in the book anyway. But talking about how going through something quite traumatic like a divorce, it just helps you get through, helps you stay a little bit calmer. But again, this is where you're learning these bad habits. Because a divorce is not done and dusted in two or three months. You know, even when they've been the end of a relationship, it can have long lasting effects and sometimes you stay in and well, because you need to because of mainly financial constraints, so boredom and or it's very well known that when people are going through a divorce or they're about to go through a divorce, they go out more because they're craving connection and they're wanting to make sure you know, that they have these strong ties to people for when they go through something, something quite horrendous. Needing to see your friends because home isn't as nice as it could be. You don't go out and just sit there and drink coffee at six and seven o'clock in the evening because you can't, because you won't be able to sleep. Funnily enough, alcohol will help you sleep, trust me. It's not the best sleep, but that's what a lot of people, this is what I mean, it goes hand in hand with pretty horrific. I mean that's another one of the reasons why we use alcohol, isn't it? To numb our emotions. And to a certain extent it does work. But you know, if you're going through something life changing like a bereavement or divorce or you know, any number of things, you know, it works to a certain extent. But then there are so many people in this country, in fact globally that suffer with anxiety and depression which, you know, kind of, you know, these things are. Life experiences are the root cause. We use it to deal with, to sort of self medicate and then you're in a bit of a sticky situation because then you get to a chicken and an egg situation, it's like which comes first, the anxiety, the depression and they sort of feed into each other and that's when it can start becoming a bit more of a problem, I think for quite a lot of people. Today on the show we have Tim Howard, the author of let's Kill all the Lawyers. Tim Howard is a doctor, a fourth generation gp. His whole life has been caring for patients. Tim trained at one of the best London hospitals and worked in an academic department there doing clever high tech medicine, but realized that his real calling was in the homes and lives of patients in the community, providing long term care. It was only when he realized that some or lots of medicine wasn't as good as he thought. It was that that became involved in these standards and regulation, trying to improve the system. Tim spent the latter part of his career as chairman of the tribunal service that judges doctors who are accused of failing, thereby setting the standards for all UK doctors. It is this that has led him to question some of the standards of present day medicine and to explore how and why the NHS is in the state that it is now. This has been the premise for the book to discuss today. Let's Kill all the Lawyers is about a doctor, a good doctor, doing his best for a difficult patient but being sued for doing so. And a solicitor, her marriage failing, beset by personal demons trying to defend him in court. This story explores the difference between the law, justice and fairness and how it affects the lives of ordinary people who are doing their best in difficult circumstances and how the life and death events can damage individuals, drive them apart and ultimately bring them together. Mistakes, we all make them. But this book talks about the issues the NHS face due to constraints set and responsible for by those not on the front line and are subject to daily criticism. I'm sure you've come across this so much and I must say this book was a delight to read. Not just for the story, but the intricate mechanisms of the world of law and medicine. Let's get stuck in. Tim. Hi, how are you? Hi, Hazel. Thank you very much for asking me onto the show. You're very welcome. I must say this book has had me enthralled. I mean, I'm one of these people anyway that likes to kind of think outside the box and be very mindful of, you know, we're very easy as a, especially as a Westernized society to kind of blame the first person we come across and they're often not the ones making the decisions. And I thoroughly loved the knowledge you have of the system and how sympathetic you are to so many different sides. You must have thoroughly loved putting your knowledge and expertise out there so that people can get a better understanding of what goes on, just so we can be nicer to each other. I think that's a really good way of putting it. I mean, I had a really privileged career as an old fashioned gp. I was one of the old, the last of the group of gps that regarded it as a lifetime dedicated issue, looking after the same patients for year after year, delivering children, seeing them grow up, delivering their children and taking them through all life's events. So that was a hugely privileged position to be in. And then We've come up against this huge, dramatic change over the last few years, where not only has medicine changed, doctoring has changed out of all recognition, but the expectations of the public, of the patients, have changed as well. And this produces tension, this dynamic tension between doctors and patients, between patients and the system that is producing all the abrasion and angst that's going on at the moment. And it's very, very