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I'm really pleased to welcome GP, lifestyle medicine expert and GP educator Anish Kotecha to Bedside Reading today. We are talking about a book called Age Proof by Rose Ann Kenny. You may be relieved to discover that when we say the science of aging, we are not talking about the science fiction of anti-aging and we're certainly not talking about chemicals or drugs or modifications of anything other than lifestyle. It was really good to talk to Anish about connection, about intimacy, about the quality of relationships, about purpose, about exercise: things that actually are within our power as healthcare professionals to start exploring with our patients. We need to be thinking about the evidence base behind that and how we communicate it more effectively.

Follow Anish on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/anish-kotecha-547a4495

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Happy New Year listeners! Have you made any New Year's resolutions? Have you decided that 2025 is the year where things are going to be different? Have you been thinking about boundaries? Or about well-being? Or about that hideous word resilience which is so misused by NHS managers and has come to be a bit of a dirty word when actually the concept is a really good one.


Today, I'm delighted to be talking to Chrissie Mowbray and Karen Forshaw about their book, How to Rise: a Complete Resilience Manual. This is a really innovative book, which is all about providing us with easily accessible tools to make us better, to be thinking about resilience in a sense of emotional resilience, psychological resilience, physical resilience, relationship resilience, and to try and be better versions of our best selves. It's a really accessible, useful book and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Chrissie and Karen.

Find Karen and Chrissie here: https://www.resilientpractice.co.uk/

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I've got a collaborative Twixtmas special coming up today. I've asked a number of friends of the podcast to tell us about their top read of 2024 and what they're most looking forward to reading in 2025. Thanks for joining me in 2024, and I'm looking forward to sharing plenty more books with you in 2025.

Featured today are the voices and choices of:
Sabina Dosani https://sabinadosani.com/
Leah Hazard https://www.leahhazard.co.uk/
Derek Ochiai https://twitter.com/DrDerekOchiai
Helen Blomfield https://www.helenblomfield.co.uk/
Pim Dhahan https://www.linkedin.com/in/pim-dhahan-1a21a5b9/
Nicola Ennis https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-ennis-3b5ab1215/
Claire McKie https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-mckie-a54a52234/
Nicola Davis https://bsky.app/profile/drnicoladavis.bsky.social and  https://bsky.app/profile/crxeate.bsky.social
Anna Baverstock https://bsky.app/profile/annabav.bsky.social
David Hindmarsh https://www.youtube.com/c/GPTemplates
Kate Wharton  https://www.instagram.com/katewharton27/?hl=en
Dani Hall https://x.com/danihalltweets and https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/

The books we recommended are:

Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
Song of the Whole Wide World by Tamarin Norwood
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
In Memoriam by Alice Wynn
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li
The Trees by Percival Everett
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Divided by Annabel Sowemimo
How to Save Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Unheard by Rageshri Dhairyawan
Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdal
You be Mother by Meg Mason
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The books we are looking forward to are:

Heartstopper 6 by Alice Oseman
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Book of Dust Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith
Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The 5th book in Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club Series
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel
Poems as Friends by Fiona Bennett
Kokoro by Beth Kempton
Microskills by Adaira Landry and Reesa E Lewiss 
Your Worry Makes Sense Martin Brunet
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

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I imagine there may be lots of listeners who are very familiar with Marion Keyes and the Walsh family so it was a great joy today to be talking to Rosie Shire about the latest in the Walsh family saga, My Favourite Mistake by Marion Keyes. There is some typical Marion Keyes in that you know that nothing really, really bad is ever going to happen, that the plot is going to keep you going as you go along and there's going to be nothing truly miserable.

There's quite a lot of depth in this story as we follow Anna, 47, recently split from a long-term relationship, as she moves to small town Ireland from New York. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for a start, a local GP is not going to give her HRT.

Rosie and I had a great conversation  about what it is to be middle aged, about relationships, about menopause, about access to HRT. I really hope you're going to enjoy listening to what we had to say.

