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You know, there are many, many, many ways that are quicker, cheaper, and less painful to find out that 40,000 people don't like your face.
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And I would recommend that you try all of them before you run for parliament.
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Hello.
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Thank you for joining me for our first"Curiosity Calls".
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Batting the breeze as passed the 25 episodes mark, and it seemed like a suitable time to take a look back at some of my favorite clips from our early episodes.
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I had a lot of fun putting this compilation together.
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I hope you enjoy listening to it too.
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We start with Enid Bottle, Episode 2 A Child's Eye View of World War II.
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Full disclosure, Enid is actually my mother and I'm pleased to say still alive and kicking and 89 today.
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Happy birthday Mum.
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While I was planning Batting the Breeze, I took some new recording kit around to mum's to test.
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I just said,"Start talking".
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So Mum shared memories of being a small child living in London when World War II broke out.
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It turned out so well, I thought I'd share it.
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She talked about the blitz.
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Night after night, the bombs dropped for nine months through to May 1941, but life carried on.
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We used to visit my grandmother at Tuffnell Park.
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She had a flat over Uncle Bob's butcher's shop.
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And when we went home, perhaps it might be nine o'clock at night, I expect, we'd go down the hill to the Tuffnell Park tube station, and you'd go down the escalator and all along the sides of the platforms, there were bunk beds and people with families all going to bed down there.
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You know, they brought all their sleeping bags and stuff, and it was their air raid shelter, and it was like that on all the stations.
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Fast forward to 1944 when Hitler unleashed a new terror weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, also known as the'buzz bomb' or'doodlebug'.
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Apart from being a weapon capable of great destruction, it was designed to spread terror across London and the Southeast, and in that respect it certainly achieved its objective.
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I remember being extremely frightened at that stage because they were missiles which would drop anywhere.
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And that is a horrible feeling.
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And we were south of the river, south of London.
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You didn't know where they were going to land because you heard them go over and suddenly stop, and it was just dead stop.
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And then quiet until you heard the bang, the explosion, when they got to the ground.
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And it was really frightening because you didn't know whether it was going to be you or someone else or what.
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We were fortunate that nothing landed on us, but they did in the locality, they did.
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Frightening times indeed.
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In episode 6 How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, we met Edward Morello.
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Edward lives in a small village called Bridport in Dorset, England.
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One evening he was watching a political program on television and getting a little irate until his wife said,"You should do this.
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Just go and do it", that is stand for election to the UK Parliament.
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So he did.
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I wondered if he took a sanity check before going ahead...
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The one thing that does happen is suddenly people, everyone goes,"Oh, do you know what?
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I know somebody who's run for parliament, would you like me to put you in touch?" There's actually quite a lot of people who have historically run for parliament.
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And the overriding denominator of all of that is that they didn't win.
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Very few people won.
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So what you do is you end up meeting lots of people who didn't win.
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And actually that's not particularly helpful.
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"My advice is do not talk to anyone who's run for parliament because all they can tell you is how they lost.
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But it's not just about knocking on doors...
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And, it is start at sun-up and end at sundown.
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People don't tend to like you knocking on the door after the sun's gone down, fair enough.
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But you start at sunup you end at sundown and you do that solidly every single day, seven days a week for four to six weeks until you can't do it anymore.
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When you get home, you've invariably got a call with your campaign team, and then you have to sit at your computer and answer the, anywhere between a hundred to 200 emails that you receive.
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And of course the most important thing about electioneering is getting used to rejection.
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It is personal, there's no way to get around that.
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I had somebody who refused to shake my hand.
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I'm not voting for you lot I'm not even gonna shake your hand.
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I did have, It was actually a retirement block of flats, and there was, I knocked on the door and this little old lady opened the door a crack and, I'm six foot three, she was probably three foot two.
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This tiny little old lady opened the door and she said,"Yes, dear"?
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I said,"Hello I'm Edward, I'm your Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate.
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"Are you dear?""Yes, I am".
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"Well, in that case, you can fuck off"! and slammed the door in my face.
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And you go,"Okay".
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I mean, that was definitely personal,"You know, there are many, many, many ways that are quicker, cheaper, and less painful to find out that 40,000 people don't like your face.
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And I would recommend that you try all of them before you run for parliament.
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And presumably for every one of those rejections, you get one that says,"Yes I'm going to vote for you." And you can take that personally as well?
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I mean, it's not one-for-one, it would've been a closer, right?
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It's about five-to-one if I'm on honest, Steve.
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But yeah, absolutely, you know, it is an ego-boost.
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There's no two ways about it.
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That's the, that's the high you're living for, right?
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Well I guess five-to-one in sales terms is quite a good return isn't it?
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It's great conversion rate, great conversion rate, terrible in politics?
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And Edward is still on standby to go through it all again at the next UK election, whenever that may be.
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I'll keep you posted.
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Now in episode 7 Is Anybody There?, I caught up with Jules Emm.
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She's a psychic medium and a very accommodating one at that.
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She said she would answer any question that I put to her.
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So I did, and she did.
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I started with,"What is a psychic medium?"
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There are lots of people out there who work in different ways,'cause you all have a different gift.
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So my gift is very much where I work with guides.
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I'm like a telephone.
