Alonement gets tremendously highbrow this week. Fans of comedy and Philip Larkin alike will love this episode with radio presenter and stand-up comedian John Robins. Since winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2017 with his show, ‘The Darkness of Robins’ – and performing the show on the Live at the Apollo stage the following year – John has become a household name.

In this episode, we discuss everything from Philip Larkin’s solitude-inspired poetry – John drops a line into every comedy show – to John’s engagement to fashion designer Coco Fennell (and the somewhat astonishing revelation that they’ve never even had an argument). Later on, we get on to the downsides of liking alone time too much (apparently this can be a hazard if you’re an introvert, like John) and the best ways to balance your alonement with seeing others, particularly when you live alone.

This conversation really made me think, and introduced me to some fascinating new perspectives – I hope it has the same effect on you.

As for the poems discussed on this episode, John (whom, I later discovered, read English at Oxford) references ‘Vers de Société’ and ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ by Philip Larkin, together with ‘Luck’ by Raymond Carver.

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