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Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English Podcast.
How are you doing?
You alright?
You alright, mate?
You alright?
How's it going, mate?
And you're thinking, wait a minute, Luke, what happened to your voice?
Yeah, I just decided to speak in a Liverpool accent there for some reason, just for fun.
Why not?
Why not, eh?
Anyway, hello, welcome back to the podcast.
How are you doing in podcast land?
I hope you're doing okay, considering the madness of the world.
I hope you're doing all right.
So this is a brand new episode, obviously, and it's completely unplanned and completely unprepared.
Right.
Now, let me explain why.
So it's Wednesday today.
Wednesday.
You know, Wednesday, the middle of the week, hump day, they call it.
Hump day.
I'm going to need to explain that now.
Okay, hump day, because a hump is like a hill.
You know, like a camel has a hump on its back, right?
So hump day is the day, it's the middle of the week.
So it's like you're on the top of the hump, meaning the first part of the week Monday, Tuesday.
It's like you're going uphill.
It's difficult, especially Monday morning.
Oh God, here we are at work.
Or, oh no, is it, what happened to the weekend?
Oh, Monday, you know.
And Tuesday is, oh, okay, we've got a lot of work to do.
We've got to get down to work.
And then Wednesday, oh, I think we're at, oh, I'm starting to get to the top of this hill.
And I can see, I can actually see Friday from up here.
And then Thursday, you're cruising.
And then you're going downhill all the way into Friday.
And then pow, it's the weekend again.
So Wednesday is hump day.
On Wednesday, you're at the top of the hill that is your working week.
And then by Thursday and Friday you start coming down the other side of the hill all the way into the weekend.
So it's Wednesday.
It's hump day.
Anyway, normally on Wednesdays, I upload new episodes of the podcast, right?
That has been the way I've been doing it for, I think, about a year now.
I never used to have a regular uploading or publishing day.
And I've been doing this podcast now for 100 years.
It's not really 100 years.
It feels like it.
I've been doing this podcast for, I think, 14 years now.
And for most of that time, I would just upload or publish episodes whenever I felt...
It was the right moment.
And sometimes I'd publish an episode and then there'd be another one like three days later.
And, you know, that can be good, you know, because you think, oh, great, another episode.
Fantastic.
But then also I think probably it's not the best way to do it, because if you publish an episode immediately after another one, then the previous episode kind of gets lost.
So it's generally a good idea, I think, to publish roughly the same time every week.
So here we are, then.
It's Wednesday, and this morning I should have published an episode, but there was no episode.
I don't know if you noticed that.
You might have been waiting for your regular fix of Luke's English Podcast to arrive, your new episode to arrive at the same time it normally does, but nothing happened.
And the reason for that is because I just didn't have anything ready.
I didn't have an episode I could publish.
And why is that?
Well, you probably know that, you know, we've got a baby at home.
And so my wife and I have been sort of juggling the childcare, which means that she looks after him sometimes.
I look after him sometimes.
And I don't really need to explain all the details.
I don't want to talk about my newborn baby all the time.
I'm not going to go on and on and on about it that much.
Except that, you know, it tends to be quite a big deal and it affects the way you can do things.
And I just haven't really had a lot of time available to do all the things to do the recording and the editing, the preparation, all that stuff.
I've got lots of episodes in the pipeline, various episodes that I'm working on at the moment.
But for one reason or another, I didn't have one episode which was ready to be published this morning.
And...
So what's happening now is that I actually have a little window of time.
I think I've probably got about an hour.
Okay, I've got about an hour.
So in this hour I am just going to talk to you and make an episode of this podcast and then, hopefully at some point today, maybe this evening, I will put this together and actually publish it and then you will get your episode.
Okay?
So here I am with about an hour of time.
You know.
Do you need to know what's happened before this window and what's going to happen afterwards?
I don't know if you need to know, but before this I had a podcast recording an interview scheduled with a guest.
I've just finished that interview.
It was with Fabio Cerpoloni. whose name I think I pronounce okay.
Anyway, Fabio from another podcast called Stoleroid, Stoleroid Stories.
Fabio has written a book about how he learned English, and it's a very interesting book.
And so I interviewed him about that.
And so that's going to come soon.
It was a good conversation, a really good one, I think.
So you'll get that at some point in a few weeks, probably.
So I've just finished that.
And then after this, I'm going to have lunch.
You know, eating food.
You know how you need to eat food in order to live?
So I'm going to be doing that after this.
And then after that, I need to... That's right.
Take over from my wife and look after our baby.
And he's starting daycare next week.
And this week, he's doing a sort of...
He's doing a kind of not really a training week, but it's a week in which he goes to the daycare centre for maybe an hour, maybe two hours, three hours, spends a bit of time there to get used to it, to get ready for it, to acclimatise to it, before he actually starts going for most of the day, Monday to Friday, starting next Monday.
It's a very strange feeling because, on the one hand, it's great because you're like great, I'm going to be able to actually get work done, And both my wife and I have been struggling because we have not been able to get much work done.
And it starts to stress you out after a while.
So it's going to be great to have all that time back.
And so, yeah, I'll be able to make the episodes and work on the episodes that I've been planning.
And that includes...
Stuff like more story episodes.
I've got some more short story episodes coming.
And premium content as well.
I've got lots of premium content that's in different stages of development and I need to really knuckle down And focus on that stuff and really finish it off properly and then record those episodes and publish them.
So premium listeners, more premium stuff is coming.
It's in the pipeline.
So it's kind of good that the boy is going to go to daycare, because we'll get time back to work on the things we need to work on.
But also it's a very it's not entirely a wonderful experience, because you know he's still very small.
