It's a spontaneous Cursed Side Quest, outside and on main! We're in the pub with dear friends and returning guests Biz K and Nick Bano, diving into the recent history of socialist government (!!) in London, after a very fun trip to the London Archives for an open day showcasing their GLC collection - propaganda posters, Thamesmead brochures, letters, flyers, guides to 'combating heterosexism', memos, all sorts of gold. This covers the period 1981-86, when London surged into the future under the bold leadership of Mayor 'Red' Ken, a very fighty bulwark against Thatcherism - and the heyday of the 'loony left'. What lessons are there to be learned? What should we be excavating from that period to guide us now? What would the Angel of History have us do with the rubble?

So after a fascinating hour or two in the archives we went - feeling inspired - to the pub, and ambushed our friends into recording with us.

For more from barrister and writer Nick Bano, check out his episode with us about his brilliant book Against Landlords: https://www.cursedobjects.co.uk/episodes/against-landlords

For more from writer and multimedia mogul Biz K, check out his episode with us and pal Jonathan Nunn, discussing Jamie Oliver's extremely cursed CD compilation album: https://www.cursedobjects.co.uk/episodes/jamies-cursed-cookin 

If you can afford £4 a month and want our many exclusive bonus episodes, do please support our Patreon! We both have jobs and we need a little bit of financial support for CO to justify carving time out to record, edit, etc - we do this all ourselves <3

And if you are in or visiting London, go and check out the London Archives! These resources are there for us all: https://www.thelondonarchives.org/

Remember in 2010 when 10 million Brits watched the first ever televised leader debate, and we collectively lost our minds? 

We ponder the moment of madness that was ‘Cleggmania’, and the associated phrases ‘Cleggstacy’ and political fandoms ‘Milifans/ Milibaes’. What was it about Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a formerly stuffy party that no one could even get excited enough to hate, that drove everybody wild? What was behind the national hallucination that he ‘wasn’t like the others’? And why were people taken in by his neat haircut and near-identical class background to Tory leader David Cameron? Little did we know he was destined for a life even greater than politics (working for Meta). 

In a rare three-object episode, we follow the trajectory of Westminster’s former golden boy Nick Clegg; from students sporting home-made yellow ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirts at flash-mobs, to royal marriage-style mugs commemorating the union of Nick and ‘call me Dave’ Cameron in the Coalition government, to finally, inevitably, Clegg’s transition from ‘the UK’s Obama’ to his lucrative multi-million pound life after politics. There is lots to read about Nick Clegg and the Coalition years, but this LSE blog by Katy Parry and Kay Richardson was especially thought provoking.

This episode turned out way more ranty than we intended it to, sorry about that! 

Also, please do subscribe to the Cursed Objects Patreon! You'll be supporting this work we otherwise do UNPAID, and it's only £4 a month - in exchange for which you get exclusive bonus episodes, in between the free ones on the main feed. There are over 40 bonus episodes on there you could access right away.

What’s for dinner? A handful of grated cheese? Some olives and a croissant? A whole crab, eaten in bed? This one goes out to all the exhausted girlies who can’t be arsed to cook. What wonders emerge when women find moments of freedom from compulsory and unpaid domestic labour? Ladies, gentlemen and nonbinary pals, welcome to the cursed/blessed super-trend that was, and is, GIRL DINNER.

This week Dan and Kasia are joined by a very special guest, writer and academic Eli Davies, whose authorial debut The Spinster Cookbook is published today! Together we ask: is ‘girl dinner’ infantilising, or a moment of feminist liberation? How do people eat differently when their lives are affected by chaos, stress and being a bit ‘goblin-like’ – and why might Girl Dinner offer a relief, and comfort, when life feels unrelenting? And how does it intersect with gendered notions of ‘what women should eat’ – are women still performing a role in service of patriarchy if there are just a few chaotic scraps on the plate, and no protein? We talk about the meaning of the word 'spinster' - and why Eli thinks it is preferable to ‘single’. And ask the vital question: was the Ploughman’s Lunch the original girl dinner? 

Also: “What about ‘mum dinner’?”, as Laura Thomas asked in a recent essay?

Buy THE SPINSTER COOKBOOK: Culture, Politics and Pleasure in the Single Woman’s Kitchen – which is OUT NOW.