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So I communicate with my guide and they will tell me things and I then pass it on to the person who's sitting in front of me.
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So for example, if I was doing a reading, I generally work with the same guide.
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If I was doing healing, I can work with very different guides.
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You're answering all my questions here by the way.
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Very good.
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Very good.
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Must be psychic.
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Do you know what they look like?
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I don't.
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I have a knowing of one, a native Indian called White Owl...
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and she has been with me from the day that I was born.
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And I know her energy.
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As soon as she comes in, I know her presence.
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Was that something just then...
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And that was her.
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So the light's flickered.
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So that was her letting her know that, you know, she's around.
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So just for the record, some light behind me...
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Is flickering.
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..at the point when you mentioned her name.
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Interesting.
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Well, of course I had to ask...
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Do you believe in ghosts?
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Yes.
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Have you ever seen one?
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Interesting.
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Where I used to live, I had presence in the house.
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One was of a young Victorian girl and also the father.
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Now the people I had in the home at the time all had seen this appearance and it was a child in Victorian clothes as solid as a human being.
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The three people who saw them all very scientific, they're all doctors, and did not believe in what I did.
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Yet, they all saw this girl and they thought it was one of the grandchildren.
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All very strange.
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I caught up with Alistair Henry in Episode 9 Awakening in the Northwest Territories.
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Alistair lives in Canada and retired a few years back, but still had a load of energy to do more.
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So he went off to a settlement in the Northwest Territories and worked and lived with the First Nation's people of Lutsel Ke.
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I started by asking him about the Northwest Territories.
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It's a huge territory.
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And Yellowknife is the capital of the Northwest Territories and it's only got 17,000 people.
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And when you get to Yellowknife, that's it.
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No more roads.
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That's the end of the tree line.
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Between there and the North Pole is called the Barren Lands.
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And big animals live there.
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And bears, wolverines, muskox.
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And you just think, wow, nature is awesome.
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And what about Lutsel Ke?
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They were nomadic up until I think about 1940.
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And then the government said,"Hey, you guys can't keep roaming the land like this.
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I mean, we're gonna be bringing people in to settle".
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So they built this community called Lutsel K'e, which means Lands of the Little Fishes".
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When you've only got 300 people, it's one great big community and mostly everybody's related anyway...
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a lot of inter-marrying goes on, there's this thing about keeping the bloodlines pure.
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While Alistair had been prepared for a sparse way of living for a period, he did expect to have somewhere to live with a roof over his head.
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He was in for a shock.
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I saw my house in 10 crates at the building site.
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There's no plumbers, no electricians, there's nobody.
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In the meantime I...
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had to live with other people in the community.
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And one of the guys I...
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lived with, Stefan, he built his home from materials he found at the landfill.
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There was no indoor toilet.
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Just on the porch, it was a bucket with a garbage bag.
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So you had to do your business in the cold.
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So one time he said to me,"You know Al, you can't pee in the honey bucket"...
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it was called a honey bucket.
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You have to go in the bushes same as me.
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And that was brutal because it meant putting on every piece of clothing you had in the middle of the night to go outside to take a pee in the bushes.
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So I stopped drinking and that's what, that was my solution.
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To say that the lifestyle was laid back would be a monumental understatement.
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They live in the moment, and a lot of times I would say,"You wanna work on Friday?" They say,"Oh yeah." But Friday, there was no sight of them.
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Because it was a nice day, they just decided to do something else.
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So from then on, I just realized if Jim is hungover, well he's hungover.
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He can't do his best today.
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So I just have to accept that at least he, he's here.
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They have this...
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affinity with nature.
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They just see the Creator like the universe.
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They're all connected and they love this interconnectedness.
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It's very real for them.
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We feel superior to nature, but they just feel part of it.
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I saw people being happy and I thought,"Well, how can you be so happy, you have nothing?" So I realize happiness isn't about what you have, it's how you see the world, how you perceive things and how you appreciate.
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And how you see the world very much applied to my next guest, Neil Harris from Episode 10-A Holotropic Journey.
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Neil, a long-time psychiatrist and psychotherapist discovered Holotropic Breathwork later in life.
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Holotropic Breathwork?
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Well, I'll let Neil explain.
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Back in the fifties and sixties, once LSD had been released by a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, encouraging people to research its possible beneficial effects for people with psychological struggles or psychiatric illness, the field really took off.
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People were researching its use for end of life anxiety, for substance dependence, for resistant depression, and the community internationally was thriving when, of course, president Nixon amongst others outlawed the use of psychedelic drugs.
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But rather than let that cause the research to grind completely to a halt, another psychiatrist called Stanislav Grof, who was from Czechoslovakia and had trained in Prague, developed a new way of supporting people into what we would call"non-ordinary states of consciousness" or"expanded states of awareness".
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Neil shared one of his early expanded states of awareness.
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He remembered that within minutes of starting he was...
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...in a Celtic clan of some sort, involved in a battle.
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I was killed.
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I was lying in a shallow grave in the ground, strangely thinking to myself,"Oh, so this is what death is like".
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Then the experience moved on to include...
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being given birth to...
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by a rather impressive goddess.
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And then at the end of the experience, one of the facilitators helped me do some processing work on a physical injury I had suffered.
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And there was a release of emotion and energy at the end of that experience, which was profoundly helpful to me.