sad to see because both sides have got a viewpoint. The doctors are trying, on the whole, they're trying their level best to do their best for their patients and that the patients feel very often that they're not getting what they want and need. Well, this is a situation where people who are at their most vulnerable and their most emotional, whether it's happening to their self or a close friend or family member, and, you know, the first person they want to attack is the first person they come across who has not actually been responsible for the constraints that they're in. There are books like Adam Kaye's this Is Going To Hurt. Well, where he went through the whole situation. It's an incredibly funny book with a very sad kind of underlying theme. And I just think, especially with what's going on, as we kind of said a little bit off air, how everyone's complaining about the wait times at the nhs, but at the end of the day, this is a system that is completely overwrought. It is over prescribed. There's not enough people to go around and there's not enough money to actually pay enough people to actually be there. And yet they're exhausted because they're doing 12 and 14 hour days. And that is purely because, you know, if there aren't the staff, they've got the choice of either walking out at the end of their shift and just leaving nobody there. People, you know, you hear about people being left in corridors with nobody to look after them. It's a sort of a terrible, chronic vicious circle that we've managed to get ourselves into in the nhs. My son's gp, fifth generation, and he was telling me the other day that he was on call for his practice and he had 90 requests for appointments in a day for himself. Now, that is simply impractical. So somehow he has to decide who's. Who is going to see, who really needs seeing and who can be managed, dealt with and their problem solved by other members of the team. So that means triaging, that means somebody at some stage asking the question, is this urgent? Is this a pain? Is it something that can be dealt with by a Physiotherapist, is it something that can be dealt with, so on. And people don't like that. They carve back to the good old days of the personal doctor, the person they knew and trusted. And I hate to say it, those days are gone. They simply cannot exist anymore. With the expectations and demands in the workforce, the numbers of gps are actually falling despite the evidence that you hear to the contrary from some sources. But the number of whole time equipments are falling and I hate to say this too, gps are leaving in troves because they can't manage continuous, intense 70 hour weeks anymore, which is a sort of standard full time GP workload. So they're either cutting back or they're leaving early. Well, they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. Exactly, exactly. It's a no win situation. Chunk of my life I've been involved in managing gps and I directed, was a director of a health authority for a while. So I've been involved in trying to analyse what the drivers are for this odd situation we've managed to get ourselves in over the last 20 or 30 years. And it's not all down to one thing. It's not down to government, it's not down to the public, it's not down to over demanding patients. It's an accumulation of a multitude of small factors. There is absolutely no doubt that like most nationalized industries, government with a small G does not run the health service very rationally, sensibly. And I got the scars to prove that from challenging senior officials, ministers over many years about some of the more potty decisions and requirements that are imposed on both general GPs and hospital specialists. Things like the, for instance, the present one, the face to face appointments, which is the present sort of public thing. I want to see my doctor. Last year we had a Minister Hancock who said the future of general practice is it, it's all going to be online this year. We've got a Minister saying, I'm sorry, gps have got to see any patient face to face when they want to be seen. Now you can't have two leaders of an organisation just saying exact opposite. But that's what's happened because they are, let's face it, politicians, neither of them knows a damn thing about general practice and so they're just responding to the wind that's blowing. It is very frustrating for those of the cold face who get the flak, they get aggression, they get real, real anger forced on them. People are deeply offended when they ask to see Their doctors and their they are told, I'm terribly sorry, the doctor is saturated. He's completely overwhelmed with a tsunami of work and he can't see you for three days or five days or a week. So you have to tell us whether it's urgent or not. So inevitably they then go to A and E and A and E is what it says it is. It's accidents and emergencies. It's not there for long standing problems problems. It's not there to manage chronic backache. It's not there to deal with the normal headaches that we all get. They're seeing relatively new junior doctors who are trained in accident and emergency work, not in a separate specialty general practice for which you need training. You. On today's show we have Nikki Smith, the author of look what yout Made Me Do. And what this book explores is the complexities of abusive relationships and the coercive nature that can destroy all surrounding relationships. A process that is calculated, devious, alarmingly