Lucy Easthope is a professor, lecturer and leading authority on emergency planning and recovering from disaster. Lucy has advised on major disasters over the last decades including the 2004 tsunami, 9/11, the Salisbury poisonings, Grenfell, and the Covid pandemic and most recently the war in Ukraine. She challenges others to think differently about what comes next after tragic events, and how to plan for future ones. Her book When the Dust Settles is both memoir of her life in disaster recovery and a personal journey through life, love and loss. You can find her on Twitter / X @LucyGoBag.

I ask Lucy about what she is hopeful about looking to the future. 

"I think one of the things is this ability to be able to back, back and forth between really terrible thoughts and risks which we have to do in emergency planning, and then just take incredible joy from a moment in the day... My work is one of the greatest privileges of it; is just seeing people being great a lot. So that gives me a lot of hope."

We talk about how many disasters I’ve been a by-stander to (Thailand tsunami, 9/11, Grenfell, 7/7, mortar bomb attack) and how disaster is recurring. 

We chat about Lucy’s activism from young and growing up around Liverpool. 

Lucy has been very involved around personal items, and the belongings of people in disasters.

I ask  about why it's such an important part of Lucy’s work. We chat about the interdisciplinary nature of here work.

We talk about the Welsh notion of hiraeth /ˈhɪərʌɪθ/. This longing for a place to which there is no return.

I ask about Lucy’s writing process and how she writes. We talk about themes in her life and writing such as working class roots and feminism. We discuss the importance of humour and why Lucy is pranked a lot.

We touch on Lucy’s personal losses of miscarriage.

I ask about what is misunderstood about disaster management and what organisations and people can do. How to think about balancing risk and opportunity. We talk about the problems of systemic and structural challenges.

We end on Lucy’s current projects and her life advice.

“Don't go to work on a row. I was reflecting with a friend recently and she said, "A lot of people say that they live life as if it's precious and you might not be here tomorrow, or the people you love might not be here tomorrow. But you Lucy, really do." And what does that look like? Everybody I love knows that I love them. Every time I say goodbye to my children, every time I go to work, it's always on the premise of how fragile this is. I think if we remember that, it sets us up to perhaps be kinder to each other. I also think that one of the most important things to me is to go back to those basics about particularly as we go into yet another difficult winter or difficult times, is think about just that couple of things that can make a difference. I think people are very anxious about trying to save the whole world. You don't need to save the whole world, just make somebody a cup of tea. Just make that tiny little kind of chaos theory difference, and that's enough.

Podcast wherever you get podcasts or links below. Video above or on YouTube. Transcript follows below.

PODCAST INFO

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• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

• All links:  https://pod.link/1562738506

Transcript (only lightly edited)

File: Lucy Easthope

Ben (00:00:03):

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Lucy Easthope. Lucy has written a beautiful and insightful book, “When the Dust Settles.” The book is part memoir and recounts her life as a professional in disaster planning and recovery. I've had the privilege of hearing Lucy in person, and she is as wonderful as I would've thought. You can do two things if you're listening. You can follow her on Twitter if that's your thing, and you can buy her book, which I very much recommend. Lucy, welcome.

Lucy (00:00:32):

Thank you very much for having me.

Ben (00:00:35):

I'm going to start at the future, actually, and I'm going to ask what gives you hope? So you wrote in your book, "The value of a horizon to swim towards, the importance of trying to build something afterwards, to stay living, breathing, that had to be a purpose, a future, a bluer sky. And I thought about that about one of your themes in the book of being hope as well as loss. I thought I'd ask, what gives you hope.

Lucy (00:01:03):

Oh, that's a brilliant question. I think one of the things is this ability to be able to back, back and forth between really terrible thoughts and risks which we have to do in emergency planning, and then just take incredible joy from a moment in the day. I find people are absolutely hooked on that and they're desperate trying to see if that's authentic. So I keep my hope, I think very boundary. I know there'll be dark times both personally and also for the world ahead, but lots of little things give me hope. And I think in the same way as when you see extremists as frequently as I do, you also see reasons to be cheerful as often as I do. Anybody in my friendship group, whoever has a baby knows how much I enjoy that event. I spent far too much of my money on baby things. I find children and babies and futures and the idea of something has to have a point going forward, being very purposeful. And also people are great. I think that's the other thing. My work is one of the greatest privileges of it; is just seeing people being great a lot. So that gives me a lot of hope.