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Neil then explained that holotropic experiences normally fell into one of three groups.
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One of those groups particularly caught my attention.
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It turns out that the second group...
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is to do with your time in the uterus.
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People are beginning to understand more and more that pre-birth experience is relevant to child development and personality development.
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The shock of moving from what might be a blissful, safe, unchallenging environment into an almost impossible situation of life-threatening pressure and novelty is something people can experience in Holotropic Breathwork and the third group of experiences...
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Um, just rewind there a bit Neil.
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I'm slightly fixated on the notion of birthing experiences, i.e.
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imagining you are being born I was unusually tongue-tied at this point, but seeing I needed a little bit of help, Neil went on to give me some practical background to this.
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A lot of these experiences leave residues in our body.
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So, an example of the birth experience causing a move towards resolution would be somebody who has chronically described neck discomfort or carries themselves in a asymmetrical way and realizes through the breathwork that that happened to them while they were being born.
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And often people will go and talk to their mothers if they're still alive and say, tell me about my birth.
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And they'll hear some surprising things that confirm their experiences that they've had in the breathwork.
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Neil and his wife Sally, organise Holotropic Breathwork events in the New Forest in the South of England, and would love to hear from you.
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Check out the show notes for details of this and all the other guests on today's show.
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And finally in Episode 12 Winston Churchill's Last Bodyguard, I had a chance encounter with Bill Murray, son of Edmund Murray, who was so Winston Churchill's bodyguard for the last 15 years of his life.
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Edmund had unparalleled access to the life of one of the world's great war leaders, and as such, to the many people with which Sir Winston fraternised.
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So what was this chance encounter?
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Well, a friend of mine, Kerry, had been scraping away wallpaper in the hallway of her new home when she nearly scraped away some old handwriting on the wall.
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It was Edmund's handwriting from over 50 years ago.
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Yes, I know that makes for some very old wallpaper! The writing revealed Edmund's position as bodyguard to Sir Winston, and so Kerry proceeded to track down any offspring.
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I took up the story.
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After some investigation, she located Bill Murray, son of Edmund, not too far away in Okehampton on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park.
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They talked on the phone and arranged to meet so that Bill could see his father's handwriting for himself.
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And in December of 2022, Bill and his wife Carolyn arrived in Wookey Hole.
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Somehow I'd managed to muscle my way in on this wonderful moment.
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After some reflection, everyone relocated to the kitchen for a cuppa and Bill very kindly allowed me to turn on the recorder while we were chatting.
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What were your initial thoughts when you saw your father's wall art?
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Well, I was really surprised it came from nowhere, didn't it really, just the conversation.
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I suppose...
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because it's my father who's written it, it's a happy memory.
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It's a happy memory.
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It's the sort of thing that he would do, it didn't surprise me in that respect.
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He had a good sense of humor and he would get something in his mind and then see it through.
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And to actually write something, a spontaneous thing probably between, I don't know, mixing up wallpaper paste or something like that...
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it didn't surprise me at all really.
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Today is May 4th and it's 44 years to the day when another British Prime Ministerial titan first came to power, Margaret Thatcher.
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It's widely thought that Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher never met.
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Spoiler alert, they did.
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Edmond actually facilitated this meeting, which we covered in the third of the three part mini-series.
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Part one, focused on Edmond's extraordinary life.
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Just before the war in 1937, he...
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got a one-way ticket to Calais and joined the Foreign Legion.
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Signed up there, went down to the south of France to do his initial training and then over to Algeria and...
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did eight years in the French Foreign Legion from 1937 to 1945.
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He was quite smart, my father, as I said, and...
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he was a good soldier.
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While in the Foreign Legion, Edmund spread his net as wide as he could and started teaching.
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He also taught English.
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He taught English to the officer's children around the barracks and in the town as well and he made a bit of money on that.
00:21:42.253 --> 00:21:46.346
He became very friendly with quite a few of the senior officers in the Foreign Legion.
00:21:46.808 --> 00:21:51.148
His other privileges were to take visiting celebrities around...
00:21:51.538 --> 00:21:54.439
the town, people like Maurice Chevalier.
00:21:55.122 --> 00:22:01.156
On one occasion, on Bastille Day I think, they went to perform at the celebrations in Paris.
00:22:01.156 --> 00:22:10.325
It must have been just before the war, and Dad did dance with Marlene Dietrich, because she was there joining in the fun I suppose.
00:22:11.131 --> 00:22:22.134
Edmund left the Foreign Legion in 1945, joined the Metropolitan Police in London in 1947, then in 1950 was first introduced to Mr.
00:22:22.134 --> 00:22:25.044
Churchill as he was in those days.
00:22:25.565 --> 00:22:28.163
"This is Murray sir", said Williams.
00:22:28.777 --> 00:22:29.166
Mr.
00:22:29.166 --> 00:22:31.987
Churchill moved his cigar to his left hand.
00:22:32.433 --> 00:22:41.223
I took his extended right lightly in mine, taking care as I have been warned to avoid clasping it firmly.
00:22:41.999 --> 00:22:48.465
The great man shook my hand, inspected me carefully, and belched.
00:22:51.451 --> 00:22:58.862
it was indeed an extraordinary life and well worth revisiting that episode as are all the episodes we featured today.