subtle and preys on the shock embarrassment factor. A powerful reminder that you very rarely know what is going on in somebody else's life. How our past can distort our future or our perception of it, how lonely you can be even when being surrounded by family. This book is an addictive, very clever and scarily realistic fiction book on abuse, family politics and how keeping secrets is toxic. The reviews for this book are incredible for a very good reason. Nikki, hi. Hello, Hazel. Hi. So Reddit loved it. You must be so happy with all the reviews. I am really delighted, yes. I'm actually going to hire you, I think, Hazel, and keep you in my pocket and bring you out to kind of repeat that little intro, various different points when I get asked to talk about the book. That was wonderful. Thank you very much. I'll send over a blurb. Yes, yes, absolutely. Well, do you know what? I can't wait to get stuck into the complexities of, of a coercive, abusive relationship. But let's start by just telling our listeners a little bit about yourself. Well, yeah, my name's Nicky Smith. I am 48 years old, so I'm not, sadly, one of these very young debut authors. I came to this a bit later in life after having a completely different career and I live in Surrey with my husband and two daughters, one of whom's a teenager and is just doing GCSEs at the moment. So I'm sure all those other parents who've got a year 11 or year 13, daughter or son can sympathise. It's a Bit of a stressful time. It is, isn't it? Especially as they're. We kind of teach our kids for about four or five years in the. In the whole high school setting about gcses, and then all of a sudden they've gone. Either way. Everything you thought was going to happen? Actually, do you know what? Pretty much for the last 10 years, we're going to do it differently. Go. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, it's. Yes, it's been a nightmare for them this year, I think. So, yeah, she's just sitting kind of as everybody is, multiple assessments and then we'll just have to see what we come out with in August. So. Yeah, fun times. Yeah. Well, best of luck to you and your daughter. It will be fine. I think everyone's. You know, you've just got to think positively and hopefully it's going to teach our children to be a little bit more adaptive and resilient. Somebody said. Yeah, somebody said something to me, actually. I was speaking to a therapist, I think it was actually for this show, and I said, oh, I'm very worried about, you know, the confusing nature for children and how they're possibly being kept back because they haven't been able to do many of the things that they're supposed to do when they're 14, 15 and 16. And the lady turned around and said, yes, but what they're learning in terms of how to adapt and just get on when things, you know, when a curveball is thrown at them, they're excelling at that. And both of these things are all the many elements will somewhere meet in the middle. So, you know, what's taken away with one hand is given, you know, given the other boundary. Yeah, I thought that was lovely, what she said, actually. So, anyway, as we were. So look what you made me do. Coercive relationships. How did you go about getting the research for this? Or have you been in a coercive relationship? I haven't really. Well, I've certainly never been in one like the one that's described in this book. And I have had quite a few people asking me since the book came out, is my husband modeled on anybody in the book, which he's not? I have to say that very quickly, but I think when I was. Certainly when I was younger and went out with kind of different people, I think there's certain aspects of one of the characters in my book, Caroline, there's aspects of her relationship that I can certainly identify with. And I think a lot of women that I spoke to have had this sadly to kind of some degree, generally. Mostly not as kind of horrific as my character endures, but certainly just, you know, maybe little kind of aspects of their relationship where, you know, somebody might kind of start telling you what to wear or telling you that, you know, there's certain friends that they'd rather you didn't see or, you know, maybe distancing you from family members, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, I obviously spoke to people I know, but I did a lot of research online and kind of spoke to various people anonymously who were. Who were kind enough to talk to me about their situations and what they'd been in. And I think we often forget that. I think even in this country, two women are still killed every week by their partner. So this is. Is, you know, this is a incredibly serious issue that. That still needs to be addressed. Do you know what? I have been in a coercive relationship, and it was a long, long time ago. I mean, we're talking at least 17, 18 years ago. Yeah. And I didn't even. I just thought he was mad as a box of frogs and not a very nice person until I realized, actually, the extent. When you're in it, it's. And as I said in my intro, it's so subtle. Yes. And there's. There's tiny little chipping bits of chipping away that you eventually get isolated. And. And what I found, I've come across a few friends or people have told me in the past about things that have happened to them. And the people who see through these narcissists or these abusers are generally the ones that the actual abusers tend to destroy first to try and get them out