Ben (00:02:18):

I often say that because sometimes I get accused of hopium, which is sort of being-- I tend to say I'm cautiously optimistic about many things around people and about the fact that although there are a lot of bad things and a lot of bad things are going to continue, we've been slowly improving across many dimensions. I've also seen people at their kind of best and also at their worst. So I have a confession. I almost didn't read your book. That was because I'd been a bystander in about five disasters, four of which you cover in your book and I wasn't sure I wanted to revisit them. But full disclosure, I should probably recount them because it's kind of quite likely. So I live in the shadow of Grand Paul. That morning I opened the door to ash raining down on me. I was near Liverpool Street over 77. I had left the beaches in Thailand the very morning the tsunami struck. I was in Manhattan over 9/11, and I heard the Downing Street mortar attack.

I was kind of around the corner, which is probably one of the smallest of the events. But I was quite young then so it left quite an impression. And I guess I can add a six in the sense that we've all lived through the start of the Covid pandemic and it echoes through today. People kind of ask, "Oh, that seemed kind of unlikely." But actually, I think it really isn't. These are kind of predictable risks, predictable surprises-- this thing on that. And we all live with-- I think you said the when, not the if; this idea that tragedies happen around us every day. I think we'll cover those. But I wanted to start actually with your youth as we go in through to this because I had this sense that your activism started really early; your sense of importance of resilience, the questions that you had, and you spent some of your youth with work experiences with coroners. Can you tell me about kind of how you started and your activism and your youth and your interest in this?

Lucy (00:04:15):

Yeah, absolutely. You introducing your experience there, I think a lot of people are touched statistically more than might seem possible by events. But also I think certain people tune into them. Sometimes people will say to me that they realized only afterwards that they were on the periphery of something, but there's other people who feel them very acutely. And I think that's very important as well. So for me, actually, I was profiled in New York in the summer. For that, my dad was interviewed and he said the first one he really remembered me becoming very agitated by was when I was about six or seven which was the Bradford City Fire disaster. Then a couple of years after that, we were on a school trip, and that's sort of where the book starts really.

We sailed past the Herald of Free Enterprise which was a passenger ferry on its side. It had gone to set sail with its bow doors open and a massive safety failing. We passed it a couple of weeks after the initial tragedy but they were still conducting recovery work. And what my dad says in the interview-- is these were very, very big questions from a very small person. This was somebody really activated and interested and worried and desperate to understand where people were now; where the dead gone, where had the living gone, where was everybody, were they okay? Then as I go into most detail in that first chapter in the book, is my dad and my mom actually were teachers in Liverpool and Birkenhead. They had school children at the Hillsborough Match on the 15th of April, 1989 and I had classmates-- I was in year six. I had classmates at the game.

From that moment on, really, I think I'm changed forever. There's a lot of discussion in modern times now about the ripple effect. So I'm not at the match, my parents aren't at the match. We don't see the things that many of our fellow community members saw. But we're very affected by what it does to those families and also we're very affected by what it does to our community. So I talk about driving into Liverpool with my parents soon after, and people are standing on the edges of the road outside newsagents and burning copies of the Sun Newspaper who have perpetuated some very terrible myths about the fan's behavior. So many experiences I think that you see in activism, they start young.

My dad uttered some words that really stayed with me. He got angry and angrier, really; very sort of gentle, but passionate man angrier about the situation. He said, "Somebody needs to sort this." And what he meant was, "This isn't fair on the fans and the families." I took that as a huge direction. That shaped me and I became a very activist teenager, and off I went to study law because I was going to make things different for the families. That just stayed as my kind of mantra throughout my life really.

Ben (00:07:27):

We recently met briefly in Liverpool. And so for those on the video, I have a purple bin.

Lucy (00:07:35):

The purple wheelie bin.

Ben (00:07:36):

I think of course, a little bit blue on the video.

Lucy (00:07:37):

That's quite blue.

Ben (00:07:38):

Yeah, but it is actually purple as a symbol. I think the ripple effect was really interesting. And there's just a small second order detail which I just recall now. In Manhattan, for those of us who were there, we really remember the smell; this visceral attack on you-- well, a kind of air attack. Some of us are still kind of triggered by it now, the kind of air ash burning. There's actually all of these pollution effects as well. And for those who would sort of remember things, it's one of the things which link us and there's this kind of ripple in terms of a shared memory of that. I guess one of the other things is the personal effects, the belongings, which has been a really important part of your work. And I think you've sort of said something like, "Remember every disaster by its personal effects. The aftermath is all about these." I guess on the one hand you think of them as small items, but incredibly important. How did you come to sort of find why that was so important and why it's such an important part of your work today?

Lucy (00:08:55):

Yeah. So when I was at university, I discovered this wonderful group of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters who'd lost their loved ones in disasters in the UK in the eighties and nineties, or in disasters overseas that had affected British citizens. And also within that, there were survivors of those disasters. They were very generous with their time and I'm joining them to listen and learn in the late nineties. One of the themes that's coming up from multiple disasters, Britain was hit by just a series of what we call kind of mass fatality incidents at that time. It was how poorly the families were treated in so many ways. So in terms of information and care, tea urns that said, "For police only" so that families couldn't get a cup of tea, all kinds of poor treatment.

But there were some specific things that stood out around things like the care of the deceased and then specifically, the care of the personal effects. So one of the things when families don't get a body back or the body is difficult to view, or it's damaged, the personal effects take on a much greater meaning. We were seeing everything from personal effects being thrown away-- and this was an international problem. The Americans had a very similar problem in the 1990s. Personal effects were being thrown away, or if they were returned at all, they were often returned without warnings to the families. The families have the right to have them back as they are, but they also now under legislation in America, have the right to have them cleaned or repaired.

But we were seeing things like black bin bags being delivered to families with the personal effects in. And that seemed like something I could work on. Ironically, when I went to work much more in the field with a private firm, that was one of their specific areas of contracting. So I moved into specifically being in charge of taking care of those personal effects. And that is the greatest privilege, the custody of those items and the tender care of those items. It's actually the part of the work that I find hardest. It's interesting to hear you talk about what we kind of technically call olfactory trauma or olfactory memory. So for me, olfactory memory is my most kind of likely to provoke a fast memory or a fast image, as you say; aviation fuel, smoke, ash.

There's other things for me I talk about in the book a particular cleaning fluid. So these are those moments that kind of stop you in your tracks. The personal effects, one of the ways that they kind of linger in your memory is they're often so mundane and you'll end up sort of going home that night and seeing exactly the same thing that you've been working on to return to a family. So I talk about biro pens and water bottles and wash bags. The other thing about sort of attributing them to particular types of incidents is that incidents-- When I reach into my memory trove of experiences, I'm linking particular types of things to particular events. You mentioned 2005 and the four bombings across London. And generally there, the deceased were quite young, young commuters in their mid-twenties.

So it was a sort of commuter's personal effects. It was a packed lunch. It was the big Nokia phones. It was paperback books bit doggy-eared that you would read resting against somebody else's shoulder on the tube for other incidents. One that I didn't personally do but I attended the debrief at Interpol Four that always stays with me is a bus crash of schoolchildren where every child had an iPod shuffle. So different incidents come with a sort of story of the loved ones that are lost and affected.

Ben (00:12:50):

I keep a memory box-- a lot of on my travels, not from every disaster. But for instance, I have a shell from that Thai beach. I think this link to memory also to smell. I guess it goes to the amygdala and the deep parts of our brain. But when I talk to friends, I do think that some form of however you want to do it memory box or taking things which live with you so you can sort of treasure or recall or compartmentalize those moments can be an important thing to do. One thing which strikes me about your work is how amazingly interdisciplinary you are. I think there has been-- particularly in hierarchies and organizations, I guess it goes that way. You have a silo, "Police do policing and doctors do doctoring."

You sit around all of this and in particular, you represent the victims so well. You kind of just calmly seem to hold your ground. I'm sure it's not calm all the time. You just have, "Well, this is right and this makes sense to me." So just by your very presence and knowing much about these, you can kind of cause an intervention just by being a little bit; just saying like, "This is going to be a voice in the room." Did the interdisciplinary nature kind of just come about slightly by accident or you just seem to know a lot about a lot of things and then you are in the situation where it makes a difference. This seems to be so rare and also just so amazing. Talk about that.