00:22:59.655 --> 00:23:02.326
And that's all for this first Curiosity Calls.
00:23:02.855 --> 00:23:08.439
A massive thank you to you for listening and to my wonderful guests for being such good sports.
00:23:09.218 --> 00:23:13.387
I hope you'll join me next week for another episode of Batting the Breeze.
00:23:13.688 --> 00:23:14.317
Thank you.
00:00:00.757 --> 00:00:08.710
You know, there are many, many, many ways that are quicker, cheaper, and less painful to find out that 40,000 people don't like your face.
00:00:08.890 --> 00:00:13.369
And I would recommend that you try all of them before you run for parliament.
00:00:55.643 --> 00:00:56.182
Hello.
00:00:56.470 --> 00:01:00.490
Thank you for joining me for our first"Curiosity Calls".
00:01:01.097 --> 00:01:11.337
Batting the breeze as passed the 25 episodes mark, and it seemed like a suitable time to take a look back at some of my favorite clips from our early episodes.
00:01:11.950 --> 00:01:14.891
I had a lot of fun putting this compilation together.
00:01:15.100 --> 00:01:17.141
I hope you enjoy listening to it too.
00:01:18.237 --> 00:01:24.158
We start with Enid Bottle, Episode 2 A Child's Eye View of World War II.
00:01:24.941 --> 00:01:33.308
Full disclosure, Enid is actually my mother and I'm pleased to say still alive and kicking and 89 today.
00:01:34.298 --> 00:01:35.768
Happy birthday Mum.
00:01:36.668 --> 00:01:42.367
While I was planning Batting the Breeze, I took some new recording kit around to mum's to test.
00:01:42.908 --> 00:01:44.798
I just said,"Start talking".
00:01:45.457 --> 00:01:50.918
So Mum shared memories of being a small child living in London when World War II broke out.
00:01:51.578 --> 00:01:54.248
It turned out so well, I thought I'd share it.
00:01:55.067 --> 00:01:56.778
She talked about the blitz.
00:01:57.287 --> 00:02:04.882
Night after night, the bombs dropped for nine months through to May 1941, but life carried on.
00:02:05.444 --> 00:02:09.133
We used to visit my grandmother at Tuffnell Park.
00:02:09.343 --> 00:02:12.704
She had a flat over Uncle Bob's butcher's shop.
00:02:13.394 --> 00:02:36.675
And when we went home, perhaps it might be nine o'clock at night, I expect, we'd go down the hill to the Tuffnell Park tube station, and you'd go down the escalator and all along the sides of the platforms, there were bunk beds and people with families all going to bed down there.
00:02:36.675 --> 00:02:46.456
You know, they brought all their sleeping bags and stuff, and it was their air raid shelter, and it was like that on all the stations.
00:02:47.042 --> 00:02:57.715
Fast forward to 1944 when Hitler unleashed a new terror weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, also known as the'buzz bomb' or'doodlebug'.
00:02:58.342 --> 00:03:09.935
Apart from being a weapon capable of great destruction, it was designed to spread terror across London and the Southeast, and in that respect it certainly achieved its objective.
00:03:10.587 --> 00:03:20.177
I remember being extremely frightened at that stage because they were missiles which would drop anywhere.
00:03:20.437 --> 00:03:22.237
And that is a horrible feeling.
00:03:22.955 --> 00:03:25.664
And we were south of the river, south of London.
00:03:25.664 --> 00:03:33.944
You didn't know where they were going to land because you heard them go over and suddenly stop, and it was just dead stop.
00:03:38.251 --> 00:03:44.820
And then quiet until you heard the bang, the explosion, when they got to the ground.
00:03:52.526 --> 00:03:58.347
And it was really frightening because you didn't know whether it was going to be you or someone else or what.
00:03:59.283 --> 00:04:05.804
We were fortunate that nothing landed on us, but they did in the locality, they did.
00:04:06.497 --> 00:04:08.597
Frightening times indeed.
00:04:09.592 --> 00:04:15.893
In episode 6 How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, we met Edward Morello.
00:04:16.425 --> 00:04:20.625
Edward lives in a small village called Bridport in Dorset, England.
00:04:21.028 --> 00:04:29.168
One evening he was watching a political program on television and getting a little irate until his wife said,"You should do this.
00:04:29.168 --> 00:04:34.387
Just go and do it", that is stand for election to the UK Parliament.
00:04:35.031 --> 00:04:36.052
So he did.
00:04:45.327 --> 00:04:48.838
I wondered if he took a sanity check before going ahead...
00:04:49.720 --> 00:04:53.923
The one thing that does happen is suddenly people, everyone goes,"Oh, do you know what?
00:04:53.983 --> 00:05:01.281
I know somebody who's run for parliament, would you like me to put you in touch?" There's actually quite a lot of people who have historically run for parliament.
00:05:01.692 --> 00:05:05.932
And the overriding denominator of all of that is that they didn't win.
00:05:06.971 --> 00:05:08.322
Very few people won.
00:05:08.598 --> 00:05:11.209
So what you do is you end up meeting lots of people who didn't win.
00:05:11.538 --> 00:05:13.278
And actually that's not particularly helpful.