It’s a book which draws on Bridget Jones, Annie Ernaux, Sex and the City and Doris Lessing with equal enthusiasm, along with Nigel and Nigella, Delia and Jamie. And we love it.

Also do subscribe to Eli’s Substack!

Also, do subscribe to the Cursed Objects Patreon! You'll be supporting this work we otherwise do UNPAID, and it's only £4 a month - in exchange for which you get exclusive bonus episodes, in between the free ones on the main feed. There are over 40 bonus episodes on there you could access right away.

CO is back, with a dream guest for Dan and Kasia: Professor Patrick Wright, author of On Living in an Old Country and The Village That Died for England, joins us for an urgent and vital conversation about Englishness, heritage, national decline, landscapes, Brexit and Reform, historical memory, and social and cultural disintegration.

This is a conversation about "the direly persistent English question" - one which will not go away.

"I don’t even have a history O’level - history came to me, rather than me coming to it,” Patrick tell us, taking us on a fascinating journey beginning in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher appealed loudly to “tradition”, while ripping up norms that would ensure many things would never be the same. We discuss why politics often amounts to, in Patrick’s words, “conjuring with the bones of the dead”, and why the telling of our history is so often framed in terms of crisis: as Heritage in Danger.

How does the landscape shape our idea of the nation, and vice versa? We chew over some great symbolic moments - “radioactive anecdotes” like the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree, the Crooked House pub fire, Foot and Mouth, Dutch Elm disease (“the whole landscape was like a cemetery”), and the elevating of HMS Mary Rose from the sea bed after 450 years.

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Read Patrick's brilliant books:

On Living in an Old Country (1985) 

The Village that Died for England (1995)

The Sea View Has Me Again (2021)

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Do please consider supporting our Patreon! 

You'll also get a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps, and it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

Only 3000 people are invited to Davos, home of the World Economic Forum - and you’re one of them! Well, not really. But welcome anyway to this chocolate-box Swiss mountain town, transformed via "the Champions League of logistics" into a de facto military base for the world's economic, political and corporate superpowers.

Guiding us through this deeply cursed world is very special guest Caitlín Doherty, smuggling us in to encounter some profoundly cursed Davos freebies. Saudi Arabia-sponsored hand warmers? Meta-branded hot chocolate? Pinterest ramen? Ice cream with crickets in? These seemingly disparate objects are a window into the centres of elite power, ‘Great Reset’ conspiracies, the Epstein files, crypto and AI bubbles, and the mysterious technocrat that is Davos Man. How has Davos - the town, and the economic forum - changed, in a world where globalisation is allegedly in retreat? What has changed under the second Trump administration? When was peak Davos, and has it passed? Are Chinese capitalists inside or outside the tent? And what happens when the capitalist class run out of ideas about where to put their money?

Read some of Cait's amazing pieces:

The Davos essay for Harpers

On David Lynch, for the New Statesman

In Dubai, for New Left Review

And keep an eye out for her forthcoming book on Davos!

And follow her on Twitter @caitdoherty

New year, new you, new Cursed Objects - let’s dive in! This week, Kasia breaks the ice and takes us on a plunge into the cursed and blessed world of wild, outdoor and cold water swimming – while Dan nervously dips a toe in to see if he can hack the chills and spills.

Wild swimming – or “swimming”, as it was sometimes known historically – has taken on an outsized and fascinating role in British culture in the last decade or so. How did we go from over 300 lidos dotted around the country to a situation where people are submerging themselves in urban rivers RIDDLED with e.coli, or indeed tragically drowning while swimming in unsupervised ‘unofficial’ spots?

We discuss the stunning mental health benefits of shocking your body swimming outdoors, especially profound in what Kasia calls “the hard floor of winter” – or in Dan’s case, shouting “WIM HOF!” and bellowing Daniel Bedingfield songs while having cold showers. 

Can places like Hampstead Heath’s famous ponds provide the urban community and conviviality neoliberalism has been stripping away from us? Even while it faces down political controversies and Bougie London Literary Woman jokes?

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Do please consider supporting our Patreon! The first of the all-new Cursed Side Quests is coming exclusively to Patreon very soon.