Lucy (00:14:29):

And so frustrating as well. When you're in a university environment, I've had many of the research coordination managers sit me down and say, "Lucy, what is your discipline?" Where are we going to go for the ref grant? The big grants in HE, what are we going to do with you? The interdisciplinarity, now it makes perfect sense, but it can look very scatter gun. So my degrees are in law, in disaster management and risk, and in medicine; a PhD in medicine. I asked my mom just two weeks ago, "Did I ever look like I didn't have a plan?" Certainly a couple of family and friends were like, "What are you doing in your twenties?" She's like, "I think I always felt you had a plan."

But you are right. You have so many tabs open at once, so many things that you're drawing on. And what I love about it now-- there was a funny moment-- I was giving some advice last week and somebody who didn't know me very well-- Because obviously, when I'm starting to chat to somebody it'll be quite gentle. It'll be quite kind of light. I know I'm going to have to raise some difficult subjects. I started to chat in a sort of normal way. It wasn't a scholar's way with loads of citations. The person in the room said, "Do you have an evidence base because you've said about 14 things there? What's your evidence base?"

Everybody in the room went, "[gasps]." It was like a Marvel comic. They were like, "Don't do that. Don't feed her after midnight. Don't ask her for the evidence base because of course, there's an evidence base." And as you say, it's drawn from about 150 disciplines. So it's a lot of work. The two things that this brain holds onto is anything told from any field; everything from educational psychology, to chemistry, to kind of the business world, all these different kinds of things. It will hold onto, it'll retain, it'll connect, it'll think how to use that and celebrity gossip. It remembers nothing else. Having the book out there prompting conversations, it has prompted conversations with family, particularly about how annoying that is.

It's terrible if I buy the Sunday papers because I can make every article relevant to what I'm doing. I'm very lucky to have academic positions because then I have access to every potential journal pretty much that I could want. And that's how I operate. One of the things I would say is-- And I met a chief executive recently-- very, very impressive woman. She did something similar. She gave herself a couple of hours in the morning for kind of reading time what was going to be their articles. You have to find ways to absorb lots and lots of information very quickly and that would be one piece of advice that I would have. The other thing I've loved-- and I know it's not always terribly popular, is the discovery. I came to it late, but the discovery of social media for me because if you curate your feed well, you can get that digested to you a thousand times an hour. I love that, but I know it's not a very popular thing sometimes to do.

Ben (00:17:45):

Well, you straddle all of that. I don't know how many people have actually read and downloaded-- did your academic papers. But I read the recent one. I have to confess I understood the abstract maybe around the first page or two, and then you lost me.

Lucy (00:18:00):

That's how it should be in academic.

Ben (00:18:03):

And theological study on DVI on basically victim identification and all of this. It just struck me that there were a lot of people working on this and it flows through into the frontline. The other thing I got from your book though, is this idea that-- It's a common sense idea that nothing really goes to plan. So you've got to have the plan, but somehow then realize that it isn't going to go to plan. And that again is one of your skills which comes across. Just ability to put forward the things which you would know, or which you might know if you could be objective and calm, but you wouldn't necessarily know in the moment. Like the cup of tea, or the clean clothes, or that very human element which doesn't come through on the papers. And again, if you just developed that through time, how would you talk to people about making sure that element comes through in however we go when we're either responding or being out in the world.

Lucy (00:19:09):

That's such a lovely question. The answer always becomes very clear to me when I'm with kind of groups of my kin; when I'm with my aunties and my older cousins. They're just this mass group of nurturers. So in our family I think there was always-- You did perhaps reach into areas that were perhaps a little bit more personal. "Have you got your cup of tea?" A lot of my female matriarchs are teachers, so it's like, "Have you got a coat?" All the questions they'd ask a year seven. "Have you got a coat? Have you had a cup of tea there?' There's a lot of nurturing goes in, in our family. There's a lot of interest in everybody's welfare in our family. I was out with a big gang of them recently and I thought, "Yeah, this is where a lot of this comes from."