00:05:13.516 --> 00:05:19.898
"My advice is do not talk to anyone who's run for parliament because all they can tell you is how they lost.
00:05:20.466 --> 00:05:23.846
But it's not just about knocking on doors...
00:05:24.360 --> 00:05:27.901
And, it is start at sun-up and end at sundown.
00:05:27.922 --> 00:05:30.795
People don't tend to like you knocking on the door after the sun's gone down, fair enough.
00:05:31.014 --> 00:05:38.798
But you start at sunup you end at sundown and you do that solidly every single day, seven days a week for four to six weeks until you can't do it anymore.
00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:52.182
When you get home, you've invariably got a call with your campaign team, and then you have to sit at your computer and answer the, anywhere between a hundred to 200 emails that you receive.
00:05:56.728 --> 00:06:02.848
And of course the most important thing about electioneering is getting used to rejection.
00:06:03.199 --> 00:06:05.976
It is personal, there's no way to get around that.
00:06:06.072 --> 00:06:08.387
I had somebody who refused to shake my hand.
00:06:08.658 --> 00:06:11.504
I'm not voting for you lot I'm not even gonna shake your hand.
00:06:11.908 --> 00:06:22.843
I did have, It was actually a retirement block of flats, and there was, I knocked on the door and this little old lady opened the door a crack and, I'm six foot three, she was probably three foot two.
00:06:23.427 --> 00:06:26.517
This tiny little old lady opened the door and she said,"Yes, dear"?
00:06:27.148 --> 00:06:31.185
I said,"Hello I'm Edward, I'm your Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate.
00:06:31.345 --> 00:06:32.845
"Are you dear?""Yes, I am".
00:06:33.528 --> 00:06:37.608
"Well, in that case, you can fuck off"! and slammed the door in my face.
00:06:37.608 --> 00:06:38.569
And you go,"Okay".
00:06:38.716 --> 00:06:50.382
I mean, that was definitely personal,"You know, there are many, many, many ways that are quicker, cheaper, and less painful to find out that 40,000 people don't like your face.
00:06:50.562 --> 00:06:55.041
And I would recommend that you try all of them before you run for parliament.
00:06:56.012 --> 00:07:04.322
And presumably for every one of those rejections, you get one that says,"Yes I'm going to vote for you." And you can take that personally as well?
00:07:05.281 --> 00:07:10.661
I mean, it's not one-for-one, it would've been a closer, right?
00:07:11.880 --> 00:07:13.471
It's about five-to-one if I'm on honest, Steve.
00:07:13.471 --> 00:07:19.377
But yeah, absolutely, you know, it is an ego-boost.
00:07:19.377 --> 00:07:20.737
There's no two ways about it.
00:07:20.737 --> 00:07:22.627
That's the, that's the high you're living for, right?
00:07:22.730 --> 00:07:26.083
Well I guess five-to-one in sales terms is quite a good return isn't it?
00:07:26.233 --> 00:07:29.562
It's great conversion rate, great conversion rate, terrible in politics?
00:07:34.656 --> 00:07:41.255
And Edward is still on standby to go through it all again at the next UK election, whenever that may be.
00:07:41.466 --> 00:07:42.605
I'll keep you posted.
00:07:43.459 --> 00:07:49.338
Now in episode 7 Is Anybody There?, I caught up with Jules Emm.
00:07:49.932 --> 00:07:53.862
She's a psychic medium and a very accommodating one at that.
00:07:54.617 --> 00:07:57.617
She said she would answer any question that I put to her.
00:07:57.918 --> 00:07:59.838
So I did, and she did.
00:08:00.490 --> 00:08:03.910
I started with,"What is a psychic medium?"
00:08:04.490 --> 00:08:10.571
There are lots of people out there who work in different ways,'cause you all have a different gift.
00:08:11.038 --> 00:08:15.687
So my gift is very much where I work with guides.
00:08:15.737 --> 00:08:17.007
I'm like a telephone.
00:08:17.418 --> 00:08:25.185
So I communicate with my guide and they will tell me things and I then pass it on to the person who's sitting in front of me.
00:08:25.264 --> 00:08:30.154
So for example, if I was doing a reading, I generally work with the same guide.
00:08:30.622 --> 00:08:35.313
If I was doing healing, I can work with very different guides.
00:08:35.861 --> 00:08:38.341
You're answering all my questions here by the way.
00:08:38.772 --> 00:08:39.192
Very good.
00:08:39.192 --> 00:08:39.761
Very good.
00:08:40.273 --> 00:08:41.586
Must be psychic.
00:08:50.346 --> 00:08:51.485
Do you know what they look like?
00:08:52.265 --> 00:08:53.255
I don't.
00:08:53.485 --> 00:08:57.568
I have a knowing of one, a native Indian called White Owl...
00:08:57.788 --> 00:09:01.235
and she has been with me from the day that I was born.
00:09:01.677 --> 00:09:03.096
And I know her energy.
00:09:03.340 --> 00:09:06.139
As soon as she comes in, I know her presence.
00:09:06.871 --> 00:09:07.761
Was that something just then...
00:09:07.761 --> 00:09:08.386
And that was her.
00:09:08.386 --> 00:09:09.537
So the light's flickered.
00:09:09.557 --> 00:09:13.246
So that was her letting her know that, you know, she's around.
