Midlifing

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee open on the tyranny of public pianos: one played beautifully by an old friend at Euston station, another axed to pieces in Lisbon after one too many renditions of the same tune. It tips into a longer meditation on recognition, virtuosity, and the icky feeling of wanting to be seen, prompted partly by Simon's nephew Finn asking how the professorship (announced la...

Send us Fan Mail Simon arrives buzzing with news: a professorial confirmation panel that left him pacing the line between anxiety and excitement for weeks beforehand. He and Lee dig into where exactly anxiety lives in the body, comparing notes on heart rate variability, breath control, and the relief of a panel that turned out far less hostile than feared. The conversation widens into the precario...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee are joined by Kate Bee, founder of The Sober School, for a conversation that opens with the rock-bottom mythology of AA before sliding into personal history: Lee traces his unusual relationship with drink back to growing up in a pub in the mid-80s, and on through the British ladette culture he lived through at university in the 90s, complete with Zoe Ball and Bacardi...

Send us Fan Mail Lee gets back from a holiday in Lisbon – computerless, app-deleted, and topped up with regular visits to a masseur who is also, confusingly, named Simon – while back home Simon is locked in a slow-motion battle with a magpie raiding his bird feeder. The conversation moves from what counts as a real holiday (a "leaky bucket list" versus a hammock and an endless cycle of n...

Send us Fan Mail A face full of acupuncture needles and a sourdough microbiologist on a country road in Sardinia: this week Simon and Lee cover a lot of ground. The main story is a hitchhiking adventure from an agriturismo near Tempio – Lil's first time ever, Simon's first in perhaps thirty-five years – that ends with a chance encounter so improbable it needs several minutes of recountin...

Send us Fan Mail Back from his travels and biking to work in Coventry, Simon clocks two encounters with men radiating pure confrontational energy – and wonders aloud what it must cost to move through the world that way. The conversation rolls into territory neither of them usually treads: class, inherited masculinity, and whether any of us really choose who we become. Along the way, Lee recalls a...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee open with friendship: Simon has spent the day building a clay oven in Sardinia with Igor and Moreno and finds himself moved by the sheer fact of having people like that in his life. From there the conversation turns to a harder question - whether either of them can actually ask for help when it really counts - and two stories emerge: Lee's account of a yoga acqu...

Send us Fan Mail A Devo earworm at a Sardinian birthday party is the unlikely start of a conversation about what expertise actually is. Lee draws on Collins and Evans's distinction between interactional and contributory expertise, and the two probe whether AI is simply the pinnacle of sounding like it knows what it's doing, and what that means for the hours both of them have put into emb...

Send us Fan Mail Simon is recording from Sassari, where the barn doors have just gone in and the pace of life feels unrecognisably slow. A conversation about loitering with intent – a legal phrase that turns out to be untranslatable into Portuguese – opens into a wide-ranging examination of third spaces, billionaires, and the frictionlessness of modern commerce: what the UK has lost, and why. Lee&...

Send us Fan Mail Simon opens with a psychology experiment about misattributed arousal -- cross a rickety bridge feeling anxious, and you might mistake that adrenaline for attraction to whoever meets you on the other side -- and uses it as a prompt to ask Lee what emotions he feels most commonly. Lee lands on shame and guilt as uniquely useless (false friends that teach nothing, unlike anxiety or j...

Send us Fan Mail Lee has developed a habit he can't fully explain: he spends his walks listening to AI-generated voices read Reddit's most morally contested family disputes, swiping through them pocket-blind on his phone while his wife Bob removes herself from the room entirely. Simon has been watching The Pittt and finding himself deep in the YouTube rabbit hole of Dr. Mike, a physician...

Send us Fan Mail Simon opens with news: a colleague complimented his secondhand trousers, though he fails to mention he'd just sat through an important meeting with the fly jammed open. A digression via Sort Your Life Out – a decluttering show that leaves him reaching for the language of the divine – opens into a conversation about whether the body ever forgets its training, sparked by Lee&ap...