He's like three months old.
It's normal here in France to put your baby into daycare, and you know, it's just totally normal and everyone does it and it's fine.
But it's a weird feeling.
Three months.
We've just spent with him, this little vulnerable baby, and spent so much time with him, watching him grow, taking care of him.
And now we're just going to give him to some other people and just leave him with some other people.
You've got to have a lot of trust and um, and so there's yeah, it's if you feel a bit nervous about it and uh, it feels a bit wrong or something um, but you know, it's what we did with our daughter and she was fine.
In fact, i think it's very good really to socialize the kids, so they they get to spend time with other children and they there are loads of toys there that they play with and lots of stimulating things and um.
So anyway, that's going to start on Monday and we need to take him to the daycare centre this afternoon.
He's going to spend a couple of hours there today.
So anyway, I've got this window of time. in which to record something.
And it's something spontaneous, something that doesn't require lots of planning and preparation and sort of editing and stuff like that.
So what could I do?
Well, of course I can just ramble.
That's one of the advantages of being able to do these rambling episodes is that they don't require that much preparation.
I mean, some rambling episodes I do actually prepare a bit in advance.
You know, I work out which topics I'm going to talk about.
In this case, I've actually got nothing, really.
Yeah and, as I said, I do have other episodes which are in various states of preparation, but I had nothing that was quite ready to be recorded and published today.
So in the end i i thought well, let's do some of that old-fashioned rambling on the podcast, uh and uh, then i can just do that.
It's a very efficient way of making content for you and i think that i've developed the ability, after all this time to talk spontaneously without having a plan and to keep you engaged right to make an episode which i hope will be enjoyable for you to listen to.
Um, can you hear, Can you hear my sore throat?
I have a slightly sore throat.
It's nothing too bad.
It's just slightly sore.
I think I've got a bit of a cold.
That's another reason why I wanted to record this now, because I know from experience that when I get a slightly sore throat like this, that in the end I end up losing my voice.
And I end up speaking like this and no one can understand what I'm saying.
And having a voice is quite important in my work.
So I thought, well, I better record something now before I lose my voice.
I don't know.
Saying that there's going to be some doctor now listening to this who's going to say Luke, you should rest your voice.
You shouldn't be doing a podcast when you've got a slightly sore throat.
Well, I'm doing it.
To hell with it.
I'm going to just throw caution to the wind.
To throw caution to the wind.
That's where you just take the sense of caution that you should have and just throw it away and just do it anyway.
I think it's all right.
Don't worry.
So just a slight... which I think was brought on by a vaccine that I had last Friday.
Now, of course, there's going to be... The vaccine sceptics are going to jump up and down now.
But I had a vaccine, nothing to do with COVID.
It was a vaccine against things like whooping cough and tetanus and typhoid, like some of those common.
I guess they're viruses that lots of people can get and which children definitely shouldn't get.
Little babies definitely should not get things like whooping cough or whooping cough.
Hold on a minute.
Is it whooping cough or whooping cough?
It's spelt W-H-O-O-P-I-N-G.
It's spelt like that. but how is it actually, how's it pronounced?
This is weird because I've lived my life saying this phrase occasionally.
And now, while recording this episode for you, suddenly the pronunciation is I'm suddenly having a moment of doubt.
It's like, is it whooping cough or whoop?
Of course, it's whooping cough.
Whooping cough, according to CollinsDictionarycom, is a serious infectious disease which causes people to cough and make a loud noise when they breathe in.
So it's a sort of a lung infection, whooping cough.
And there's a vaccine against it.
And it's important that, as the father of a newborn baby, it's important that I have that vaccine to make sure that I don't get it and give it to him.
Because if the little boy gets it, that could be very bad news.
And it's a vaccine that combined immunisation against whooping cough and a couple of other sort of common things, common diseases.
And so I had the sort of routine vaccine that you might have every 10 years or something.
Had the vaccine in my left arm.
And then just that was on Friday.
And then, over the weekend, I started feeling a bit run down, you know, feeling a bit tired, which is a normal response, isn't it, to having a vaccine.
You just feel a little bit sort of tired, a bit under the weather.
And then now here I am.
I feel otherwise feel totally fine, but just like the slightly dry, sore throat.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's stop talking about that.
You don't want to hear me talking about that. about having a sore throat.
Now the thing right.
So what I did was right.
So I took my daughter to school this morning on the metro.
We didn't sit down on the metro because I don't know if you've seen this in the news.
Have you seen this in the news?
Has this story made it into your world, in your country, on news outlets talking about this?
Have you seen this online?
Apparently there are bedbugs in Paris. there's apparently some sort of infestation of bedbugs.
Now, I'm actually going to talk about this in an upcoming episode.
I recorded an episode last week with Zdenek Zdenek Lucas, and we talked about insects and bugs and creepy crawlies and things.
And we talk about the bed bug situation because Zdenek wrote to me and he said, is this true?
Are there bed bugs in Paris?
And I was like, well, there have always been bed bugs in Paris, just like everywhere.
And he was like, no, no, it seems to be a really big problem.
And in fact, yeah, my wife had spoken to me about it.
And it's in the news.
Apparently there's an infestation of bedbugs.
So I'm going to be talking about this on the podcast soon, in a couple of weeks, when Zdenek and I have a long, rambling conversation about insects and stories of different encounters that he has had with insects in his life.
It's for Halloween.
Right.
It's going to coincide with Halloween, a creepy story about a creepy episode about creepy crawlies.
But anyway, my daughter and I, we didn't sit down on the Metro because?