We mentioned some menopause training resources:
https://thebms.org.uk/
https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Education-and-Training/essentials-of-menopause-care.aspx
https://www.menopausematters.co.uk/
https://drjengunter.com/

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Today's book is one like nothing else I've ever read. It's a real treat to talk to liaison psychiatrist Amy Gledhill about In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Mercado. This is an extraordinary memoir. It is incredibly beautifully written and it is ostensibly about a controlling and abusive relationship with the complicating factor of being a queer relationship. There's much more to it than that. It is incredibly beautifully written, very very short chapters, so incredibly readable and
quick and though deep and one that you might well want to go back to again and again. 

There is so much learning and reflection in the book and I've really really enjoyed exploring it with Amy.

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It's a huge treat today to welcome Chella Quint OBE to Bedside Reading. Chella is a period activist and educator from Sheffield and she is the author of two absolutely wonderful books including Own Your Period: a fact-filled guide to period positivity which I think is quite possibly one of the best non-fiction books for young people that you could ever want to read. It is phenomenal for older people as well and for grown-ups, for doctors, for anybody, definitely definitely one to put on your Christmas list  to give to lots of people. It's a book that debunks so many period myths and answers so many potentially unanswered questions. 

I had a great conversation with Chella.  Please do follow her period positive  website https://periodpositive.com/

and and her social media:
https://www.instagram.com/period_positive/

https://twitter.com/PeriodPositive

https://www.facebook.com/periodpositive/

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A warm welcome today to former GP and now headache specialist, Dr Janice Heath, who joins me today to talk about The Outrun, Amy Liptrot's memoir of alcoholism, addiction, recovery and living in Orkney. It's a really beautiful book which has been made into a very recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and the storytelling and the imagery in the book are absolutely stunning. (Janice has watched the film. I haven't yet. I've seen the trailers though and actually the images seem just as Amy describes them and in her beautiful, beautiful writing.) There's a lot to think about here in terms of thinking about addiction and recovery:  addiction and the path through from chaos into something manageable. I really enjoyed talking to Janice much in the same way that I really enjoyed the book.

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It's a welcome back today to psychiatrist Gill Patterson, who's here to talk about the Scottish Book Trust's Book Week Scotland publication of 2024, which is called Hope. This is a collection of true stories written by people from Scotland. The Scottish Book Trust produce 65,000 free copies of Hope which are available in Scotland or from the Scottish Book Trust website https://shop.scottishbooktrust.com/products/hope-book It was brilliant to talk to Gill both about her own story that is featured in this collection and about what this collection means and why the Scottish Book Trust are such a fabulous organisation.

We mentioned some resources around perinatal mental illness

RCGP perinatal toolkit https://elearning.rcgp.org.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=13115&chapterid=606

RCPsych https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and-mental-health-problems/post-natal-depression

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It's a real joy today to welcome GP Eugenia Lee back to Bedside Reading to talk about Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See, which is a fabulous novel. It's historical fiction based on the true character of Tan Yunxian who was a doctor in 15th century China . She lived to the ripe age of about 92 and published a book of her cases in 1511. That book survived into the current day and Lisa See has picked that up, and what is known of Lady Tan and then created this fabulous historical novel. It's a really, really good read and I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Eugenia about it.

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It was a huge honour to get an email from Rachel Zimmerman's publicist asking if I would consider reading a pre-publication copy of her new book, Us After, and to have Rachel on the show. Us After is the astonishing memoir of Rachel and her daughters' lives after the death of her husband Seth by suicide.

Before you think this is all going to be very, very depressing, it really isn't. It's an incredibly important and insightful book which Rachel describes as being "a little window for those people who say, 'I can't imagine what it must have been like'" because she wanted to give other people a sense it. There's family life. There are tears. There is the incomprehensible death of her beloved husband and through it so much optimism and hope and a sense of needing to move forwards. I absolutely loved Us, After and I have really, really enjoyed talking to Rachel.