00:09:13.351 --> 00:09:16.078
So just for the record, some light behind me...
00:09:16.928 --> 00:09:17.649
Is flickering.
00:09:18.058 --> 00:09:20.349
..at the point when you mentioned her name.
00:09:21.149 --> 00:09:21.629
Interesting.
00:09:22.563 --> 00:09:24.933
Well, of course I had to ask...
00:09:25.479 --> 00:09:26.859
Do you believe in ghosts?
00:09:27.403 --> 00:09:27.888
Yes.
00:09:28.515 --> 00:09:29.355
Have you ever seen one?
00:09:29.941 --> 00:09:30.811
Interesting.
00:09:31.028 --> 00:09:35.312
Where I used to live, I had presence in the house.
00:09:35.312 --> 00:09:39.366
One was of a young Victorian girl and also the father.
00:09:39.636 --> 00:09:52.230
Now the people I had in the home at the time all had seen this appearance and it was a child in Victorian clothes as solid as a human being.
00:09:52.291 --> 00:09:58.640
The three people who saw them all very scientific, they're all doctors, and did not believe in what I did.
00:09:58.917 --> 00:10:04.126
Yet, they all saw this girl and they thought it was one of the grandchildren.
00:10:06.027 --> 00:10:08.067
All very strange.
00:10:09.686 --> 00:10:15.535
I caught up with Alistair Henry in Episode 9 Awakening in the Northwest Territories.
00:10:15.969 --> 00:10:22.028
Alistair lives in Canada and retired a few years back, but still had a load of energy to do more.
00:10:22.523 --> 00:10:30.258
So he went off to a settlement in the Northwest Territories and worked and lived with the First Nation's people of Lutsel Ke.
00:10:30.884 --> 00:10:34.166
I started by asking him about the Northwest Territories.
00:10:34.700 --> 00:10:36.732
It's a huge territory.
00:10:36.857 --> 00:10:43.210
And Yellowknife is the capital of the Northwest Territories and it's only got 17,000 people.
00:10:43.794 --> 00:10:45.934
And when you get to Yellowknife, that's it.
00:10:46.201 --> 00:10:47.110
No more roads.
00:10:47.160 --> 00:10:48.770
That's the end of the tree line.
00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:52.701
Between there and the North Pole is called the Barren Lands.
00:10:53.215 --> 00:10:54.835
And big animals live there.
00:10:54.835 --> 00:10:58.268
And bears, wolverines, muskox.
00:10:58.937 --> 00:11:02.337
And you just think, wow, nature is awesome.
00:11:07.342 --> 00:11:09.293
And what about Lutsel Ke?
00:11:10.219 --> 00:11:13.198
They were nomadic up until I think about 1940.
00:11:13.710 --> 00:11:17.950
And then the government said,"Hey, you guys can't keep roaming the land like this.
00:11:17.950 --> 00:11:20.590
I mean, we're gonna be bringing people in to settle".
00:11:21.320 --> 00:11:28.485
So they built this community called Lutsel K'e, which means Lands of the Little Fishes".
00:11:28.860 --> 00:11:35.472
When you've only got 300 people, it's one great big community and mostly everybody's related anyway...
00:11:35.727 --> 00:11:40.581
a lot of inter-marrying goes on, there's this thing about keeping the bloodlines pure.
00:11:41.375 --> 00:11:49.416
While Alistair had been prepared for a sparse way of living for a period, he did expect to have somewhere to live with a roof over his head.
00:11:50.166 --> 00:11:51.576
He was in for a shock.
00:11:52.330 --> 00:11:56.269
I saw my house in 10 crates at the building site.
00:11:56.832 --> 00:11:59.919
There's no plumbers, no electricians, there's nobody.
00:12:00.397 --> 00:12:01.427
In the meantime I...
00:12:01.427 --> 00:12:04.596
had to live with other people in the community.
00:12:04.989 --> 00:12:06.089
And one of the guys I...
00:12:06.089 --> 00:12:10.950
lived with, Stefan, he built his home from materials he found at the landfill.
00:12:11.174 --> 00:12:12.615
There was no indoor toilet.
00:12:13.254 --> 00:12:16.538
Just on the porch, it was a bucket with a garbage bag.
00:12:16.884 --> 00:12:18.754
So you had to do your business in the cold.
00:12:19.086 --> 00:12:22.639
So one time he said to me,"You know Al, you can't pee in the honey bucket"...
00:12:22.749 --> 00:12:24.178
it was called a honey bucket.
00:12:24.633 --> 00:12:26.732
You have to go in the bushes same as me.
00:12:27.047 --> 00:12:34.919
And that was brutal because it meant putting on every piece of clothing you had in the middle of the night to go outside to take a pee in the bushes.
00:12:35.466 --> 00:12:38.667
So I stopped drinking and that's what, that was my solution.
00:12:42.698 --> 00:12:48.249
To say that the lifestyle was laid back would be a monumental understatement.
00:12:48.773 --> 00:12:56.994
They live in the moment, and a lot of times I would say,"You wanna work on Friday?" They say,"Oh yeah." But Friday, there was no sight of them.
00:12:56.994 --> 00:13:00.423
Because it was a nice day, they just decided to do something else.
00:13:00.931 --> 00:13:06.336
So from then on, I just realized if Jim is hungover, well he's hungover.
00:13:06.336 --> 00:13:07.576
He can't do his best today.
00:13:07.576 --> 00:13:12.176
So I just have to accept that at least he, he's here.
00:13:12.741 --> 00:13:13.481
They have this...
00:13:14.129 --> 00:13:15.442
affinity with nature.
00:13:15.942 --> 00:13:18.961
They just see the Creator like the universe.
00:13:19.436 --> 00:13:23.346
They're all connected and they love this interconnectedness.
00:13:23.601 --> 00:13:24.932
It's very real for them.
00:13:25.265 --> 00:13:29.328
We feel superior to nature, but they just feel part of it.
00:13:29.908 --> 00:13:42.830
I saw people being happy and I thought,"Well, how can you be so happy, you have nothing?" So I realize happiness isn't about what you have, it's how you see the world, how you perceive things and how you appreciate.
00:13:43.716 --> 00:13:52.385
And how you see the world very much applied to my next guest, Neil Harris from Episode 10-A Holotropic Journey.
00:13:53.025 --> 00:13:59.446
Neil, a long-time psychiatrist and psychotherapist discovered Holotropic Breathwork later in life.
00:14:00.105 --> 00:14:01.436
Holotropic Breathwork?
00:14:01.743 --> 00:14:03.846
Well, I'll let Neil explain.
00:14:08.528 --> 00:14:24.604
Back in the fifties and sixties, once LSD had been released by a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, encouraging people to research its possible beneficial effects for people with psychological struggles or psychiatric illness, the field really took off.
00:14:24.803 --> 00:14:42.501
People were researching its use for end of life anxiety, for substance dependence, for resistant depression, and the community internationally was thriving when, of course, president Nixon amongst others outlawed the use of psychedelic drugs.
00:14:42.945 --> 00:15:03.813
But rather than let that cause the research to grind completely to a halt, another psychiatrist called Stanislav Grof, who was from Czechoslovakia and had trained in Prague, developed a new way of supporting people into what we would call"non-ordinary states of consciousness" or"expanded states of awareness".
00:15:04.639 --> 00:15:08.840
Neil shared one of his early expanded states of awareness.
00:15:09.417 --> 00:15:13.076
He remembered that within minutes of starting he was...
00:15:13.225 --> 00:15:17.648
...in a Celtic clan of some sort, involved in a battle.
00:15:17.755 --> 00:15:18.716
I was killed.
00:15:18.924 --> 00:15:25.315
I was lying in a shallow grave in the ground, strangely thinking to myself,"Oh, so this is what death is like".
00:15:25.644 --> 00:15:29.063
Then the experience moved on to include...
00:15:29.063 --> 00:15:30.673
being given birth to...
00:15:30.734 --> 00:15:33.700
by a rather impressive goddess.
00:15:34.436 --> 00:15:42.755
And then at the end of the experience, one of the facilitators helped me do some processing work on a physical injury I had suffered.
00:15:42.966 --> 00:15:49.504
And there was a release of emotion and energy at the end of that experience, which was profoundly helpful to me.
00:15:50.753 --> 00:15:56.812
Neil then explained that holotropic experiences normally fell into one of three groups.
00:15:57.437 --> 00:16:00.648
One of those groups particularly caught my attention.
00:16:01.197 --> 00:16:03.116
It turns out that the second group...
00:16:03.392 --> 00:16:06.361
is to do with your time in the uterus.
00:16:06.730 --> 00:16:15.063
People are beginning to understand more and more that pre-birth experience is relevant to child development and personality development.
00:16:15.416 --> 00:16:32.183
The shock of moving from what might be a blissful, safe, unchallenging environment into an almost impossible situation of life-threatening pressure and novelty is something people can experience in Holotropic Breathwork and the third group of experiences...
00:16:33.432 --> 00:16:35.772
Um, just rewind there a bit Neil.
00:16:36.011 --> 00:16:41.423
I'm slightly fixated on the notion of birthing experiences, i.e.
00:16:41.692 --> 00:16:53.537
imagining you are being born I was unusually tongue-tied at this point, but seeing I needed a little bit of help, Neil went on to give me some practical background to this.
00:16:53.903 --> 00:16:57.764
A lot of these experiences leave residues in our body.
00:16:58.014 --> 00:17:16.161
So, an example of the birth experience causing a move towards resolution would be somebody who has chronically described neck discomfort or carries themselves in a asymmetrical way and realizes through the breathwork that that happened to them while they were being born.
00:17:16.401 --> 00:17:21.811
And often people will go and talk to their mothers if they're still alive and say, tell me about my birth.
00:17:21.811 --> 00:17:26.741
And they'll hear some surprising things that confirm their experiences that they've had in the breathwork.
00:17:27.830 --> 00:17:35.451
Neil and his wife Sally, organise Holotropic Breathwork events in the New Forest in the South of England, and would love to hear from you.
00:17:36.010 --> 00:17:40.631
Check out the show notes for details of this and all the other guests on today's show.
00:17:41.596 --> 00:17:56.510
And finally in Episode 12 Winston Churchill's Last Bodyguard, I had a chance encounter with Bill Murray, son of Edmund Murray, who was so Winston Churchill's bodyguard for the last 15 years of his life.