of the way, because they're the strong ones that are a threat, which was obviously the situation in this as well in this book. And they're threatened by people who can call them out. Absolutely. And I think, as you say, as well, I think what. What people, you know, people often hear about the behavior, and they kind of think that, well, I'd never get myself into a situation like that. And obviously, if somebody treated you like that from the very beginning when you met them, you wouldn't. But I think a lot of these people are far cleverer than that. And. And they can often shower you in, you know, affection and make you feel safe, and it feels like they completely adore you and you're their world. And then by the time the behavior starts changing into something more, you know, threatening or disturbing, you're kind of in the middle of that relationship, and it's Often very, very difficult to get out. Yes. And it's that whole it. They play on your guilt factor as well, because it's. I've done this for you and what, you're going to leave me just because I said the wrong thing. And it's kind of minimizing their behavior. I mean, it's, it's very scary. And I think, and what I talk about a lot on Get Booked is, yes, this is fiction, but these are perfect ways for people to kind of bizarrely be entertained but understand the complexities and what to actually look out for. Because the majority, you know, if you've fallen out with somebody because they've behaved funny and they think that, you know, they're partners, changing them and whatnot, it's probably quite intentional. And it's to kind of understand that you don't always know what's going on. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's very scary. But what was the inspiration for this book then? Well, it was. It actually, it came from kind of a number of. A number of different places. I think the kind of the coercive control element was something that I'd always wanted to write about. And that's the kind of main theme that runs through the novel. I mean, I just read so many stories, horrendous stories of, you know, women in, you know, these kind of situations who find it really difficult to get out of them, I think, particularly when children are involved as well, because often the person concerned can kind of control the finances and they can use children as a weapon so that the, you know, the woman feels like she can't leave a relationship. But also it was. It was actually somebody I know who was telling me a story about a family who'd been impacted by the effects of a will and when somebody died and what happened to the rest of the family, because the will had kind of left certain things to certain people and there were big disagreements about it and it all kind of went to legal cases and things. So I found that kind of totally fascinating as well. So we kind of wanted to combine the two ideas. Now on today's Get Booked, we have Fab Giovannetti chatting to us about her latest book, Reclaim youm Time Off. A book that after this last year, I'm sure is going to be beneficial for many of us. A book that needs to be embraced to get our work time and U time back, back on track. The lines have become too blurred. Our bedrooms, dining table and sofa time have become our new pandemic office. Working from home has enabled us and yet disabled us at the same time. However, for way too many of us, this was an issue long before COVID hit. And in the modern working world, we were work really hard. On average over 60 hours per week. In order to do more, we silently have agreed to sacrifice our time off. And burnout is the buzzword. The inbox of shame and productivity paralysis. Describe a normal working day. Fab is joining us here today to chat about reclaiming our time off. And with a name like that, I feel like we should listen. However, I've read the books, I know we should listen. So let's get cracking. Fab. Hi. Hello. You definitely gave me, I think as you said, is my name. It just puts a lot of pressure onto performing, I think straight away. So hello and thank you for having me. You will be Fab. I feel like you should have T shirts made. I mean, the puns are not lost in me. There's so many jokes, so many things over the past years, the past 10 years I've been living in the UK and there's always a new one that people come up with and it always makes me really happy. So I should probably put them all on different T shirts and then wear them when I'm out. Yes, you can wear your T shirt. Will determine exactly how fab you are feeling. Maybe have a scale of 1 to 10. Oh, I like that. Okay, that's a new one. Thank you so much for that. Or you could just completely go down the hyper color route and just, you know, those like, you can get like fancy nails and T shirts that change depending on your heat. A bit like a mood ring. Oh yeah, I love it. Like, like a Fab ring. Kind of like, how fabulous are you feeling today? And then it kind of goes for different like colors or sparkles and things like that. Yes, exactly. There you go. We've just come up with a new business idea and we weren't even trying. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, Azel, that, that's pretty much my weekly basis. There's a new idea coming up. So I'm glad that we're bringing this up together because it just happens so much for me anyway. Oh, brilliant. Well, I have been storming through your book and I've been chatting away. I actually went on a dog walk this morning and the person that my friend that I was walking with, she's just about to go into a conference on how to work smarter and I was like, oh man, you should have just taken this book with you and kind of said, ta da. It's Something that everybody's talking about at the moment, isn't it? It's interesting, though, because this book was actually born about two years and a half ago. So when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, it was before this topic was actually so much on everybody's mouths. And I think it just happened naturally because you mentioned it actually in the introduction, which I think is so important. This is something that we're talking about right now. Obviously, the conference is about it, so that proves that. But also, we have been in a lot of us, and some of us have been struggling with just finding balance and understanding how to navigate work and life for a very long time. And I was among these people. And I mean, I'm sure you know, and I'm sure your listeners know from obviously talking to different authors. I think the best books are the ones that authors write because they needed somebody to tell them those things and they cannot find it anywhere else, so they come up themselves. And that's kind of why this book was born, because I've always been struggling with this and now so many people are facing the lack of boundaries, the overwhelm, the stress. And so it's become more of a mainstream conversation and it's definitely allowed a lot more people to be aware of where the energy goes. But again, so many people have been struggling for a long time because it can be natural for us to go into the hoops of constantly working, following up with new ideas, and just wanting because we're passionate about what we do as well. That's kind of my camp, I would say. Paradoxically, we are always so busy and trying to squeeze things in that we don't actually take the time off to assess how we can get the most out of our time and think reading books like yours helps us to realize what we're potentially not doing wrong. Now, just to get cracking, just to give our listeners a little bit of an insight, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and why you've been writing? Reclaim your time off and what you do on your website and everything so people can just understand a little bit more about you. Excellent. No problema. So we're going to go back. It was one fair morning of September 1990. I'm joking. We're not going to go that bad. Scale it up a bit more. All right, let's come back to 10 years ago. That sounds more feasible for a radio show, no? When about 10 years ago I moved to the UK and I think that's a big jump of what I'VE been doing and at that time I was using a pattern that as I said I always had which was doing different things because I had a passion, I had a dream which was very different for what I do right now. It was becoming a music journalist and I was really passionate about the topic but I had to also work and so I moved to the UK after my degree and I did random jobs so that I would build up in the meantime the connections and doing work for free to again become make my name in, into the music sphere as well. That was kind of where I started to have this juggling kind of career almost, if you want to put it this way, before multi hyphen careers were a thing and fast forwarding a bit to then becoming a marketing manager, that was probably the first big break. And from then, then I almost left my dream so to speak because I really got passionate about marketing, which is kind of what you would know me as by trade, I guess as a marketing consultant. That's what I do mainly. And I've been a marketing manager and working in marketing for the past 10 years. Years. Then I left a full time employed job eight years ago. So it's been much, much longer than probably I can't even think about sometimes. And at that time then I went back to my juggling quite honestly because I was trying to run my own business, figure out what my business was. And then I had a couple of passions and groups and communities that I just started building that then became part of my job. And so a lot of people know me now as the founder of Creative Impact, which is a collective of creatives and experts making a positive impact in the world. So I would that one became more and more what I would focus on on a daily basis. And on top of that I then started working with clients, first of all from business and strategy. And then I just came back to marketing because that's really where my passion lays and my experiences. And I would always have different things on the go. Creative Impact has got different products within it. We have a community, we have courses with a magazine, we have events. And then my consulting was very varied. I would work with individuals, I would work with startups. And then I started, I do a lot of teaching as well for different courses and colleges and at time of chatting to you as well, I'm starting a new venture very soon, a new project that I really wanted to, I'm really passionate about. So as I said, I am the kind of person that would follow different passions and leads and would be kind of exploring different ideas. And even when I had my own business, I realized that was my way of thriving, that was my way of getting excited. And I realized that that was my idea of balance and understanding. When I went off, balance was key for me because I'm quite prone to burnouts, unsurprisingly.