Today is January 26th. 

If you’ve listened to the show for a while you’ll probably have an idea about where I view the significance of this day. If there’s one thing I wish for 2026, it’s that two things can be true at the same time. It is vitally important to celebrate a national identity, the story which binds us together as a community. 

The current day we’re celebrating this concept causes a great deal of pain to a significant number of people in our country. I’m not putting forward at all that we sholdn’t celebrate who we are as a nation, far from it - i think it’s incredibly important to be proud of who we are, what we’ve become and also to recognise where we’ve come from. We can do that in a way which unites us. 
The current way we’re going about it doesn’t really do the job. What kind of community do we want? A community divided along ideological lines so stark that we may as well be separate communities? Or a community united by values which we consider at the core of our national identity, and those ideological lines branch from there, as a way to put those values into action in our daily lives?

For context, today we’re revisiting one of my favourite people in the world - the incredible Stan Grant. 

LINKS:

• Listen to the full interview with Stan from 2021 here
• Listen to my other chat with Stan from 2019 here
• Watch episodes of Better Than Yesterday on YouTube
• Watch Story Club on YouTube and grab tickets to Story Club's next show
• My books So What? Now What? and Back After The Break are available here
• Send a pic of what you're looking at to [email protected]

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