From Management To Mushrooms: Suddenly Fired At 49

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On What do you want?

No, really, not for lunch or those sushi would be nice, not for your birthday, or to buy with that tax return or to add to cart. Tonight, Mid Doom scroll No, if you stopped.

Like now.

And set somewhere quiet for a moment and let yourself really think about that question, what do you want? What

You might say, we'll allow it.

Yours might be Love, might be security, might be family, maybe purpose, And from there if you started to build out a life anchored to that word, what would it be? What difference would it make to the very next thing you do and the next I know all this sounds a bit like an inspirational quote on a tea towel or something you saw in cursive fon over a picture of a sunset on Instagram in twenty fifteen. But the truth is mits if we don't ask this question, no

She was fifty.

It was a moment of devastation for Eleanor, one that called for a significant rebuild after the prerequisite period of rocking in a corner. Obviously, and you won't be surprised to hear this, being middle and everything, that what Eleanor did next was completely transformative. But before you think that this is just a story about super successful ad types

Well, I think the first thing that's really crucial to say, and hello everybody from London, is that you're never too old and it's never too late to become the woman that you always wanted to be. And in fact, I would say that it's a kind of fifty plus that we really get an opportunity to start digging it into

It was a massive shock.

I'd kind of gone up there with all my files and my or my forward planning for the next few months to talk to the new editor, and I walked into the.

Room, and I suddenly realized it was.

That meeting tissues on the table, and it was the head of HR and the editor and they started talking about you know, and it's just one of those really surreal things, a bit like being in a car crashed, or when you are talking to someone and you realize they're trying to break up with you, or you know, with something really massive shifts in your life, or if you get a terrible diagnosis.

It was a bit like that.

It was really weird. Everything just stopped. I wrote about it in my book that I could hear these voices talking and all I could see was the tugboat chugging very slowly up the Thames, and these birds, kind of pigeons flying around the kind of roof of the cathedral in the middle of London. And it's a very weird thing that you suddenly feel like you're not there in your own life, and everything that I thought I was and everything that I thought my life was suddenly stopped.

In that way. And I also realized that this.

Incredible wave that i'd caught, this kind of journalistic wave that i'd caught as an early woman in my early twenties, the kind of twenty five years on, had come to an end, and I've been spat off it and it was like, Wow, what am I going to do next?

For our Australian listeners. The Sunday Times is a very prestigious newspaper, so this is a very impressive job that I'm sure was very much part of your identity. You'd been there for such a long time. You right in your book about how not that long before that happened to you, you'd gone on a trip with a friend for a story where you did a guided psilocybin trip, a mushroom trip, and you had a vision during that for what was going to be your next stage, but

I think I did. I think it was very weird.

I mean, life unfolds in strange ways, doesn't it. So just to rewinder it, I'm not really a kind of psychedelic psychedelic ninja.

Really.

I went to Jamaica to take a whole load of magic mushrooms with one of my colleagues at the Sunday Time is an incredible journalist called Decker Achenhead. If any of you want to know more about it, that she actually won the BBC's Best Article of the Year for the journalistic article that she wrote about our mushroom trip. And we went to Jamaica, where it's legal to take psilocybin magic mushrooms, and we did three heroic doses in a week. So this isn't microdosing. This is like the fault.

I was feeling a bit wobbly when I read those paraclops.

When I read that chapter. She went because she had really bad PTSD.

Her husband had died in front of us about ten years before, and she just felt like she couldn't really feel anything. And I went with her, partly because she's my great mate. I was her editor, and I thought I had a guty of care, but I was also something very deep in me was called to go to Jamaica and take the magic mushrooms.

And it's one of those things.

I'm sure people listening to this will have had times where somebody suggested that you do something and it's quite out of character or not something that you would normally do, but something very deep within you just goes yes this now. And I just had this really overwhelming sense that I was supposed to go to Jamaica with her a hard life, you'd say, and go to the Caribbean and take a shedload of magic mushroom. But actually it was actually quite

Of just everything kind of melting.

They call it ego dissolution, and it was basically as if I had dissolved into a vat of kind of yellow cream. This would be the best way to describe it. I was just flooded with the sense of kind of golden light and connection to all things, and also just suddenly everything being possible, and I almost had the sense.

That I was moving into a new phase.

