How Keir Starmer engineered (?) a standing ovation. 

And how Emma Raducanu fell over, and got up again.

Plus, an assortment of unexpected rhymes.

If you read this after listening, you may like to know that you can get your own fix of Gavin Ewart.

How To Write. In this episode, I bring you the sound of three authors writing - Tony McGowan, Jay Heinrichs and Ian Sansom - then bring them together with the two you may already have heard in what I call A Symphony For Five Writers. 

Then there's a message from one of my sponsors (as we say on podcasts). 

And finally, a chunk from work in progress on a new book proposal, looking back ten years to when I wrote my most successful book (so far, fingers crossed).

If the last bit drives you crazy with enthusiasm, you can also read it and look at the pictures on this web page: Riots, Brooms and Giant Whales. 

Please follow and read my writer friends:

Sathnam Sanghera https://www.sathnam.com/

Pilita Clark https://twitter.com/pilitaclark

Tony McGowan http://anthonymcgowan.com/anewsite/

Jay Heinrichs https://jayheinrichs.com/

Ian Sansom https://www.iansansom.net/ 

Pilita Clark is a columnist at The Financial Times. I used to sit next to Pilita when we both worked on the FT's Saturday magazine. 

I don't suppose it's really possible that the sound of her typing, which you hear in this episode, can really have reminded me of that time - because one person's typing isn't all that different from another's, surely. But listening to it did take me right back, as I pictured Pilita "typing up a storm" (a phrase she used to use herself sometimes).

As you listen, you can hear a wonderful sigh after about 16m 30s. It's not quite a sigh of relief, because she's still got a few minutes left. I don't know what kind of sigh it is. I don't suppose Pilita knows, either. But it makes me think about my own typing process, and how I probably do tend to hold my breath while developing a particular line of thought. 

Incidentally, yesterday I recorded a livestream of myself typing, direct to Facebook. I was screensharing a Google Doc, so viewers could see the words as they appeared, and sometimes disappeared. I streamed it using Zoom, and thought I'd done it so that there was no tiny image of me on the screen - but when I watched a few moments I saw that I was, in fact, visible. 

And I noticed that, though I mostly sit quite still, I do also move my head a certain amount - a bit like a conductor focusing on different parts of the orchestra. I'm not sure what this is about, but am enjoying this ongoing process of examining writing as a performance.

Follow Pilita on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pilitaclark

In this episode, you can hear X writing one of his weekly columns for The Times. 

You can download the published column, and and "feel" the writing as you read it, on this page:

flintoff.org/columnist-what-it-feels-like