So the bed bug thing, bed bugs, these are like little insects that that hide next to your bed or in your bed and then in the middle of the night, when you're sleeping, they come out, they crawl into the bed and they bite you and they suck your blood and then they hide again um, when the sun comes up.
Little bastards, little bed bastards basically um, that are really annoying and they're apparently very difficult to get rid of, Because one bed bug can multiply and become, you know, many bed bugs.
And so all it takes is for one person to carry one bed bug from their bed bug-infested bedroom to somewhere else.
Oh, God, don't write to me, Airbnb, all right?
I've used their services, and they're very competitive.
Apparently, there are loads of bedbugs in Paris, more than normal, and there have been videos shared on the internet of bedbugs on the metro and bedbugs in the cinema as well.
In the metro, so that's the underground trains, and in the cinema, these are bedbugs.
They shouldn't be anywhere else.
Bedbugs know your place.
Get out of the metro.
Get out of the cinema.
Stay in the beds.
In fact, don't even stay in the beds.
Just, I don't know, just jump off a cliff, dive into a river.
That's for the bedbugs.
What purpose do bedbugs serve in the ecosystem?
Here's me saying that I wish all the bedbugs would kill themselves.
Sorry, bedbug lovers.
Here's me saying that all the bedbugs should just get eradicated.
But maybe they fulfil a valuable function in the ecosystem.
What is it that bedbugs are contributing?
If we got rid of all the bedbugs, would our ecosystem collapse in some way?
Would there just be billions of other little bugs?
I don't know.
I don't know what would happen.
How would the world be worse if people weren't scratching and annoyed all the time?
I don't know how that would be worse.
But anyway, so we didn't sit down on the Metro.
I took her to school.
We didn't sit down because we're now a bit paranoid about this.
Not that I have not heard anyone I know mention bedbugs.
I mean, I haven't heard anyone I know mention having bedbugs.
Right.
No actual firsthand evidence.
I've never seen one.
I've never heard anyone who's had them in Paris.
And yet, according to the news and the Internet and social media, there are bedbugs everywhere in Paris.
So I'm fine.
I'm feeling very itchy, but I'm fine.
I'm not really feeling very itchy.
Don't worry.
That was a hilarious joke, which I'm sure you all noticed.
So anyway, the bed bug situation, I don't know what's up with that.
Everything seems fine as far as I can tell.
But nevertheless, we don't want to sit down on the metro.
So I took her to school and I was heading back and I was thinking, oh, God, it's Wednesday.
No podcast episode.
Got to do something.
What am I going to do?
And off the top of my head, I thought I just thought of the words random topic generator.
Hmm.
It's a bit like the topic tombola from the last episode with James.
Random topic generator.
And I thought, I wonder if I Google random topic generator, if I will find a random topic generator.
And so that's exactly what I did.
I Googled random topic generator and I found a website called capitalizemylifecom.
Capitalize my no, capitalize my titlecom.
Why did I think it was capitalize my life.com?
I don't know.
Maybe because subconsciously I just really want someone to capitalize my life, whatever that means.
Anyway, capitalize my title.com has a random topic generator.
OK, and it's very simple.
It just says random topic generator and conversation starters.
You can choose topics for anyone topics for business, topics for couples, topics for family or topics for essays for essay writing.
I'm going to choose topics for anyone.
And you just click the generate random topic button.
And it just generates a random topic.
So I thought that I could just, you know, maybe talk about some random topics and we'll see what happens.
And I'll see if I can keep going until it's my lunchtime.
So I guess that means we've got about another 45 minutes or so.
Let's see if I can ramble about random topics and we'll see what kinds of vocabulary come out of this.
So I've just clicked generate random topic.
And the question is this, where is the most relaxing place you have been?
Where's the most relaxing place you've been?
All right.
So I'm going to answer these just off the top of my head.
You could, by the way, you could visit capitalize my title.
You could visit, capitalize my title dot com.
Slash random dash topic dash generator dot.
And you could try this too.
It could be a good way to do some speaking practice.
So where is the most relaxing place you've been?
My bed, I would say.
I think my bed, the bed in my home now, is the most relaxing place I've ever been.
And I sincerely hope it stays that way and that there are no bed bugs that get involved.
And my wife is calling me on the telephone.
I have to answer this.
A few moments later...
Okay, and we're back.
Right, so, yes, I think my bed is probably the most relaxing place I've been.
It's a wonderful bed.
It's just... Every time, every night, my wife and I lie down in that bed, we both go, oh, this bed.
I know, like, your own bed is definitely the best bed in the world.
And when you've been on holiday and you come back to your own bed and you lie down in it ah, it's the best thing in the world.
But this particular bed, of all the beds I've owned and slept on in my life, this particular one is just amazing.
I don't know what it is exactly about it.
The mattress is just a really good mattress.
It's not too soft.
It's pretty solid, but not hard.
I don't like a really soft mattress.
I like a mattress that's got that's fairly solid.
So this one is both solid, but has just the right amount of give to it.
Give meaning that it squashes down just the right amount, but not too much.
It seems to just stretch you out when you lie down on it.
Like your back just goes, ah, thanks a lot when you lie down in it or on it, on the mattress.
So yeah, my bed is the most relaxing place I have been.
And it's still relaxing, even though we've got a baby who does wake up at night.
Whenever we lie back down in that bed, that's nice.
In terms of places in the world, I think there have probably been some places in Japan that are fairly relaxing.
Like they have these beautiful Zen gardens.
Like there's one in Kyoto.
Which one is it?
There's one in Kyoto where there's...
And the sand has been sort of, what's the word for it?
Raked.
That's it.
The sand has been raked with a rake in lines and the lines go around these rocks and the rocks are just very pleasing shapes and you sit there on the kind of wooden platform, wooden terrace.
