Work continues on episodes of the podcast. When I started this I didn’t appreciate how many obstacles I’d be facing. Surely, I thought, I can record myself reading the stories.

I’m not an actor, though. I’m not a performer, and I’m not an audio engineer.

But I am a huge self-critic, and the internal voice is forever damning my speech, my expression, my technical skills and my editing. It’s constantly rubbishing the entire project. All I want to do is get these stories out there in an accessible form - short audio episodes to fit into busy routines - to see if there’s an audience for them. But in my mind I’m comparing them to the BBC.

I didn’t think I had to voice actual characters. I thought I could just read their lines expressively. But as I go on I find myself wanting real voices for Sascha and Luca, Aggie, Aisha and the indomitable, insufferable Mary-Alice. I have a Sascha voice that I don’t much like, and a Mary-Alice tone that sometimes hits right.

Recently I asked someone to be the voice of Aisha, and I loved her accent. But she’s wandered off to other endeavours, leaving me with just four bites of dialogue in a single episode. I’ll have to record those bites again, in my own voice.