You'll also get a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps, and it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

Luke Skywalker, shut up and eat your jelly! As everyone knows, Christmas is like Cursed Objects Christmas, and so sure enough: it’s the long-awaited CO Christmas Special. REJOICE!

This year, we are talking about childhood experiences of Christmas, then and now. Starting off with toy crazes, from Optimus Prime to Cabbage Patch Dolls, and therefore, the true meaning of Christmas: supply-chain economics. “Kids used to be satisfied by a promissory bond!” Kasia rightly complains. We discuss our own childhood moments of WONDER and AWE, Dalmation-related magick, votive offerings to Father Christmas, and the varied acts of parental pageantry required by the season.

We learn that Wu-Tang Clan are not just for Christmas - Raekwon is a year-round commitment - ask whether Darth Vader is the original Grinch, why children are such sticklers for the rules (and such fans of Dostoevsky), and introduce perhaps correctly overlooked festive characters Krampus and Farmhand Rupert, Santa’s designated driver and NPC.

Have a wonderful holiday, love from Kasia, Dan, Nick and Archie - see you in 2026! x

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Christmas is a time of giving, so do please consider supporting our Patreon:

To access a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

~~~~~

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

What would Christmas be without a tour of London’s lights? For the first of our free xmas podcasts, Kasia and Dan go UP TOWN for an outside (!!) walking tour through Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Known as stressful hot-spots for holiday season breakdowns, these Central London capitalistic hell-holes must have some redeeming features, right?! 

We find out what London’s markets were like in 1870, and why Covent Garden has become London’s epicentre of festive fun. And we ask: why have Germanic Christmas markets sprung up everywhere via American films that make Christmas seem more idyllic than it really is? Admiring the neat Bratwurst, surprisingly acceptable beer and very poor puns, we throw ourselves into the Leicester Square ‘experience economy’. Finally, given that they want us to look up and marvel at the Christmas lights (rather than be terrified of oncoming traffic), why has the City of London not just pedestrianised central London? 

Christmas is a time of giving, so consider supporting our Patreon:

To listen to this episode and all the rest too - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

Not the Queen of Hearts! Greetings, England's roses, and welcome back to the People's Podcast - this week, it's the original parasocial relationship: ROYALTY. 

Kasia is being pursued by a stream of Lady Di-themed cursed objects, and with Dan explores the universe of royal tat, Diana standom, 90s tabloids and the media hysteria around her death and funeral, when Britain discovered EMOTIONS and behaved like honking loons. Some younger listeners may not realise that in the days before TikTok and BBC News 24, commemorative plates were the primary means of news dissemination, and mass-produced soft toys could be a profound avatar for loss.

So it's a wild ride in a white Fiat Uno, discussing dark souvenirism, the anatomy of a Beanie Baby, royal grief in Harvester, the hoarding of historic newspapers, a riot in Woolworths over Candle in the Wind '97, and er ... whatever happened to jacket potatoes?

Regular free and regular Patreon-exclusive episodes are back, baby!

To listen to this episode and all the rest too - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

"Escape to the King's Cross Riviera," said the sign on the construction hoardings - so we did! And it forced us to ask questions like: 'What if you threw a major urban regeneration zone and lots of people came, but then they wanted a branch of All Bar One when they got there?'

In this brand new episode, Kasia and Dan are on an Outside Broadcast Adventure (OBA), captured live during the heart of the London summer in King's Cross, one of the capital's Regeneration Ground Zeroes, a bouji office and leisure district that has been transformed into shiny glass and steel towers in the last 20 years.

Kasia takes Dan on a public art walking tour, and they navigate the glitzy commercial areas, swish landscaped gardens and astroturf seating that have replaced the brick buildings stained with soot, heavy industry and brownfield sites - although clubs like The Egg are hanging on from its edgier era: the rogue nightclub you go to when all the others are shut.

We discuss Google's new side-scraper 'campus', how the knowledge economy and the creative industries became New Labour's engine of urban change, and how you bring joy and a settled identity to areas usually defined by transience, like major railway stations. Also, why are small children so interested in large infrastructure projects?

Regular free and regular Patreon-exclusive episodes are back, baby!

To listen to this episode and all the rest, in full - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL only £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects