You could say I have a love/hate relationship with money.  Love it when I have it, hate it when I don't.  Pretty simple you'd think? Yeah, but nah. Money seems to have caused me grief throughout much of my adult life whether I had it or not.  Spending my younger years perched high on the shoulders of my father while he laid bets at the races - horses, dogs, cats or whatever could run that you could bet on - laid the foundations of a pretty dysfunctional relationship with the old'moola.   Life was either feast or famine, party time or povo street, then as an actor - always earning sporadically meant that I have never developed a balanced approach to money.

So now - 7 years into a job which pays monthly, pays super and holiday pay etc, and I actually have money in the bank - how do I feel about it?

Well...It's complicated.

Did Covid change your shopping habits?  Have you bought stuff in the past 18 months that you would never have bought under normal circumstances?  Yeah me too!  Shopping has changed - and it's changed us.  And you can buy some crazy s**t online.  My latest online purchase?  Live lady bugs.  I s**t you not!

Author Nikki McWatters and I get up close and personal about motherhood, writing memoir, shagging pop stars and more.  We marvel at our sliding door lives of growing up on Queensland's Gold Coast - same schools, same teachers, same careers - pondering if our parents had in fact sneakily had it off with each other and are we in fact sisters!!  We also reminisce about our (almost famous) acting careers and how Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman stole our careers.  An episode not to miss!

Nikki McWatters is the author of six books. There are a couple of memoirs in there and a trilogy of young adult novels. She dabbled in all sorts of careers before settling on writing including being a housekeeper at Kerry Packer's mansion and acting in dodgy film and television shows. She lives in the Blue Mountains. Mother of five. Spokesperson for the CEO Sleepout. And passionate op-shopper.

Hooray!!! I made it to launch day - and I'm still sane (relatively) Welcome lovely listeners to my first episode! XXX

Are you one of those people that insist on 'editing' photos of you taken on other people's phones?  Hey no judgement here - me too!  Vanity and opportunity collide to make everyone a Vogue Editor these days.  But just think of all those pics of you that don't make the cut - in ten years time, you'd probably look back on them - and think 'Phoarrrr - I was hot!'  Today I explore that we edit and delete at our peril - because your older self will always look back on photos of younger you with longing and envy - but not if you've trashed them all!!!

In Part 2 of To Market To Market - a podcast/Audible Mash Up - I share an exerpt from my book 'The Gap Year(s)' that charts my early forays into the online dating world.  A world of deception and lies where noone and nothing is what it seems - or - seems to seem.  Numbers, which mean one thing in the real world, are suddenly transformed to mean something entirely different in the online dating profile world.  Was this whole dating profile business just a whole heap of fake news?  I was about to find out!

What's a girl to do once her divorce is settled and her mojo has returned?  Well I'm sure there are a milliion things a girl could do, but one of the things I tried was online dating.  Only after I realised that my immediate - in person - dating pool was full of men who were either married to my friends or to each other - it felt a bit like the well was dry.  But I was not deterred - I dove into the world of cyber hookous and all that came with it.  This episode the first of 2 episodes that explore my adventure.  It's a podcast/audible mashup - I'm trying stuff - bear with me.  It is called Suck It And See after all - yes?