And that I was being shown kind of shown something new, which was the power of connection and also the power of a massive shift and a change in how we thought about everything. At this point of kind of being in my being in my fiftieth year, I was there actually when I turned forty nine. It was the kind of a few months before I left the Sunday Times.

Possibility of moving into a new act.

It was really really powerful, and I felt that I'd been shown that somehow as a guiding.

Light through what was to come.

Do you think I've heard you say that you know this is at this sort of transitional point, particularly if for transition that was already happening, then was kind of given a shove for you that this is a really important time for women of our age to go what is it that I really want? And you. Yes, it sounds like in your story the part of your job that you particularly loved helping people building connection, you know,

I think a lot of women don't even allow themselves to ask it. I remember going to see a ratherwise teacher and she said, no, she said to me, really is a good exercise for your ladies queen ages as I call them queen agers. I would suggest line a bath or wherever it is that you feel kind of happy and relaxed, maybe on your sofa or on your sundown jeting with it in summer in Australia, ild it

And it's very funny when you try and do that As a woman. I found when I was.

Laid there trying to think about what I really wanted, my brain cut in. Before I'd even been able to articulate what it was that I might actually truly want. My my brain had kind of cut in to go, that's ridiculous. Shut up, don't be you know, don't be don't be proposed.

Be selfish, greedy, Yeah, don't be really, don't don't be unrealistic.

And I think that women are very good at not allowing themselves to dream big or to even tap into what that desire might be or might kind of even look like in their wildest dreams. And I think you're never going to get to that place of kind of not just success in a kind of world achievement sense, but more kind of fulfillment be on your wildest dreams if you won't even allow yourself to contemplate what that

It's quite a scary one.

So I write in my book about I think what I talk about is the capacity to.

Shape shift at this point in life.

And I think that for a lot of women, there are so many expectations, particularly of our age, about what we were supposed to do or what kind of good look like, that we've never actually allowed ourselves to kind of form our own organic shape. So like if you were kind of pouring some kind of wax or something into a mold and you were going to let it, let it completely settle into what it wanted to become, you know, essence of essence of you, kind of essence

Twenty five to fifty.

Women are often ticking the boxes that other people have given them, all the things that we were supposed to do, you know, be a good wife, a good mother, a good a good daughter, a good employee. You know, we're trying to be kind of good and fit into all the things that society is telling us we're supposed to do. And I don't think we're ever really encouraged to ask ourselves what is it that we really want? You know,

I'm going to be back with more from Eleanor Mills right after this quick break. You have built a community called Noon of your ages, as you call them, which is us wonderful women in midlife. I've heard you say too, to follow on from what we were just talking about, that you feel like this age and reclaiming it is almost the last frontier of feminism because the patriarchy kind of has no use for us anymore in a way, and so we're free to draw our own maps, is

Yes, yeah, okay, So I would say that patriarchy, which is basically the and that this is not to kind of slag off kind of all individual men, many of whom are lovely, but patriarchy is the system which has definitely kind of groomed us, if you like, kind of programmed us to women to behave in certain ways and We've been living within patriarchy for you know, several thousand years, and basically what patriarchy values women for is being you know, young. Second.

Maybe we're a bit useful as Grandma's.

Still a bit of caring left in the.

Still a bit of useful care and left in us. But the reality is that thirty percent of women my queen ages certainly here in the UK are child free, and about forty percent of those who don't have kids have actively chosen not to have children. So that's quite a big cohort of our generation. So if the only definition of possibility of what you are as you get older is being a granny and about a third of women don't have.

Children, that's a huge number of queen.

Agers who don't fit into the kind of you know, the what my society might see as a norm. I wouldn't say it's a normal. I think it's almost as normal now not to have kids. So what I'm interested in is that we're talking about this map. There's this sense that the current paradigm about what women in midlife are four is massively norm fit for purpose, and kind of.

Out of days.

And when I talk about creating a new map, I think what we're trying to do is to create new signposts and a new map, a sense of what this bit from fifty to seventy five or you know, we're quite a lot of us likely to live into our nineties or till we're one hundred.

What does that next half of our life look like.

I called my community noon as in the middle of the day, because in the one hundred year life, fifty is only halfway through.

It's like we're only at lunchtime. We've got the whole of the afternoon in the evening to come.

You know.

It's partly why I called my book much More to Come.

So I just think we need to reframe this bit of our life, and for me, the possibility of the possibility, and I've actually shown it in what I've done myself, is that at fifty we can massively pivot, reinvent, and become something different. And actually, if we're going to live that long, it's preposterous to think that you would start doing something in your twenties and still be doing it at fifty. In fact, when I was made redundant from the Saenter times later, my friends were.