And actually, one of the things that I've learned going out into the world-- And obviously, you see how other people operate is that actually can be quite intrusive. Saying to somebody, "Have you had a chance to get the loo? Have you had a shower? Have you had food?" Those aren't necessarily normal questions I'm not about to ask you all those questions now. They are really good crisis interventions. They're really good to go, "Okay, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I'm going to go really basic here. I'm going to show you where the loos are. I'm going to make sure you've had a cup of tea before we put you into an interview with the police" or anything like that. So family was a great training for that. I think the other thing is the ability to look slightly into the future of where something's going to go.

So one of my most controversial topics over the last year-- and the book has given me a lovely platform to try out other discussions. When disasters happen, some of the worst things you can do are things that feel like they're absolutely the right thing to do. So I have a hashtag #cash, not stuff, which is about not donating all of the old things from your back bedroom to the nearest disaster. They often become the second disaster. A much better thing is to donate cash. So one of the things that I would find is I would mention that people be horrified. This is us showing care. This is something we want to do. So often where the plan fails is not because it has gone horribly wrong or because it's so unsurvivable with the situation.

It's because people are perhaps doing things that feel right in the moment, but not doing a longer term risk analysis. And I think the public sector struggle with that. Often when I'm working with the private sector, because for example, their financiers and their legal teams will tend to have a long range view. They are often easier to brief with me going, "Hang on, there's a hidden consequence." What I'm learning and still learning-- I learn constantly-- is there's a real responsibility to playing that role. Somebody asked me the other day, they wanted to write a briefing on an incident that's just happened. There was just too much information in the briefing. It wasn't going to land. I advised on two or three things that needed to come out. Afterwards I thought, "That's quite a big thing you just did there." Because those two or three things-- I've obviously said, "Put them in another paper that goes second." But you're making some big choices and people are kind of looking at you going, "What's the right thing to do here?" We've talked about the evidence base, but you also have to have mentors that you check in with. So 11 o'clock last night I was speaking to a colleague that is a sense maker for me, and that's a really important part of this as well.

Ben (00:22:31):

That's really fascinating. And that part about cash really resonates as well, because partly when you're reaching out to help people, you are thinking in your own shoes sort of like, "Oh, what would I like? Where am I sitting?" Whereas often from the other person when they have nothing anymore, they need to kind of be empowered to make their own choices not given by some other direction or something like that.

That also leads me to think another theme about your book. So you deal a lot on the near term and the aftermath and then the kind of medium term, a little bit like that. Then for some things, the sense of justice and the fighting for those. Then there is the kind of medium to very long term-- these echoes. I mean, in Liverpool you have the echo today. I think the city will be forever shaped by what happened; so that's going to be that. Manhattan is shaped, I think forevermore with that. You have this Welsh term which I'm going to mispronounce. Is it hiraeth?

Lucy (00:23:37):

Yeah, beautiful term.

Ben (00:23:39):

This longing for a place to which there is no return. I think you say an echo of something that can never be found or something that no longer exists. I'm going to wrap it around as well because my son is autistic and there are some things which disappear from his life like trains or other things. I see this in other parts which have been my life, and they are no longer about. Some things when you do break, you can't really put them back together. When I came across that term, I thought that is exactly right. But what would you say in your interactions for that, what we should do for this sense of missing, the sense of whole either at the kind of city organizational level or on the people level now that you've been to so many of these places and keep them alive with you. What do you think we should do with this hiraeth sickness for something that no longer exists?

Lucy (00:24:35):

Well, I think the first thing you have to do is acknowledge hiraeth. It's something that doesn't sit well with framings of modern mental health. It was one of the things that I'm growing increasingly concerned about when I do respond initially to a disaster is rhetoric from both kind of some mental health professionals, but also politicians that this will be overcome, this will be bounced back from. That resilience is you forgetting or parceling or being able to move to the next stage. Hiraeth stays with you. I think that's a really important recognition. Certain parts of the book flowed very easily. Hiraeth was a part of the book that flowed easily because it was the word that was working most for me when I was meeting with both community groups and responders in Grenfell. So this was a diaspora of multiple communities, many languages, and this one word was doing this work. It was connecting everybody's feeling.

Everybody loved it, but also was desperate about it because I wasn't offering a fix. There is no fix for hiraeth. And with a lot of things, I think similarly bereavement or a massive career change, there is a loss of the life before. What you watch people do in the early stages of something like bereavement is kind of try and fight it. You also watch the people around them try and fight it. For example, in my work, I've often seen people interact with very, very newly widowed young women. People are like, "Well, we can get you that life back." Way too early and way too soon people are saying, "There's still a life. We'll find the life." People are very desperate to try and convince you that it will be okay which is understandable. But hiraeth doesn't go anywhere.

A lot of the conversations that I have with communities affected by disaster stems from a life before and a life after. They will still see moments of joy. They will still see moments of hope. They might like their new leisure center better than the one before. But it doesn't mean that hiraeth is not very, very permanent. The other thing I really like about the use of that word particularly is it's a kind of direct challenge to where I go on in the book, which is the sort of modern spin of emergency management. I was quite shocked at an event a couple of weeks ago. We are still talking about minimizing the effect of these events. The ultimate role of emergency planning in the UK is to kind of minimize these events so that they almost feel like speed bumps in the road. And you're like, "Are you kidding me? These are so fundamental to the fabric of society." And also the way you described your experiences. They're so fundamental to the fabric of you that I don't believe that how we measure-- whether something has come back from somewhere-- is their ability to forget it. My much truer test is their ability to live alongside the horizon.

Ben (00:27:33):

That really resonates with me. I mean, part of my experience with my Thai friends and also in Manhattan is that I keep their stories alive by including them in my own. That's something that you sort of talk about in the book. There is this acknowledgement about how it shapes us and that we don't forget. We have this around Grenfell as well. So that idea that it shapes us on that by keeping their stories alive. The other thing which I think on that with what you're talking about, kind of this modern idea that these are just blips in the road with resilience, these kind of things will never happen again. Yet they're all predictable surprises. We know these things are happening. It seems to me that maybe some of our organizations have entered into a failure of imagination somehow. We've got these process and things and we just can't think outside the little box or even just outside our recent history. You don't have to go back very far. Or in fact, sometimes not even history if you just look around the world to what is actually happening. Do you think there is this kind of failure of imagination, or how would you say the role of thinking bigger and wider, particularly in terms of resilience is planning out?

Lucy (00:28:57):

That's our question of the moment, really in emergency planning. I often attribute a lot of my ability to both be effective as a planner, but also to have been, I think, quite prescient in the things that I've predicted to just a really good imagination fostered by lots of love of story and fiction and nonfiction. I joke in the book that I was very much a child of certain types of telly in the UK. So watching casualty and watching Brookside and all the things that can happen. Also, you mentioned right at the start that I spent a lot of time with my aunt and my uncle who were both coroners and coroners in their inquest process. So they look at how and why and when somebody died, but they also look at the kind of circumstances around that.

They're often a little bit like a mini episode of casualty themselves. Maybe if the ladder hadn't been against the rickety wall type thing, the person wouldn't have fallen off. So there's an awful lot of kind of joining the dots that I do. Imagination is woefully lacking in my field. But more importantly, I think very difficult in central government. One of the places that I go to in the book is that it has become more and more difficult to use what we would call in emergency planning, the reasonable worst case scenario. "So paint me a picture of a reasonably worse day." There are no aliens in there, but it's pretty bad. And what happened was that became about political football. So I'm on record talking about-- In 2009, I was raising the concern. I raised it at an Irish emergency planning conference and it was written up on the internet, which I'm very glad about because it puts a date stamp on it. I raised a concern that we were planning for a difficult exit from Europe, but our pandemic plans were being kind of pushed into the long grass. The idea was being put out by central government in England that you wouldn't get a pandemic at the same time as a no deal.

The idea was being put out by central government in England that you wouldn't get a pandemic at the same time as a no deal Brexit and that's a failure of imagination. We first saw this term failure of imagination in the commission report into 9/11. For me, it's one of the biggest issues. People like their scenarios very safe and very optimistic. Also, I'm starting to use it to challenge other things. It's not a failure of imagination to imagine, for example, what happens if we don't get to net zero/ Failure of imagination works very well with climate change discussions because you have to be able to explore rather than-- You said right at the start hopium is a big issue in emergency response. If we don't hit some of these targets, if we exceed some of our concerns, if we don't put the mitigations in place for certain things, let's accept that as a reasonable worst case scenario. Let's imagine what that looks like and plan accordingly.

Imagination stands you very well, I think as well in your kind of personal and family life. So you kind of picture what might go wrong and you mitigate or you can also-- we talked a little bit about joy and hope. It's a way of picturing what a good thing might look like as well. So I think imagination is very much linked to, in the business world, what we might call kind of scouting and foresight.