You sit there and you just look at the rocks and look at the sand and the textures and the shapes are somehow very pleasing and relaxing.
So I would say that's the most relaxing place I've been.
Is it Ryoanji Temple?
Ryoanji Temple, is it?
You know, it is as well.
Check out my memory.
Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto.
I'm trying to see some photos on my computer, but it won't let me for some reason.
So Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto is the one.
Yeah.
It's just very simple.
There's sand or gravel with these different rocks.
The rocks have got moss on them.
And the sand has been raked in lines that go around the rocks.
And I don't know how big it is.
It's like smaller than a tennis court.
It's like the size of a squash court, something like that.
And it's outside, beautiful trees all around.
And you can just sit there on the steps and just sort of take in the atmosphere.
Something about the shapes of the stones are very complementary.
And it just has this...
It's really mysterious.
I don't know how, architecture or landscape design, landscaping of a garden and the arrangement of trees and plants and rocks and stones and walls and things, how the arrangement of those things and the design of the buildings and stuff, how does that bring about a feeling of calm and relaxation?
I don't know how that works like just the arrangement of a physical space but it does.
It has an impact on us, doesn't it?
If you can imagine just sitting in a very untidy room with objects piled up all around you, it's not very relaxing.
It tends to make you feel a bit stressed.
For example, if you are having a stressful time, you need a peaceful place to maybe have a lie down to have a nap.
If you try and have a nap in the afternoon in a very untidy room like your bedroom's very messy and you're feeling a bit stressed out.
If you lie down in that messy room, it's very hard to relax for some reason.
Even if you close your eyes, just the knowledge that things are messy, things are arranged in a chaotic and messy way, makes you stressed.
Whereas tidying things, keeping everything nice and neat and tidy and having quite a lot of open clean, empty space around you where everything has been put in its right place, that brings about a sense of calm and zen-like meditation in your mind.
Interesting that, isn't it?
Just like how arranging objects in different positions can have an effect on your state of mind.
I find that fascinating.
It's also true with architecture.
You can just go into a room or a building or a courtyard or something and it just makes you feel all calm and peaceful, just because of the way it's been designed and the materials that they've used and so on.
I find that fascinating.
So, other than my bed, maybe...
Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto is a very relaxing place.
Although, actually, it's also not very relaxing.
Because, despite the fact that it's so nicely designed, it's very zen.
Ryoanji Temple, just like most of those temples in Kyoto, is often very crowded with tourists.
And so...
If you look at the garden, it's wonderful.
You turn round, even just turn a little bit to your left and right.
There's loads of tourists all around you taking photos and being annoying.
And you're one of them.
You're one of the annoying tourists.
So what you have to try and do is find a spot right in front of the garden and sit there and try to zone out all of the action and activity that's going on around you and behind you.
And just focus your vision so that the periphery of your vision...
Like, the garden lines up with your peripheral vision, so you can't actually see any other people.
You can only see the garden.
And you just have to try and block out all of the noise of the people talking about oh, I'm hungry, should we get some sandwiches?
Or, like, you know, whatever it is that people are saying behind you.
And then you can enjoy the relaxation.
So Ryoenji Temple Kyoto, like the most relaxing, zen-like gardens ever, but with the most stressful, annoying people standing all around you at the same time.
It's kind of a weird combination of the two.
Let's have another random topic.
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This question is this.
What trends did you follow when you were younger?
What trends did you follow?
So following trends when I was younger.
Hmm.
Hmm.
What trends did I follow when I was younger?
If I talk about my childhood, I guess with trends, we probably think of fashion, right?
Clothing trends and stuff.
I don't think I was ever someone who followed all the latest trends so much, but I probably did.
I probably did.
For example, when I was a kid in the 90s, it was trendy to wear quite baggy, uh, jeans, right?
Jeans that were quite baggy, quite loose, large, loose fitting jeans.
Um, and maybe like long sleeve t-shirts.
So I used to wear stuff like that, like baggy jeans, long sleeve t-shirts.
I had my hair in a in in curtains and That was the style that was quite trendy at the time, in the sort of early 90s.
Curtains where you have a centre parting.
The hair is parted down the centre and the hair falls down on either side.
A bit like a pair of curtains.
So I had curtains and the rest of that stuff.
So, you know, I guess I followed those trends.
So this is in the late 80s, maybe like 1980, no, mid 80s, 85, 86.
I would have been about seven or eight years old.
And I think the trend at the time was fluorescent socks.
So socks that glow up. quite brightly in the daytime.
Fluorescent colours.
You know a highlighter that you would use if you're reading, if you're studying, if you're a student and you're reading some academic paper or whatever and you need to highlight some of the things that you're reading, you'd use a highlighter pen.
And those highlighter pens, they use fluorescent colours.
So that very bright green or orange or blue or pink or something, those are fluorescent colours, colours that seem to glow up.
That kind of glow in the daytime.
So fluorescent socks were a trend, I remember, in the 80s.
And my brother and I got some fluorescent socks and we thought we were so cool with our fluorescent socks.
And you would wear your jeans with turnips.
So you'd turn up your jeans.
That means fold the jeans up a little bit to expose the socks.
So you'd have like some pretty cool sneakers, although we never had like cool sneakers.
Sneakers, that's American English.
What am I doing using American English?
Trainers is what we call them in British English.
So we had like, we didn't have very cool trainers, but we had trainers with like Velcro.
You know, instead of laces that you have to tie into a knot and untie, we had trainers with Velcro, like little straps that stick to each other and you just pull them apart like that and stick them back together.