Like, well, what do you mean else?

You know, I've been through like five jobs in the time that you've been there. That sense that you would go and work somewhere and you would be there for the whole of your career just doesn't really stack up anymore. So my book is also and what we do at Noon is a kind of a real call to people to say, don't get stuck in kind of old thinking of this three stage life that you kind of get educated,

Looks like for loads of different women.

Because it's also really important, I think not to get too prescriptive about what that has to be. No more shoulds that The point is at fifty you get a chance to become the woman that you always wanted to be, and that looks differently for everyone. So what I'm encouraging is that voyage of in a discovery or purpose within the world or just whatever it is that you came into the world thinking that you wanted to do, and really giving yourself a chance to do that before it's too late.

The women that you are, that are in that community, and it's an amazing thing to have built that bad just I'm so in all it is a time of immense possibility and change, and we know ourselves well and I couldn't agree with you more that it's the time when in a way we're told that we should be feeling a little bit ashamed of ourselves and a little bit sad and embarrassing. But actually, as I always say,

Bit of it.

No, No, for sure you talked about sitting with her in her last days, and you wrote it is such a typical midlife experience, this sitting with someone beloved who is leaving us, but doing it has made me realize something important, That this is the real grit of life, being there in the preciousness of these final times, that ultimately we are all each other, interconnected into woven. It is at these massive times of transition that the bones

I think at this time of life, what is incredibly important to remember is just that sense of ying, the kind of ying yang the light and the darkness, the darkness and the light, that wherever we are in our lives, every.

Thing is present.

I think it was one of the things that I learned most from the mushroom retreat I did, actually, which was that in the kind of greatest kind of the greatest light, that great sense of kind of golden connection, there's also always the possibility of the darkness. And I think something about midlife is being becoming more comfortable was sitting with both and realizing, certainly sitting with my mother in law when she was dying, I was very fond

And then what you.

Realize is that, you know, we've been together for nearly thirty years, we've got two daughters, but.

We have it's always that we've taken on the mantle.

From his mum to kind of look after him, and that that real adulting is the kind of you know, the business of midlife is that really kind of moving into our power.

But also part of that power is.

The power to support people really when they really need it, whether that's a kind of adolescent who's having a kind of been a massive anxiety crisis or self harming or something like that. Seen so many friends go through that, so many women or people kind of in the astral portal at the other end, when they're dying, and really what we what we do at this point is we come into our power to be able to manage not just ourselves but the people around us as they go

When we come back after the break, ellenor Mills tells us exactly how she's looking after herself and look, it's freezing, but we'll be right back.

One of the things I always do now in midlife is I swim every day and I get in the cold water, and I love that kind of rush, the kind of immediacy of this here now, the birds, that kind of light on the water, noticing the leaves every day, that kind of being plunged into nature.

I live in the briddle of a city, so that's really important to me.

And I wake up in the morning and I meditate for twenty minutes or half an hour, and I try and make sure that I do some pilates or something twice a week so I don't seize up, and I go for walks. And so it's also about putting some good stuff and some proper time back into our cells,

You know, just caring for them.

Also this thing about the gen Z's epidemic of anxiety in our gen Z kids and having to look after them, and then you know, other health staff, a bit of menopause, all of those things. There's kind of massive shifts that happen.

In life at this point. But I think that we have to.

Certainly, what I realized for myself was in that massive shedding, that sense of what had been at the same of my life disappearing in that loss, in that space is actually the possibility of something else being able to grow if we can.

See it in that way.

So rather than feeling all the time the loss, the loss, the shedding, how can I bear it, it's kind of also seeing it as a bit of a clearing out, so clearing a space where you might plant something new, which you know, if you're lucky, might actually be better. That's the kind of hope that I'm trying to hold.

But I think we bring this huge wisdom.

This capacity for love, for connection to be there to kind of hold the ring, but also for this self actualization of you know, who you know, what is it that you really want to do? You know in this your one world and precious life. This is the thing that you are here to do only you and that's not necessarily just looking after other people. You know, what's the what's the kind of special bit of magic that you want? Is it a book that you've always wanted to write, or do you paint or do you have

This might be a silly question, but when you were working, when you were working, I mean you're working. You're probably working harder than ever running your own thing. Like, let's be honest, when you had your other job, your big job, the big Sunday Times job, were you meditating, swimming in the lake realizing these things for it? Like were you no?

