@SuePreemly listening to what RS said about his mother, she has led a fascinating life. I’ve lifted the transcript of the episode here, it doesn’t specify who is talking where but you can figure it out fairly easily:
“So my mother was a GP's daughter, father was a doctor. She went to Oxford in the 1950s. My mother's down, staying with me in London at the moment.
I hope she is now old enough to not be embarrassed to hear. She's now 88 years old. We walked probably about three miles yesterday through the streets of London with my 88-year-old mother and my two little children.
So, thank goodness, touching wood all over the place, she's in very good form. But she went to Oxford, she worked for Television Wales. She jumped in a Land Rover and drove from London to Kuala Lumpur in the late 1950s.
For Television Wales?
Yeah, I worked for Television Wales, yeah.
What was she doing in Television Wales?
She was a producer and the way she describes it is those were the glory days of television. She was traveling first class on the train up and down to Wales. She loved the Welsh producers, very interested in Welsh language.
Anyway, then she moved to Kuala Lumpur. She became an advertising executive in Malaysia and then she taught at the University of Malaya, taught agricultural economics relating almost to your dad, met my father, came back to London and then we moved back to Malaysia and then Hong Kong where again she was different forms of academic. She ended up being the head of Hong Kong University Business School.
Blimey, she's got much longer adult CV than my mum.
Yeah, in a way you wouldn't really believe it if you met her. She's also incredibly interested in clothes and shoes. She's very laid back.
She loves doing her tapestry and reading trashy novels on the sofa. And she's also somebody, I don't know, she's a sort of counter example to the way that we're told to live our lives. She's somebody who took absolutely no exercise at any point in her entire existence.
And consequently age of 88 is really fit and well.
No, she's amazingly fit for 88, no doubt about that.
And I think her argument is she didn't wear her knees out unlike Joe Biden by doing whatever he was doing.”
From The Rest Is Politics: Question Time: Orban in person, Biden's fragility, and the subtle art of focus groups, 19 Jun 2024
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rest-is-politics/id1611374685?i=1000659404863
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