So we had trainers with Velcro on with our jeans turned up a little bit, and we had fluorescent socks.
And the cool thing, the really cool, the really trendy thing was to wear odd socks.
So we'd have one fluorescent yellow sock and one fluorescent orange sock.
So you'd have a yellow sock on your left foot or ankle whatever, and you'd have the orange one on your right leg foot ankle, whatever.
So odd socks, odd fluorescent socks.
That was cool when I was about eight years old.
So, yeah, I sort of used to follow those sorts of trends, I suppose.
A few little trends like that.
And then when I was older, when I was a teenager, when I thought I was cool in the mid to late 90s, I felt like I wasn't following the main trends and I felt like I had my own style.
I think, looking back on it, I think what I thought was my own style was actually also fairly common style at the time.
So what I used to wear when I was like 17 or 18 years old...
I bought all my clothes from the indoor market in Birmingham.
So we used to go into Birmingham at the weekend sometimes and there was this indoor market, a big market, and it sold loads of stuff like loads of vintage clothes and vinyl records and stuff.
So we used to go to the indoor market and I would go shopping for clothes because they were cheap and also because a lot of them were really cool, like really cool vintage stuff.
And I would look for like Levi's, vintage Levi's.
And in those days...
This was like 1993, 1994, 1995, something like that.
In those days vintage clothes from the 70s or maybe from the early 80s or something.
They were cheap.
People wanted to get rid of them.
These days, vintage clothes are sold for... They're super expensive.
But in those days, they were cheap, and I didn't have a lot of money.
I was a student, so...
I would look for vintage Levi jeans and shirts, like 70s shirts.
And I wanted to get flares, so flared jeans, you know, jeans that kind of go out at the bottom, like from the 1970s.
And I looked for 70s shirts, shirts with like a big collar.
And I used to like those sort of Western shirts, kind of like cowboy shirts, you know, with a big collar and a check pattern.
And I bought a kind of sheepskin jacket. jacket.
So a jacket which had a kind of woolen checked outer.
It was wool and with a checked pattern on the outside and on the lining was sheepskin.
And so I basically looked like I was basically dressed in 70s clothes and I had my hair long, sort of like a hippie or something.
And I used to wear I wanted Adidas three-stripe trainers, like Gazelles or something.
I wanted them, because that's what, like, the Beastie Boys would wear and stuff like that.
But I couldn't get Adidas three-stripe so I used to wear like a kind of cheap copy of Adidas three-stripe.
Like, sort of Adidas, like...
Fake Adidas three-stripe trainers, basically, with these old 70s clothes.
And I thought I was the coolest kid at college.
I really did.
I used to strut around.
I used to strut my stuff at college like I was the coolest kid.
And you know, maybe I was quite cool strutting around, but I spent all my time strutting around being cool.
Didn't actually do any work.
And as a result, failed my A-levels.
I don't know if that was a direct result of wearing vintage clothing.
I don't know.
But anyway, I did follow a few trends.
And I guess that in the 90s, it was fairly trendy to wear like retro clothing and stuff.
There you go.
You know, you could use these questions as well.
As I said, you could give your own answers to these questions too.
Say them out loud.
Try and do what I'm doing to practice your English.
Or you can write comments in the comment section.
What kind of trends did you follow when you were younger?
Maybe where you are from, you know, it's a totally different context.
Maybe the trends are totally different.
Maybe the thought of wearing secondhand clothes that you bought from a market is like ridiculous to you.
I don't know.
I don't know you.
I don't know your life.
Or maybe you're exactly the same.
Maybe you're like, yeah, in the 90s, you know, I used to wear like old vintage stuff as well.
Or maybe you're thinking yeah, in the 90s I wasn't even alive yet Luke, because I hadn't been born.
I don't know.
But you can, you know, share your thoughts in the comment section, can't you?
Let's generate another random topic.
What old trend is coming back these days?
Okay, so we're still on the subject of trends.
What old trend is coming back these days?
Hmm, what old trend is coming back these days?
There must be loads of things I can think of.
I mean, I mentioned vinyl records.
But I don't know if it's true to say that vinyl records are coming back these days.
I think vinyl records came back a few years ago, right?
Now.
They've been popular again for at least 10 years or so.
Apparently...
Vinyl record sales, so sales of old-fashioned LP or 12-inch or 7-inch vinyl records.
Sales of vinyl these days is actually higher than sales of CDs.
So, in fact, CDs are now seriously out of fashion.
But maybe even CDs are going to come back.
Maybe CDs are like what the hipsters buying these days.
I know that cassettes.
Cassettes are sort of quite hip and trendy as well these days because i think that a lot of like independent musicians, independent artists, actually release their music on cassette because it's very cheap, it's cheap to produce, it's cheap, cheap to publish your music on cassette.
I think my brother has published a couple of cassettes, a couple of maybe eps on cassette, And so cassettes are kind of back.
But again, they've been back for a while.
There is something very nice about having a cassette and listening to your music on cassette.
If you have a cassette player or a Walkman, like one of those old fashioned Sony Walkmans or Walkmans made by other companies like Aiwa or Panasonic and stuff.
Those were great days.
I used to love that.
I used to always have my Walkman with me.
And I would load up the pockets in my jacket with cassettes so that I had lots of options of music to listen to while I was strutting around college in my flares.
So cassettes.
But I think CDs, I think probably CDs are going to come back next.
That'll be the new hip way to listen to music.
It's like, yeah, well, I don't stream my music.
I only listen to my music on CD these days.
I bet there are some very cool people who are saying things like that these days.
And why?
I suppose it's because CDs are cheap now, right?
You can probably buy lots of music on CD really, really cheap nowadays.
