Bedside Reading

• Fear and Loathing in Plymouth

  Send us a textWelcome to  November 2025 and season 11 of the podcast,. We are celebrating our 4th Birthday in November and my guest today, Claire Le Day aka GP Steph celebrates her 40th birthday in November. Claire/Steph is here to talk about her fabulous med school diaries which have been published as Fear and Loathing in Plymouth. If you are looking for a book to make you think, to take you on a trip back down memory lane, to remember what it was like to be a teenager, to cringe alongside Steph as she recalls some of the excesses of her first and second year at Peninsula Medical School, really this is a great book to be picking up.So Happy birthday, Claire. Welcome to season 11 of the podcast and Fear and Loathing in Plymouth. Let's go.

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• BONUS EPISODE: The best of what has been....

  Send us a textTo celebrate the end of season 10 and our 4th birthday, today's episode is a little bit different. I've chosen a small snippet of each of the most downloaded episodes from seasons 1-10.I hope you'll enjoy a trip down memory lane!Episodes featured:S1 Jo Stewart and I discuss Instrumental by James RhodesS2 Ed Pooley joins me to discuss Counselling for ToadsS3 Emma Cunliffe and I explore Victoria Cilliers' chilling memoir of abuse I SurvivedS4 The most downloaded episode of all time, Ellie corse and I discuss This Winter by Alice OsemanS5 Kathleen Wenaden and I explore Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie GarmusS6 Kirsty Shires and I talk about the anthopological classic medical humaities text The Spirit Catches You and You Fall DownS7 Rebecca Henleywillis and I talk about Fern Brady's excellent memoir  Strong Female CharacterS8 It's the turn of the memoir of everyone's favourite vicar, The Rev Richard Coles, The Madness of Grief which I loved talking about with Lynsey BennetS9 Time for a poem and Beth Osmond guides us through "Ode to Dalya's Bald Spot" by Ahgel NafisS10 It's The Anxious Generation and Laura Spells and I talk about Jonathan Haidt's book, the smartphone-free-childhood movement and the great rewiring of childhood

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• The Ayatollah's Gaze

  Send us a textIt is a huge pleasure today to welcome doctor and writer, Majid Parsa. We're talking about The Ayatollah's Gaze: a memoir of the forbidden and the fabulous, which is his first boook. What a book and what a memoir it is. I absolutely loved it. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked it up. It has a phenomenal pink cover. It is wise. It is insightful. It is moving. It is very, very funny in places and it was a real window into a world which I might not otherwise ever have known about. This is Majid's story. but it's also the story of a generation of young men in Tehran.It has really, really made me think, and I loved talking to him about it

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• Ultra Women

  Send us a textIt's a real treat today to welcome one of the authors of Ultra Women, Emma Wilkinson to the podcast. Ultra Women, written by Emma Wilkinson and Lily Canter, is a book which rather defies classification. It is a book about women doing extraordinary things in the fields of endurance sport, but it's very much not a "sports book".We've got wonderful stories. We've got sociology. We've got history. We've got physiology. We've got a good dose of "invisible women" in there as well.It's a really, really fascinating, thought-provoking book, which I absolutely loved reading. And it's been absolutely fantastic to talk to Emma today about the book and what we can take away from it.

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• The Age of Diagnosis

  Send us a textSuzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis was hotly awaited and has received a lot of discussion on social media and in the national press.  Ben Tyler and I had both really enjoyed her former books and looked forward to this book.  Overdiagnosis is a bit of a hot topic lately, but as I hope we manage to explore, keeping curiosity and compassion at the forefront of what we do are much more important than making hard judgements.We mention John Harris' brilliant substack on the book https://maybeimamazed.substack.com/p/why-new-book-the-age-of-diagnosisand Elke Housmann's BJGP review of the book https://bjgp.org/content/75/754/228

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