Send us Fan Mail What do you do when someone asks if you liked something and the honest answer is "it's just not for me"? Simon and Lee explore how taste works – how it forms, how it shifts depending on who's in the room, and why saying something is "shit" is often just laziness dressed up as confidence. Along the way: sharks on planes, Pina Bausch via Tilda Swinton,...

Send us Fan Mail A chance remark in a New York bar in 1991 — "you're an idealist" — lands differently than expected. Simon and Lee trace that moment through the topsy-turviness of political labels, from Antifa on a Lisbon rooftop to the day idealism became an insult. Along the way: growing up under IRA bombs and Cold War dread, algorithmically sorted fear, and whether a badly-timed...

Send us Fan Mail Simon finds himself crying for multiple things at once. Lee reflects on being largely inoculated from grief since childhood, always the supporter, never quite allowed his own response. An honest conversation about mortality, what we carry, and Swedish death cleaning. Mentions Touch by Ashley Montague — cited for the observation that "touch" has the longest entry in the O...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon move from the absurd grind of international transit and the ways money buys freedom from friction into a sharper reflection on systems, meritocracy and the stories we tell about fairness. The episode lands somewhere quieter and more human, with transhumanism and techno-hope set against goodbye, touch, family and the fragile consolation of ordinary love. Get in touch...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon reflect on certainty, persuasion and the strange dead-end of “that’s just a fact,” moving from Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere to questions of shininess, inherited politics and why some surfaces feel impossible to trust. They then swing into a wedding report from Lake Wānaka, where being firmly in the oldies camp still ends with a dance-off, a Virginian falsett...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon reflect on waking up feeling anxious amid talk of global conflict, distance from home, and the strange experience of feeling both safe and unsettled while travelling. The conversation moves between geopolitical dread and everyday life – trousers, weddings, beauty and awe – arriving at a fragile commitment to grace, kindness and continuing on anyway. Get in touch with...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon find themselves time-travelling: through a tennis racket that returns a 57-year-old body to its 15-year-old instincts (apart from the inconvenient eyes), and through faces from 1980s school corridors flickering inside present-day skin. They circle the pleasure and awkwardness of reunion – what it means to want connection, to resist it, and to recognise the same gestu...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon explore Simon’s return to New Zealand and the deep, embodied sense of “home” he feels there, distinct from the buildings or habits that mark belonging elsewhere. They circle the gradations of alienness across places – London, Lisbon, Italy, the US – and reflect on privilege, inequality, and the uneasy freedom to move between worlds. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee discuss how “the slop” of online discourse warps attention, community, and even basic ways of being with other people, then land on the uneasy idea that conversation can be as much a mirror (to feel real and worthy) as a window (to actually learn and connect). A second thread is the double-truth of social life: feeling useful and coherent while simultaneously hearing...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon talk about ageing, visibility and bodily maintenance, moving from Tai Chi scams and ripped male bodies to the uneven cultural tolerance of ageing faces, especially women’s. The thread tightens around choosing how to age – attitude over appearance – while catching themselves mid-slide into weather-moaning, grammar-policing crotchetiness. Get in touch with Lee and Simo...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee reflect on how “it’s just history” can function as a shield, contrasting nostalgia and certainty with the messier ethics of speaking up, particularly around homophobia and memory. The episode widens this to a mistrust of technological truth-claims, arguing for caution, empathy and interrogation over easy laughter or false neutrality. Get in touch with Lee and Simon a...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon talk about Heated Rivalry as hockey smut, using it to think about bonkbusters, fan fiction, masculinity and the manosphere, and why gay male romance written by and for straight women feels culturally charged. They contrast escapist fantasy with realism, testing where disbelief breaks (coming out in elite sport, hockey culture) and where emotional truth still lands. G...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon move from bread, travel and pensions into a sharper conversation about advertising, sustainability and how language quietly manipulates trust. What starts as midlife logistics ends in unease about media ethics and the stories we are trained to accept. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net . --- The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H...