Why would you buy music these days instead of just streaming it, instead of just illegally downloading it?
Well, maybe if you're a responsible person who believes that, A you should pay for the music that you listen to and that, B we should recycle all this stuff.
There's no point in just If we don't use these CDs, they're just going to get thrown away and dumped into the ground.
And there's all that plastic and stuff.
So we might as well recycle and reuse.
So why not CDs?
I reckon CDs are coming back these days.
How do you listen to music, everyone?
Do you stream your music?
You probably do.
Which service do you use?
Spotify?
YouTube music?
Do you just search for things on YouTube?
Is BitTorrent still a thing?
I don't hear people talk about BitTorrent that much anymore.
Is BitTorrent still a thing?
I'm sure it is.
It must be.
Or do you use vinyl?
Do you like to listen to your music on vinyl?
Does vinyl sound better?
Do you listen to cassettes?
Do you have a cassette player at home?
Does cassette sound better?
Cassettes, I think some of those old cassettes which I still have.
I've got a bag down here full of old cassettes.
Some of those cassettes sound fantastic.
I do have a Walkman somewhere in this room, which I use occasionally.
And when I listen to music on my Walkman from some of the old cassettes I've got, it does have a fantastic sound very warm, deep bass sound, lovely kind of analogue feel.
I think the cassettes are analogue, right?
They're not digital.
So there's a slightly different sound.
So, you know, do you have cassettes?
Do you still listen to cassettes?
Like, you know, C60s, C90s, or the...
The wonderful C-120, which is a two-hour cassette.
You've got 60 minutes on one side and 60 minutes on the other side.
A C-120 was a wonderful thing because you could get more music on it, but also a very risky thing because C-120s would always get tangled up right.
The tape would always end up tangled up.
C120s.
120 minute cassettes are much more likely to tangle up because there's a lot more tape in there and the tape is thinner.
And so C120s were always, always tangling up, absolute nightmare.
I think the C90 is probably the best.
C60s, the sound quality is a bit better because I think the tape is thicker, right?
C90 is quite a good balance.
You can get a good, decent amount of music on a C90.
You can get two Beatle albums, more or less.
You can get two Beatle albums on a C90.
You could get Rubber Soul and Revolver.
You can get Rubber Soul on side A and Revolver on side B.
Now it might chop off the last song halfway through, which is terrible, especially if it's Revolver, because that's Tomorrow, Never Knows which is one of the greatest Beatles songs ever.
If that gets chopped off, because I don't know how long is... I don't know.
Anyway...
Do you listen to music on cassettes or CDs?
Are you still using CDs?
You can let us know in the comments section, can't you?
Let's have another topic.
What book has influenced you the most?
Oh, gosh.
What book has influenced you the most?
I don't know.
That's really hard.
That's a really hard question to answer.
I think there's no correct answer for that.
What book has influenced you the most?
Very difficult question to answer.
I can't really give a definitive answer to that question.
But I guess I would say that there was a time before I became an English teacher, before I moved to Japan and got my first teaching job, before I started doing this podcast or anything.
There was a time, sort of just after university, when I didn't know what to do with my life at all.
And I was very directionless.
And there was a period where I kind of wanted to be a writer, but it was a sort of like a very private ambition of mine.
I wanted to be a writer.
I was very, very inspired by, strangely, by the work of Hunter S. Thompson.
My namesake, Hunter S. Thompson.
His work is very sort of...
Well, it's kind of mad.
There's a lot of excessive stuff in his writing.
And I wasn't influenced by his lifestyle or anything, but just the way that he wrote.
It grabbed my attention so much.
I found it so compelling, his writing, and so original and so funny.
And it really sort of spoke to me in ways that a lot of other things didn't.
For some reason, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that book.
I found it to be so compelling and so original and so attention-grabbing.
And it really spoke to me.
It was like, in that period, it wasn't the best time of my life.
Although I was young, I was in my 20s, and it should have been my best years.
I was a bit directionless and maybe a bit depressed at certain times.
But reading Hunter S. Thompson's work...
How can I describe this?
It was just very bright and really spoke to me.
I don't know, just his writing style.
I just found it really engaging.
And so I was really inspired by his writing and wanted to do the same kind of thing.
But the thing is about Hunter S. Thompson is that he had this gonzo style of journalism.
So he wrote, he was a journalist.
And his approach to his stories was that he would put himself right into the centre of the story.
So, for example, if he was sent by Rolling Stone magazine to cover a sporting event right like the Kentucky Derby, which is a horse race in Kentucky in America, sort of big cultural event over there.
If he was sent by Rolling Stone to cover that race, he would probably get very drunk and maybe take loads of drugs or something.
And then he would write an account of the madness that he experienced at the event while under the influence of all of these things.
Now, as I said, my lifestyle wasn't the same, but there was a certain sort of vibrant truth that came through in that writing, which was somehow a lot more revealing and captivating than just boring normal writing.
His writing was so exciting and violent and weird and funny.
And so I wanted to do the same kind of thing.
But as an English guy living in the countryside some like sleepy village in the English countryside it was very hard for me to get the same level of wildness into the situations I was going to write about.
So instead I would try and write about, for example going, I would try and write video game reviews in a similar style, a very kind of subjective style style.
So I guess fear and loathing in Las Vegas influenced me quite a lot.
But then I stopped writing like that.
I stopped doing all that sort of thing and ended up doing completely different things.
And I've never gone back to writing, just writing.
Obviously there's writing involved in doing the podcast and in doing stand-up comedy, but I never went back to kind of writing the sorts of things I was writing then.
Maybe there's a parallel universe where I'm a writer now.
