Midlifing

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...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon discuss overload: storms, sickness, media saturation, and a growing sense that attention itself is the battleground. They land on “what we ignore” as a survival skill, using sport, news, and desire as case studies for selective blindness and unexpected meaning. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net . --- The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon reflect on ageing through ordinary shocks – driving at night, learning languages badly in public, and realising your social stamina has quietly changed. The episode circles the relief of opting out (sleep, simple food, cinema marathons) versus the effort of keeping up, without pretending either choice is noble. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net ....

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon reflect on the turn of the year not through resolutions but through attention to time, labour, and value – what feels worth doing, and what quietly drains energy. The conversation circles embodied work, intergenerational thinking, and the midlife urge to spend less time reacting and more time building things that outlast you. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@m...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon circle from Christmas silliness to showers, cocktails, bureaucracy, and grief, using humour to hold off the end-of-the-world feeling while letting something tender through. Beneath the ramble, the episode quietly lands on memory, loss, and the strange intimacy of ordinary rituals. Related link: I Asked 64,182 People About “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells”. Here's Wh...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon circle around the messy line between saying “no” (as self-respect) and staying relational, using condominum meetings, Portuguese/Italian slips, and a post office queue as lived examples of how “transactional” life can feel. They land on the idea that some exchanges (kindness, levity, basic decency) aren’t quid-pro-quo at all – and then veer into unfiltered joy at Oli...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee spiral from the weird intimacy of recording their friendship into the horror of AI-fuelled “chatfishing” and the prospect of being “back on the market” after loss. They end up sitting with ageing, death, and the line between cherished solitude, unacknowledged loneliness, and the hunger for simple physical affection. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.n...

Send us Fan Mail Lee talks about realising how “thin-skinned” he is at home and at work, and how that sensitivity both hurts (wanting to cry over a throwaway comment about his clothes) and helps him get more quickly to the truth of what’s actually going on emotionally. He and Simon fold this into a wider question of whether you want to be “a radiator or a drain” in relationships, and how different...

Send us Fan Mail Simon and Lee chew over how trauma and pain can’t really be compared or ranked, even inside cushioned-but-precarious academic lives where people still don’t feel safe. They then push a fraught hypothetical about raising a daughter into a misogynist world. Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net . --- The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: ht...

Send us Fan Mail Lee and Simon meet in person for the first time in three years and move from gallbladder scares and overstretched health systems into a reflection on post-pandemic disconnection, social capital and the erosion of community. They sit with the discomfort of feeling more willing to be “a doer, the joiner” abroad than in the UK, and the unsettling knowledge that not joining in also he...

Send us Fan Mail Lee’s rebellious gallbladder and the realisation that he’s not “a box with a brain in it” spark a conversation about midlife bodies that can no longer be ignored. From Lisbon-airport dehydration to shamelessly helping-while-queue-jumping anxious Americans, they sit with the mix of pride, shame and “curiosity, not judgement” toward other people’s (and their own) fragilities. Get in...