00:17:57.191 --> 00:18:07.038
Edmund had unparalleled access to the life of one of the world's great war leaders, and as such, to the many people with which Sir Winston fraternised.
00:18:07.634 --> 00:18:09.674
So what was this chance encounter?
00:18:09.961 --> 00:18:20.008
Well, a friend of mine, Kerry, had been scraping away wallpaper in the hallway of her new home when she nearly scraped away some old handwriting on the wall.
00:18:20.551 --> 00:18:23.971
It was Edmund's handwriting from over 50 years ago.
00:18:24.248 --> 00:18:35.357
Yes, I know that makes for some very old wallpaper! The writing revealed Edmund's position as bodyguard to Sir Winston, and so Kerry proceeded to track down any offspring.
00:18:36.035 --> 00:18:37.295
I took up the story.
00:18:37.894 --> 00:18:48.161
After some investigation, she located Bill Murray, son of Edmund, not too far away in Okehampton on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park.
00:18:48.476 --> 00:18:55.787
They talked on the phone and arranged to meet so that Bill could see his father's handwriting for himself.
00:18:59.621 --> 00:19:07.196
And in December of 2022, Bill and his wife Carolyn arrived in Wookey Hole.
00:19:33.862 --> 00:19:38.182
Somehow I'd managed to muscle my way in on this wonderful moment.
00:19:38.669 --> 00:19:48.961
After some reflection, everyone relocated to the kitchen for a cuppa and Bill very kindly allowed me to turn on the recorder while we were chatting.
00:19:49.804 --> 00:19:53.308
What were your initial thoughts when you saw your father's wall art?
00:19:53.949 --> 00:19:57.999
Well, I was really surprised it came from nowhere, didn't it really, just the conversation.
00:19:58.459 --> 00:19:58.878
I suppose...
00:19:59.056 --> 00:20:01.726
because it's my father who's written it, it's a happy memory.
00:20:02.385 --> 00:20:03.195
It's a happy memory.
00:20:03.195 --> 00:20:06.701
It's the sort of thing that he would do, it didn't surprise me in that respect.
00:20:07.336 --> 00:20:12.781
He had a good sense of humor and he would get something in his mind and then see it through.
00:20:12.781 --> 00:20:21.011
And to actually write something, a spontaneous thing probably between, I don't know, mixing up wallpaper paste or something like that...
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it didn't surprise me at all really.
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Today is May 4th and it's 44 years to the day when another British Prime Ministerial titan first came to power, Margaret Thatcher.
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It's widely thought that Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher never met.
00:20:40.904 --> 00:20:43.095
Spoiler alert, they did.
00:20:43.631 --> 00:20:49.961
Edmond actually facilitated this meeting, which we covered in the third of the three part mini-series.
00:20:50.597 --> 00:20:53.807
Part one, focused on Edmond's extraordinary life.
00:20:54.377 --> 00:20:57.948
Just before the war in 1937, he...
00:20:58.162 --> 00:21:08.262
got a one-way ticket to Calais and joined the Foreign Legion.
00:21:08.262 --> 00:21:16.153
Signed up there, went down to the south of France to do his initial training and then over to Algeria and...
00:21:16.153 --> 00:21:21.108
did eight years in the French Foreign Legion from 1937 to 1945.
00:21:22.213 --> 00:21:24.361
He was quite smart, my father, as I said, and...
00:21:24.383 --> 00:21:25.643
he was a good soldier.
00:21:26.421 --> 00:21:31.881
While in the Foreign Legion, Edmund spread his net as wide as he could and started teaching.
00:21:32.280 --> 00:21:33.601
He also taught English.
00:21:33.601 --> 00:21:41.931
He taught English to the officer's children around the barracks and in the town as well and he made a bit of money on that.
00:21:42.253 --> 00:21:46.346
He became very friendly with quite a few of the senior officers in the Foreign Legion.
00:21:46.808 --> 00:21:51.148
His other privileges were to take visiting celebrities around...
00:21:51.538 --> 00:21:54.439
the town, people like Maurice Chevalier.
00:21:55.122 --> 00:22:01.156
On one occasion, on Bastille Day I think, they went to perform at the celebrations in Paris.
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It must have been just before the war, and Dad did dance with Marlene Dietrich, because she was there joining in the fun I suppose.
00:22:11.131 --> 00:22:22.134
Edmund left the Foreign Legion in 1945, joined the Metropolitan Police in London in 1947, then in 1950 was first introduced to Mr.
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Churchill as he was in those days.
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"This is Murray sir", said Williams.
00:22:28.777 --> 00:22:29.166
Mr.
00:22:29.166 --> 00:22:31.987
Churchill moved his cigar to his left hand.
00:22:32.433 --> 00:22:41.223
I took his extended right lightly in mine, taking care as I have been warned to avoid clasping it firmly.
00:22:41.999 --> 00:22:48.465
The great man shook my hand, inspected me carefully, and belched.
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it was indeed an extraordinary life and well worth revisiting that episode as are all the episodes we featured today.
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And that's all for this first Curiosity Calls.
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A massive thank you to you for listening and to my wonderful guests for being such good sports.
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I hope you'll join me next week for another episode of Batting the Breeze.
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Thank you.