Ben (00:32:23):

Yes. So one of the hats I wear is I write plays, I make theater. Actually, my current show which is coming around again in January 2024, is around death. It's part standup comedy, part one man show. But you get to plan my own funeral. So I now have a joke that I'm the only person who's been to their own funeral five times because we kind of talk about what music you would choose, what images, and it is this sense of just imagination for things around death which are definitely going to happen. So that's not an issue. I think climate's really interesting so I do quite a lot of work around here as well. I think one of the problems we've come across is actually the way that a lot of our standard fiction and our standard stories happen.

If our fiction seems too close to the real world and in the extraordinary, we say, "That would never happen. That's only science fiction. That's only fantasy." Even though if I'd wrote a little fiction story about what has happened around Grenfell, particularly post Brexit or post that amount of time, it would've been dismissed as completely unbelievable. "There is no way this would happen. We are not going to publish this as a fiction story," and then it happens in real life so you can't countenance it. So there has been something which has happened where we can only believe it as science fiction and not as real. So that's something to do with that part of story.

Lucy (00:33:51):

Definitely.

Ben (00:33:52):

Maybe that's a good segue into perhaps a couple of more personal aspects. Thinking about story, do you have a particular writing process? Because your writing is really beautiful.

Lucy (00:34:04):

Thank you.

Ben (00:34:07):

It is what we, I guess would call life writing or non-fiction writing, but it is very stylish and every chapter tells stories. They tell your stories, they tell other people's stories. Do you have a process? Everyone has a different process. Do you like write in verse, evening, morning notebook? How do you write? What's your writing process?

Lucy (00:34:32):

That's a lovely question. It goes back as I think as well to your earlier point about trying to write with academic writing. I think the article that you are referring to was in production for four years. I struggled terribly with academic writing. And I think somewhere on my wall I've pinned a review for an earlier piece of academic writing that says, "Credit should be given to the author because English is clearly not her first language." We all know reviewer two in the academic world is particularly brutal. My PhD thesis, I really discovered ethnography and auto ethnography. I was very lucky that the school of Medicine at Lancaster University was very supportive of exploring ethnography which is very intimate; attention to detail, but also centering yourself in the writing.

That released me. I mean, the things we had to do-- We had to get permission for my thesis to be in the first person, and that became my academic monograph, the recovery myth. We had to at every stage up to Viva, and even at Viva, although had very supportive examiners you're justifying the first person in writing which of course isn't true in memoir or life writing. Of course, you'd be writing in the first person. But what I discovered was how much I love that which is a slight death now to being an academic. I still am an academic, but why do I struggle with not being able to write? There were some real inspirations in my writing which were perhaps a very-- Obviously, they were people like Patricia Cornwell and Stephen King. So they were huge influences.

I had also started to really enjoy the professional confessional type memoir, the revelation memoir, the nonfiction, the celebrity nonfiction that as you say was much more kind of life writing, much more true to self. I was on an academic writing retreat, and a colleague who very sadly is no longer with us-- We were having a coffee in the afternoon and I said, "My brain, there's nothing coming out. I can't write this paper." She said, "Well, write what you want to write." That became the prologue, that became that opening chapter. I never showed it to anybody. Then like halfway through the-- I'd got the book deal and I was putting in chapters and my editor was saying to me, "We need a chapter that sets the scene." I attached it to an email and sent it in. She was like, "My goodness, where has that been hiding?"

I do follow religiously all of the good proper writers on Twitter who tell me how to do it. I know I'm supposed to try and get a few words down every day and I know I'm supposed to have times of the day. It was quite revelatory writing up my thesis. I went to a writing workshop and they said, "Find your golden hours; the hours in the day when you can just flow. Don't have your computer connected to the internet. Just write." My goals now are between about five and 7:00 AM which is horrible for the household. Then as the day wears on, I get sort of less creative and I just do my editing or whatever.

