Not every Christmas is a merry one, but happy endings are sometimes achievable. The trouble with bad memories is they keep floating out of the woodwork like festive ghouls intent on ruining your happy vibes.

Maria shares how her first 14 Christmases were pretty cruddy and how their lingering presence needs to be put to rest once and for all.

Contains a theme of domestic abuse, just so you know. Nothing graphic though.

For help with domestic abuse, please visit https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help for a list of services available.

If you listened to Episode 3 then you’ll want to hear this one :)

Listen in to find out the names of all the 90s bands included in Episode 3! Maria will guide you through each one. How many did you get?

When a man ‘of a certain age’ dismisses the concerns and accusations of women ‘of a certain age’, it shows he doesn’t have a clue about the lived experience of women.

This episode contains some details of Maria’s own potted history of sexual violence and harassment and why women of a certain age are just fed up now…

How, after almost 30 years of consigning university to a bin labelled failure, reliving shared experiences with old friends helped Maria salvage a part of herself she had forgotten. There was physics, biology and a bit of chemistry.

You can’t rewrite the past, but you can reframe it.

27 years after graduating it’s finally time to attend a reunion of sorts. But after almost 3 decades, Maria can finally admit that university didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped at 18 and that she probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place…

And also, what does she wear?

Everyone’s got one.

Some folks are so desperate to share their opinion (not their, well, you know what) that they won’t wait to be asked.

But not all opinions are created equal and the trick to getting value from someone else’s thoughts is to work out what you need and who you need it from…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/10/the-best-advice-ive-ever-been-given-celebrities-share-their-wisdom

Aah the 90s. Who doesn’t look back on that decade with fond memories? Memories is all we really have as there’s very little photographic evidence of what we got up to.

We still have the music though! Maria’s obsession with Absolute Radio 90s inspires this very short episode but don’t be fooled, you’ve got a job to do…

Can you find the 60+ band names hidden in this episode?

Thought teenage friendships were difficult to navigate? Well not much has changed. Except maybe the new ways we can kill our friendships these days.

Maria didn’t expect to use social media to assassinate a friendship in her 40s, but that didn’t stop it happening. And just when she thought it was resurrected, well what goes around comes around doesn’t it?

What makes a 48 year old woman with a crippling fear of failure suddenly decide to launch a podcast?

Maria explains why now is the time for Gen X women to ditch any obsession with perfection, forget shame or embarrassment and look beyond the constraints of being the sandwich generation.

There are stories to be shared, lessons to be learned and even more ridiculous adventures to be had. And this is Maria’s first…