No?

Soh my god, so big the transformation you've been through in these last few years, and this is this is this right putting yourself at the front.

Yeah, is completely huge.

So so this is what I mean by finding the kind of the silver lining, as it were in the in the loss is that when I was missus, you know, Super Hauncher of the Sunday Times, editorial director, editor of the magazine Share of Women in Journalism, I was so busy. I was I think I was addicted actually to the to the business of it. So I was one of those people who had every time I went back to my phone there were probably like fifty emails that I

To swap one very kind of massively busy job.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Do you have to watch your addiction to work like, because obviously you are incredibly busy running two businesses and writing books, but you now obviously have realized the how essential it is to you to build in the time for the things that keep you sane and running. Yeah, And I think, so, do you have to watch your work addictions or do.

You have to watch my workaholism?

But I also it's just a different thing, you know. I set up my life now so every day at twelve, I go up to the pond and I swim. You know, I make sure that whatever.

Do you do that even now?

Yeah? Yeah, are you in London. Temperature in the pond where.

I saw of every day at the moment is five or six degrees. You were saying the shivering winter at thirteen. That's why I was smiling to herself. I was thinking, oh that that was early in the autumn. Yeah, it's five or six degrees. Sometimes it's kind of frozen.

But there's something.

About going into that cold water which absolutely makes you have to focus on them.

Now.

And I think that when you're doing those very busy jobs or you're kind of running on business all the time, You're always thinking about something else, you're always distracted from actually kind of where you are and the reality of that. And so I try now to be much more in that present. And I also spend a lot of time sitting in big circles of queen ages, listening to them and hearing their stories and hearing their own way that

All those other women. So you come in and someone will have say, just got divorced.

I was in a terrible circle last week where a woman said she literally just found out that her husband of thirty years had been having an affair and she just didn't know what to do. And one of the other women in the in the circle had been in that situation eighteen months ago, and so there's this amazing sense it almost like that we're all kind of going around the spiral, and some of the women are a bit further along the journey, some are just beginning it.

But as we sit together and the.

Story is unfold, the woman who feels like she's just been, you know, not pushed off a cliff, can see that there is a way through, and maybe several different ways through. So one woman had decided that she was going to be in a kind of more open marriage because she didn't want to spit up with her husband. Another had sent him packing and had kind of moved into a

The women who've been through the most end up the happiest.

That there's a sense of the shedding, kind of clearing out space for what they really want to do, and they end up happiest because they have created a life which is resonant for them. And for what I mean by that is that you create a life for yourself which looks on the outside how you feel on the inside. So lovely woman in my book who I met actually in Jamaica, when after I'd been made redundant, I went out there again and I went I was in a

Feel on the inside.

That they kept kind of moving on, and you know, they'd made loads of friends and they were exploring, and she said, this is what I've always wanted to do. And there was something for me that lit a spark for me, this sense that you really could completely change everything and have a completely different, new kind of life at this point, that there really was the opportunity of embracing somebody that you'd never really known was inside you.

And that's what that's really.

My call to all queen ages is kind of you know, if you really could do anything, what might that be and what is your awakened self calling you to do? Because I do think that there's a sense that we know somewhere deep within us that we might be something else.

It's just allowing ourselves to tune into that and to dream.

Oh, I love it. I was about I was going to ask you what was the most wonderful thing about being in circles with all the queen ages, But it sounds like it's wisdom and experience.

It's wisdom. Experience is huge humor.

One of the things that we do on some of our retreats, because I run a lot of retreats, as I make them do or make them do, the invitation is to come and do some drumming, and we do these this crazy kind of samba drumming and it's.

Like we did it. We did it earlier this year we had.

Forty women all like banging drums and banging their triangles and things.

It was like being in a kindergarten class. I've never seen such total joy and kind of manias. And they couldn't believe how much noise we'd made. They could hear us about two miles away in the village, and it.

Said, it's a real sense of again getting into the moment, being you know, really tapping back into some joy, kind.

Of saying that we're allowed to kind of have fun and some silliness. I get them to get into. It's quite a bit of a cold water theme here.

We do a bit of ice baths and swimming in the cord pond on the top of the Yorkshire Malls and then going into a sauna.

But what I also.

Find is really important at this point is to get the women slightly out of their comfort zone because I think if you realize that if you do something that you've never done before, kind of at fifty or sixty or whenever it is, you know, you get yourself on an ice bath, or you you know, you climb up a mountain, we do incredible trips as well, then you suddenly realize that actually you're not done yet, that there's still quite a lot of stuff that you can do.

Another big transition for a lot of queen ages or mids is if you do have children, them growing older. I actually had my kids late, so I'm still dealing with nits and school bags even though I'm back.

Exactly.

But I think one of your daughters has just graduated UNI and your other one is at UNI, and you've written a little bit about empty nesting and about the end of this massive phase of your and your husband's life of always having practical jobs on the go, always having to tend to their needs, making food, doing all the things. And I know that older children still need a lot of you, but it's a different it's a

Well, when it.

First happened, it was absolutely agonizing. I'm writing the book, and it's actually one of the book where I had I had to read the audio version of the book, and actually the bit where my little one goes off to university, I can't It was about the only bit in the book that really made me cry. And there's there's quite a lot of bits in the book which are quite emotional, but there's something visceral about you know, being in her bedroom and packing up her apans and

Seven, you know, just look at where are they? Are they here? Are they fed? Are they in the house? Stops? And they go off and you're not responsible for them in that way.

But I so I felt, really, really felt the loss of that, felt very very sad about it.

But that passes.

And what I would also say is there's a huge opportunity. You know, there's a huge opportunity in this. You suddenly get all this space which is not being touched kind of you know, taken up with swimming things and school runs and you know, the pta and all that stuff which you can. So I think what we see with a lot of the women is that actually seventy percent of the women when they hit fifty want to power up their careers, partly because the kids have gone.

And suddenly you've got all this time.

You know, all those years of having to run back and be there for bedtime or feeling really guilty.

That you weren't there. Suddenly they're not there anyway, so you know, you can do whatever you like. So that's why.

And you've got all this experience, you've experience you know a lot exactly.

But the problem is is that because of the gender and agism in our culture, and we've got all these women who want to power up, I've got all the experience and now got all this time. But that's not the way the organizations see us. Right, So one of the other big pieces of work that we're doing at noon with the you also with the UK government is.

To really talk about this sense of elongating.

Thinking about women's careers so that employers understand that attually it fifty we might want to power up, that we've been doing all this kind of caring for the last twenty five years.

But and so this might be an opportunity where we really move into leadership. You know, we finally break.

Those glass ceilings, we finally get enough you know, more women, you know, running stuff, because we move into our wisdom and our power in our fifties. But the culture doesn't see that. They would rather corporate world would much rather have rather pleasing, you know, young women who are a bit pliable and say yes, you know, and look pretty, whereas actually queen ages are the masters of managing complex change, really interesting review and the Harvard business with you so

That we had together before we had children.

We can go traveling where we look after each other quite a lot, we have there's so much time, you know, we have.

We have a really lovely time together. So I think that that's.

Also a kind of bonus that nobody kind of ever really talks about. And then the parenting challenges of older children are really different. So I'll give you an example. I suddenly had my daughter who's in Paris. She graduated from Oxford this summer. She's in Paris working as a no parent like out her French and doing a translation courts and stuffs, having a lovely time. But I suddenly got all from her very very late on a Sunday evening, going,

You suddenly get.

A call going, you know, I've lost my cash point card in I've lost my bank card in Laos or you know, or.

Up up in Manchester.

All the all the smoke alarms are going off and I don't know what to do or kind of how do I get in touch with my landlord?

Or so you get.

Something very you get very very intense incoming like crikee, how do I sort out how do I find her a new bank card when she's in Cambodia and I'm sitting in London. That kind of those kind of logistical things and a lot of kind of emotional backup, but it's.

A different thing.

And I also think that there's something around being confident in the way that we've created these new humans that they can stand on their own feet. I love that the gilbron the Prophet's poem about our children are the arrows that we shoot into the future. That we don't own them, we can't control them, we can't control their minds. Our job is to stand firm like the archer with the bow and shoot them forward and let them do

There in essence, and then you have to let them get on with it.