Maybe I'm a... Maybe I...
If I went back and lived my life again, maybe I'd go back to that time and I would say right, I'm going to move to London.
I'm going to go and live in London, not go to Japan or anything, but go and live in London and continue writing.
Maybe try and become a writer, a journalist, and write computer game reviews in a crazy sort of Hunter S Thompson style.
So maybe in a parallel universe there's a version of me that's doing that and I've got no money and I'm living in poverty because I'm not successful.
I don't know.
Okay.
Let's generate another topic.
What do you bring with you everywhere you go?
What do you bring with you everywhere you go?
Now, it would be nice, wouldn't it, if I could come up with a very clever answer to that question.
What do you bring with you everywhere you go?
Well, I bring my, what would it be?
Some philosophical answer.
I bring all my prejudices.
I bring my hopes.
I bring my memories.
I don't know.
I bring my keys, my wallet and my phone everywhere I go.
And, as I said in an episode earlier this year, when I leave the house I have to check that I've got all those things.
And I do the Macarena dance in front of the door.
Have I got everything?
Got my keys, got my phone, got my wallet.
Do the Macarena.
Those aren't the lyrics of the Macarena.
Do the Macarena.
No, it's... I can't remember what the lyrics are.
This is a wonderful episode, isn't it, listeners?
Am I going to publish this?
I think I am.
I think it's okay.
But, you know, it's totally spontaneous.
So that's what I bring everywhere with me.
And when I go to the British Council twice a week, I have to remember to bring my badge...
You have a badge on a lanyard that goes around your neck.
I have to remember to bring that because if I don't bring the badge, I can't get into the building.
Basically, if you're at the British Council and you don't have your badge, it's a nightmare because you can't open any doors.
You can't operate the photocopier.
You're just totally powerless without your badge.
So keys, wallet, phone, and if I'm teaching, my badge.
Fascinating stuff, listeners.
Next one.
If you were a king or queen, what would your throne look like?
If you were a king or queen, what would your throne look like?
Okay, so the throne obviously is the chair that the king or queen looks like.
No, king or queen doesn't look like a chair.
What?
No, you know what a throne is.
Game of Thrones.
Of course you know what a throne is.
The chair that the king or queen sits on.
So what would my throne look like if I was the king or queen?
If I was the king, my throne would look like an office chair.
Because that's exactly what I'm sitting in right now.
In my pod room, I have my own throne here.
I am the king of my own kingdom.
That kingdom is called Lepland.
And I am the king of Lepland.
And my approach to ruling Lepland is to just sort of talk to my citizens, my subjects on a weekly basis, sometimes bi-weekly basis, and ramble about random things.
That's basically my approach to being a king.
No rules.
You don't have to pay tax to me.
Although, you know, you can if you want.
Obviously, premium subscribers, you know, it's a different story.
You do have to, you know, pay your tax to me as the lord of premium Lepland.
This is weird.
This is weird.
I feel like I'm being very weird and bizarre and random here.
But this is what happens when there's absolutely no preparation at all.
You know, just stuff comes out that's maybe stuff I should have thought about in advance.
But my throne?
Yeah, it would look like an office chair with wheels on it because I could wheel my way around the room.
I think that the people who design these chairs, they have worked out how to do chairs.
I think chairs have been almost perfected now, especially those very expensive designer office chairs, because they're designed to give you the right back support.
They're designed to be kind of comfortable, to encourage you to adopt the right posture so that you don't get a bad back.
I think the office chair is your healthiest chair, right?
Because a wooden throne that a king would sit on Eventually, your bum's going to go to sleep, right?
You're going to lose the circulation in your legs.
You're going to get pins and needles in your legs.
You know that feeling when the blood isn't circulating into your legs properly and it feels like someone is spiking your legs with pins and needles.
We call it pins and needles.
So if you just sit as a king on a traditional big wooden throne...
You're going to get pins and needles in your legs.
You're going to get thrombosis.
You're going to get a dead bum.
I mean, you'll lose the sensation in your bum.
Your bum's going to go to sleep.
You'll get a bad back.
And you might, you know, maybe you're going to get a pain in your neck as well.
So definitely a decent quality office chair, I think, is the best solution as a throne.
Because I think chairs don't really get much better than that, do they?
They don't.
They don't.
Next question.
Next random topic.
What was your least favourite job that you've ever had?
What was your least favourite job that you've ever had?
Hmm.
Hmm.
I mean, I could talk about some teaching jobs I had that weren't great.
I think I won't, because I don't think that was... I still, even though I had some teaching jobs, where the conditions and the... just things weren't good, still, they weren't probably the worst jobs I've ever had.
I remember I had one job once, maybe the first job I ever had, in fact, when I was about 15, 16.
My friend and I, who we both lived in the same little village in England, there was a restaurant at the top of the village, the top of the main road.
And that restaurant, it used to be a Chinese restaurant.
In fact, it was one of those places where the owners of the place change every year or two.
Sort of one of those places that's just cursed as the location for a business.
That every business, every new restaurant, that Every new managers that come in and they redesign it with a new theme and they create a new restaurant, whoever it is that comes in every time, their business would fail in this location.
So we had this restaurant at the top of the village, at the top of the main road, and the management would change all the time and every single business that started there would fail.
And I remember at this particular time, when I was about 16 years old, It had been for maybe a couple of years it had been a Chinese restaurant run by Chinese people in this little village in the middle of England, somewhere on a main road between Birmingham and Coventry, in the middle of the countryside.
There was this Chinese restaurant there run by Chinese people and they had...
The business had gone bankrupt or something after two years, and so they had left.
And new managers came in and took over the restaurant and they wanted to do something completely different with it.
