Bedside Reading

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A warm welcome today to Pete Aird, who is here to talk about Henry Normal and Angela Pell's wonderful memoir, A Normal Family: Everyday Adventures with Our Autistic Son.

This is a book which absolutely blew me away. I couldn't put it down.  I have adored Henry Normal's poetry for quite some time, and it was a really amazing window into the lives of two people, very successful TV people, and and Henry also as a poet, recognising that their son was going to be different to how they had imagined that he was going to be. They explore the challenges of bringing up a young person who is autistic and has a learning disability and the changes that that has required in them, the feelings that they have had and a really brutally honest portrayal of what it is to love and cherish and parent somebody who doesn't always give anything very much back to you and who you love so very much, want to protect, but don't have all of the tools to parent because the books are all based on a "normal" child.

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A really warm welcome today to Eva Hibbs, who is here to talk about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is an absolutely hilarious and very, very different novel i'm following a nine-year-old boy called Oscar in New York City following the death of his father. It's a really interesting,  thought-provoking novel with themes of undiagnosied neurodiversity and intergenerational trauma. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And it's been great to talk about it with Eva today.

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It's a real honour today to welcome Stephen Unwin to Bedside Reading. Stephen is a theatre director by trade. He's also a brilliant writer. We're here today to talk about his phenomenal book, Beautiful Lives, How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong, which is an incredibly accessible, brilliant page-turner of a book, which runs through some of the history of how society have seen, judged, and categorised people.

It's about othering. It's about ableism. It's a real call to action for all of us to think about the way that we do things and the way that we see people And the fact that everybody must be human first and not labelled, categorised and pushed into a corner somewhere.

It is an utterly, utterly brilliant book. And I have absolutely loved talking to Stephen about it today.

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There might be a little bit of squealy fangirling from me today... I'm delighted to welcome Lee David to the podcast. Lee is a GP by background. She's also a CBT therapist and I remember her from when I was a GP registrar, when she introduced the concept of 15-minute CBT and ran lots of amazing workshops around this.
Lee also hosts an amazing podcast of her own but we're here today to talk about a book called Defy by Sunita Sah which is about why we just go along with things why sometimes, even when all of our body is crying out to us, "no, no, no, this is a terrible mistake" we agree to things. we think about how we can start to recognise that tension and to make different choices keeping our actions aligned with our values.
Lee is an absolutely wonderful speaker and she's somebody who really makes me think and often when I listen to her podcast and and it's been a real delight to host her online today and talk about this brilliant book.

Follow her podcast "The Choice Space" here: https://thechoicespace.co.uk/podcast/

We mentioned NHS Practitioner Health find them here https://www.practitionerhealth.nhs.uk/

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I've got a fabulous guest today, Neonatologist and poet Beth Osmond, talking about her gorgeous collection, Hatchery. This is an utterly, utterly gorgeous collection of beautiful poems, mainly inspired by Beth's career as a Neonatologist.

It is thought provoking, it is funny.,it is gentle, it is deep. There are so many things I could say about it. It is utterly, utterly lovely. Please, please buy yourself a copy. You can buy this direct from the publishers or you could obviously and nip down to your local bookshop and buy it that way instead if you would prefer.

It has been such a joy to talk to Beth and to hear a couple of the poems. It was very difficult for us to choose which two she should share. And there are so many lovely ones, but I'm hoping we will leave you wanting more, loving these poems and wanting to buy your own copy.

Buy your copy now: https://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/2026/05/launching-hatchery.html