Midlifing

Send us Fan Mail A review of wired headphones, sold out to nostalgic teenagers, sets Simon wondering why some objects turn his head long after he's stopped needing them. Simon and Lee compare their weaknesses – hi-fi on one side, trousers and coats spread across two countries on the other – and trace how money, desire and the discipline of saving up have shaped what they covet since their tee...

Send us Fan Mail Simon's secondhand iPhone and Lee's flirtation with a folding one get things going, but the episode turns on a last-minute invitation to Lisbon Fashion Week that Lee almost turned down over pizza. Saying yes, he points out, isn't a marriage, because you can always leave. That leads them to ask who actually gets to be that open: the socially anxious, parents on pick-...

Send us Fan Mail Lee reveals that giving a colleague a lift home exposed a further, unsuspected layer of "unfiltered Lee", which prompts Simon to suggest a set of age-rated cardboard signs to hang around his neck. Simon finds real pleasure in treating a knotty work situation as a giant puzzle made of human pieces. He also reports that this week's raid on the office chocolate cupboar...

Send us Fan Mail Lee arrives squinting at his phone, his many pairs of reading glasses having all washed up in one place, out of reach. After a detour through Reacher and its spin-off Neagley, Lee brings in an Alabama senator warning that airline pilots may secretly be furries, and Simon questions the maths. From there it's a stolen mint chocolate that turns out to be Simon's Proustian m...

Send us Fan Mail Simon opens with a simple question for Lee: what, exactly, is the attraction of right-wing extremism? Lee comes at it sideways, through Britpop. He admits the off-stage rudeness of Blur and Oasis in the late 90s put him off their music entirely (Tori Amos, at least, seemed nice), and wonders whether the far right runs on a capacity for forgiveness he simply lacks. From there it&ap...

Send us Fan Mail Simon is packing for a work trip to Sardinia via Venice that may or may not still be above water, while Lee is nursing a resurrected three-week-old voicemail from his own iPad and marvelling at a £2000 folding phone. A friend's line from her work as a couples therapist – point the finger at yourself a little more – tips them into their oldest shared material: Simon's mot...

Send us Fan Mail Simon has been sent his late mother's diaries and the courtship letters she exchanged with his father, and can't decide whether reading them is an act of care or an invasion. Lee counters with his own father's diary, thirty years running and started by a Disney Store Aladdin Diary, a purely functional record with no reflection in it whatsoever. Between a Lisbon vega...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee catch up after a stretch apart: Simon turns 58 in Scotland, complete with a sleeper train that quietly failed to leave London and a lakeside sauna ritual, and comes home to an accepted offer on a new flat close enough to see from his window. Lee, holding down the Lisbon end of things, hosts long-time listeners Josh and Craig and finds a speakeasy behind a knitting sh...

Send us Fan Mail Simon returns from holiday with a question rather than the usual content: should there be a limit on turning your own trauma into comedy, prompted by Amanda Knox's new Edinburgh Fringe show about her wrongful imprisonment for Meredith Kercher's murder. Lee takes it somewhere more personal, tracing his low tolerance for comedy that punches down through a brutal old episod...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee start off sleepy and a little weepy, which somehow tips into a debate about the line between pornography and eroticism, sparked by the Heated Rivalry novels Bob bought Lee for his birthday (which, they discover, started life as Bucky Barnes/Captain America slash fiction). From there it's kettlebells, sarcopenia, and shirtless YouTube fitness bros neither of them...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee open with birthday banter that spirals into scientists launching an OnlyFans-style subscription service to replace cut research funding, then a viral clip of bonobos defusing a fight with cuddles instead of violence. The real conversation catches fire when Simon reads out an AI-generated reply from a prospective PhD student, and the two dig into what gives it away (t...

Send us Fan Mail Simon announces two big life events on the same Saturday morning: the first day of his new role as Director of the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, and an offer just put in on a flat. Lee's praise for the decision (steered by Annie Duke's How to Decide) tips into a riff on downsizing, industrial ovens, and buyers' markets, before Lee's own acco...

Send us Fan Mail Simon opens with a difficult conversation from a trip to Italy, about care and dementia, and what it means to owe someone your future self – discomfort sparked by Lil telling him plainly and rightly that she'd carry on living her own life, not simply become his carer. Lee counters with the story of a friend whose husband planned his own decline with startling clarity before d...

Send us Fan Mail Simon is back from one week in Italy (camping, farm work, and a proper test of an air-conditioning-free apartment), while Lee has rediscovered swimming in the Dart, a habit lost somewhere around COVID and indulged daily ever since. They compare the textures of different water, from a Mediterranean "like a bath" to an unforgiving Atlantic, before Lee lands on a firm concl...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee are joined by Maya: an AI trained on twenty-odd episodes of Midlifing and gifted to them by a listener, Dr David Corbet (@corbetron), who built her using vibe coding. What starts as a joke tips quickly into uncanny valley territory, and from there into a shared list of words that have started to grate on them both (casted, obligated, positionality, normalcy), and the...

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...