And so they employed people.
They were looking for people to help to clean up the place and to start working in it.
And so my friend and I got jobs there in the summer and we were basically kitchen porters.
We were kitchen porters and we were also like glass collectors.
Glass collectors.
That's when you go out into the main part of the restaurant or the pub and you just collect empty glasses and bring them back to the bar.
So we were glass collectors in the evenings and in the daytime we were kitchen porters.
We would do stuff in the kitchen, cleaning the pots and pans.
And it was extremely grotty because the guys who'd run the kitchen before had left the kitchen in a really disgusting state.
So the previous owners had left and left the kitchen really disgusting.
And I remember one particular thing.
So listeners, if you're Chinese or if you know about this kind of stuff, then maybe you'll know what I'm talking about.
But there was this one thing that they had in the kitchen.
One thing.
Why did my voice do that then?
There was one thing.
There was this one thing that was in the kitchen.
It was like this thing that they had used to like cook ducks, or to smoke ducks, or to marinate ducks or something like that.
So it's like this big metal drum, right with these hooks that hung in the inside of the drum from the top.
So I guess the ducks or chickens or whatever would be hung from these hooks.
And then the thing was heated and the ducks had all this stuff on them.
I don't know what it was, this sauce, this kind of marinade that was on them.
And I guess they would be like people would come and apply more of this stuff onto the ducks all the time and they'd be cooked slowly in this big drum for ages and ages and all the fat and all the sauce and the marinade would drip down off the ducks into the bottom of the drum and it seemed that they'd never cleaned it.
They just like never, ever cleaned it.
Maybe that was on purpose, maybe that helps to add flavor or something, i don't know, But it had never been cleaned, and so the bottom of this big metal drum was thick, maybe with about How much was it about?
A layer of about 20 to 30 centimetres of brown sticky goo.
Just brown, sticky stuff.
I don't even know what it was, but it was oily and sticky and yucky and it was just horrible.
And of course, it was Paul and my job.
So Paul was a friend of mine.
Yeah, good friend of mine, Paul, who...
One of my oldest friends, Paul, who I grew up with in that village.
Paul is no longer with us.
That's a sort of sad thing.
He died last year, in fact, which is just, yeah, just thinking about it, it's very sad.
Because we had some funny times together.
So anyway, Paul and I, it was our job to clean this thing out.
And we spent the entire day cleaning out all this.
It was like bright orange as well, this stuff that was inside this drum.
We spent the whole day cleaning it out.
We were covered in it at the end of the day.
It was rank, which means disgusting.
It was absolutely disgusting.
I remembered, oh, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck.
And we had to hose it down in the backyard and everything.
So that's my least favourite job that I've ever had.
And I think that's probably a good place to stop now talking about my least favourite job I've ever had.
Which, you know, just makes me thankful that I have probably my favourite job that I've ever had, which is this.
If this is even a job.
Is this a job?
Is this a job?
I mean you know it does pay the bills doing this, making my podcast and making premium episodes, and you know the ad revenue and stuff and sponsorships that happen occasionally.
And, you know, that does pay the bill.
So I suppose this is a job.
So very lucky I can count my blessings that A, I didn't continue working in disgusting kitchens.
Although, who knows, maybe if I had continued working in kitchens I would eventually worked my way up Two.
I would have been the owner of a restaurant, or something like that.
Nah, no, it doesn't appeal to me.
No, thanks.
Or if I'd continue to be a writer, I would have been an impoverished, depressed writer trying to write reviews for things and not doing very well and then getting angry about ChatGPT.
Ugh.
Now luckily, I'm in this particular timeline and I've ended up doing this, which I enjoy tremendously.
Yeah, and rest in peace my old friend Paul Breeze, who I did see about a year before he died.
I hadn't seen him for about 15 years and I was in a part of England where he was living and we met up with each other and talked about old times and some of the old stories from the old days.
And so it's very sad to get the news that he died.
Anyway, I'm oversharing now.
But that's the end of this episode.
Thank you so much for getting all the way through to the end.
And if you did get through to the end here, you can leave a comment saying something about a duck.
Okay, a duck.
Like to duck.
To duck for cover.
Duck could be get your head down.
I don't know how you're going to write a comment about a duck.
Maybe just something like...
I don't know, you have to use your imagination.
I'm exhausted.
I'm exhausted now.
I'm exhausted.
I did it though, didn't I?
I gave you an episode.
I could have just done nothing.
I could have just left it for a week.
You know, I could have just gone, I could have just had a sleep in this most comfortable office chair.
I could have just had a little nap.
But I decided to do this instead, and I hope that it was worthwhile.
Anyway, if you've listened all the way to the end, nice one.
And you can write a comment with the word duck in there in some way, even if it's just that story about the ducks was disgusting or something like that, you could do that.
But just try and include the word duck.
If you could find a creative way of including the word duck, then you get extra bonus points.
Not that there are points, but anyway, you get respect points, I suppose, from me.
All right, I'm going to stop rambling now because it's time to go and have lunch.
Mmm, yum, yum, yum.
Am I going to eat duck?
No, I'm not.
I will not have duck now because that does not appeal to me at this point.
I think I'm going to have something else then.
Not that I would normally have duck.
Mmm, lunchtime.
Time to have some duck again.
No, I don't always eat duck all the time.
What am I talking about?
I don't know.
I'm going to stop now.
Thanks so much for listening, okay?
Speak to you again soon.
Premium episodes are coming.
All right?
Nice one.
Take care of yourselves.
Try to be excellent to each other.
Okay?
And I will speak to you next time.
But for now, it's time to say goodbye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.
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