This is what I find. My daughter is about to be fifteen, and she yeah right, and she is not me, and that is my I always say that's my biggest parenting lesson that I learn every day. Is that she's not me. I find there's so much joy in watching her become this person. You know, yes, but it's it's but but I ask you for reassurance because one minute she's like she needs mommy, don't go away for work, Mum, I need you here, And then the next day it's

But I think what you have to remember is it does it comes round. So I had such a it's my birthday last week and I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang and there was a man with an enormous bunch of lilies. My daughter's called Alice Lily, and she'd sent me lilies from Paris with this beautiful card of me and her when she was a baby, going, you know, love you, you know, love you, marm from your and she used her baby nickname on this card, and I.

Just burst into tears. It was so sweet. So so you do get you.

Know, we've definitely had our moments kind of during her adolescence, but I think that there's this kind of great sweetness that it kind of comes full circle if you let them go and there's this thing when their adolescent of they need you terribly when they need you, but then they don't want you anywhere near near them. So the trick is to try and be available in the moments when they need you, and that is hard, particularly once a kind.

Of working, working women.

And I think one of the other sweetnesses of what happened to me was it was just before the pandemic that I was made redundant. So I had these three very special years when I was very much at home.

You know, we were we were kind of all hanging out together.

We did a lot of baking, We did a lot of sitting around kind of you know, watching watching kind of you know, Emily.

In Paris or Lasso or whatever.

Altogether, that was a real kind of sweetness, an extra kind of bonus that I hadn't really hadn't really expected because it was that last bit before they went off to university. So I also think, like really kind of hug them close kind of while they're there, and try and set up just a kind of sense that you're I just think that you're you're always there for them, that you love them, whatever, that their lover is really unconditional.

A lovely.

Jamaican friend said to me that as parents, you know that you can't accept the love is the love that you give as a parent is not conditional. It's just you know you you love them, that you give them, that you don't expect anything back from it. And I think that that's quite important. That's not necessarily how I felt about my own parents. And I try and stay very strongly to my children all the time. I just want you to be exactly what you want to be.

Pouring into the mold and who is it that you want to be.

I really feel with my daughters that they are able to kind of take the shape that they want to take, that they've got a kind of a real investment in that, Whereas for me, I felt very much that I was being poured into asking mold that my parents wanted me to be in, whereas I think for them, their mold is more free form, I hope, so I'm always saying to them that I'd like that to be the case.

One last question for you, Eleanor when you look at the at the next stage, the post seventy five quadrant, I guess harvest they call what kind of glorious old lady do you want to be? In your heart?

Well, there's that wonderful poem, isn't there about when I'm old, I shall.

Wear purple, wear purple.

So I don't know if I wear purple, so it's not really my color, but I'll certainly wear green. I'll keep going swimming, I'll hopefully. Well, I'm really looking forward to actually just having loads of grandchildren. I spent the weekend with my I've got a baby niece called CC who's three, and I spent a very happy day on Saturday kind of doing puzzles and hanging out with baby CC. So I'm really looking forward to being a grandma.

But I also want to go on writing. I'm want to run my community.

I hope that Noon becomes a really terrifying load of kind of old queen ages kind of tripping around the world. We're just about to launch a big trip tos Bekistan and we're going to do sixty percent of solo travelers are queen ages.

So we've just done a big link up with.

A voyage Jules vern and I'm going to take a whole load of queen ages all over the world to.

Kind of be town and Zbekistan and India and on.

The Oh my god, I want to calm.

I'm calming.

Yes, in come it's going to be called it's called Noon Voyage, just part of the voyas Jules Verne, which is a big part of KUNI, And we're doing a whole kind of travel kind of brand. So I'm going to be so hopefully. My mum is eighty one. She came skiing with us on a queen Age of ski trip last year and it's still like paddle boarding. So I'm hoping that my granny little she was ninety seven and could still do headstands and yoga yoga poses in her.

Just got to keep moving right, just got to keep moving, Eleanor, thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. We will put, of course, the links to where people can buy your book, where people can find out more about Noon and all your queen ages in the show notes of the podcast. But thank you for giving me your time.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been great. It's been really interesting to talk to you.

Meditation and cold swims. It seems that these are now the markers of midlife in a way that might once have been a comfy cardian, some flat shoes, two other things that can be quite partial too, actually, but I think that these signifiers of self care might just be better for us. If you want to know more about Eleanor and her noon circles, there's a link in the show notes to find out and or so to where

Here.

The executive producer of mid is and I am A Brown. The senior producer is Grace Rufray, and our producer is Charlie Blackman. And we've had sound design and editing by Jacob Brown. And I'm Holly Wainwright and thank you for listening.