Welcome to the On The Horizon podcast. This podcast series starts by taking you through recordings from our live event, and then will move onto more conversations with more brilliant people, throughout the year.

We felt that the talks that we used to host at The Good Life Experience (our festival of food, ideas, music & craft that we ran for 8 years) on Hawarden Estate were really special and unusual. In many ways it was the guests’ conversations before and after the talks that made them different. We deliberately had no green room or backstage, and so the speakers were able to meet the audience and continue their conversations over a drink or food or whatever.

And then we had the fact that our great, great, (an extra great for Tara) grandfather, William Gladstone Prime Minister, lived here for much of his life and that this means that there is a rich history of important conversations happening here.

So yes, maybe the concept for On The Horizon was taking Hawarden back to the time when politicians and thinkers flooded here in the 1800s; when they had conversations rather than debates.

Gentle, generous, considered conversation feels peculiarly important today. We live in a world of argument, of culture wars, of opinions formed quickly and blurted loudly, of half-facts and fake news. Conversations that involve listening and digesting and conversing are important, entertaining and life enhancing but I can’t help but worry that they are becoming depressingly rare.