But different chapters have been written in different ways. One of the ones that I really remember with a kind of energy was I was so grateful to Hodder and Stoughton; they let me write about flooding. Flooding is just this grim, chronic aftermath that we're going to see so much of in the UK. So I really wanted to write about flooding, and I felt it was brave of them because it wasn't the big, dramatic types of disasters that I was writing in other chapters. I wanted to meet a deadline, but also we had a new dog. If I went downstairs, the dog would bark and wake the whole house hold. So I sat on the bathroom floor, cramped legs, and just powered through that chapter. I think there's an energy-- It becomes the hiraeth chapter. There's an energy to that that always makes me smile when people say kind of, "What's your technique?" Because sometimes it's very much built by circumstance. There are bits written on the train, there's bits written exactly as we're supposed to in my golden hours.

Then the other thing I found, I think having been through the rigors and the brutality of academic writing, I had huge respect from the outset for the editorial process. So when people said to me, "That goes, or that doesn't work there," I just listened to it. And I'm so glad I did because I think what you get is a quite a tight narrative and a coherent narrative which was something before the book that I think I would've said I struggled with.

Ben (00:39:14):

And do you write long hand by notebook and then into computer, or straight into computer? Or it seems like it varies. It doesn't bother you kind of.

Lucy (00:39:23):

I love a notebook. I do have a notebook of ideas. My main business expenditure is very nice notebook. So I do have notebooks for initial ideas, and then I get very upset because I'll get a smudge in them from my pen and then I don't want to use it anymore. I'm terrible; I'm very obsessed about my notebooks. But then it's on the laptop-- And what I do-- I've always done this-- It's like a shuttle launch. I get the workspace set up and I've got inspirational quotes on the wall, and these are the books I'm going to refer to. I don't do that at all. I sit in front... The way my brain works-- this is a terrible confession that you've lured out of me. But I quite often need something going on in the background.

So people will say to me, "How can you have been both producing an article that's out in the independent tomorrow and you also seem to know all of your selling sunset gossip?" It's because I have it on at the same time. And I think it's that thing about having all the tabs open. I can write, which I know people find abhorrent the idea that you would have that much background noise. But I write better if I've got something fun on the telly over here. I just sit and write stuff. So yeah, I'm fascinated by process. When the book came out I did a lot more literary festivals and things, and I realized how much newer writers and aspiring writers really hang on to the idea of process. I felt a little bit of a fraud there because I'd sort of sat with my Mac Air and Selling Sunset.

Ben (00:40:50):

I've interviewed-- I would probably say hundreds of creatives in some form. The one dominant thing is that there is almost no process that is for certain. Now mainly, there's some in the sense that if you are a writer, you need at some point to write words. If you don't manage to get words down, you don't have anything. But it can be at 5:00 AM or 5:00 PM. You can want silence. You can want a lot of noise. Some people use notebooks, some people go straight to computer and all of that. But one of the things I guess is you have to do it. One last one on your writing because I think it is so beautiful. You have a lot of beautiful sentences. And I just wonder at the level of the sentence, do you hone and reedit-- Obviously, you'll have editors who do things. Or do the sentences come out mostly fully formed when you are writing them-- your particularly beautiful ones? Are you kind of at the level of the sentence going back and back and back, or they kind of flow out because you've had it all up in your mind and you've now got the time and it's all coming through? Well, you probably don't really think about it. But at the level of the sentence, you've got such beautiful ones and the phrasing is different. I mean, it's almost towards poetry, but it was within prose. But to someone who's sensitive to writing, it definitely jumps out as in this is someone who has written special sentences throughout the book.

Lucy (00:42:20):

That means the world. Definitely like I said, I listen closely to my editors. I think also, there was a technique that had certainly been beaten out of me in academic writing, But I'd always loved in things like Stephen King's writing, which was maybe that last sentence in a chapter would kind of kick you in the guts. I think there's lines where he'll say, "Susan Jones really enjoyed her last breakfast," and you know that things are going to get really grim in the next chapter. I like the power of a last sentence. It's interesting now I've been to-- Again, because the book has thrown me into this wonderful world of literature that I hadn't been exposed to for a long time. I've been to a lot more poetry workshops and poetry events over the last year and I've realized how much I like alliteration and how much I like kind of trailing off a stream of adjectives and description. The power of constructing a sentence that is quite clashing.

That was really important I think for some of the content that goes to more difficult areas; some of the things about you might say the more forensic areas. And what the editors would do for me there is they would say, "Go away and write. We are not going to be scared. We are not going to be horrified. Write everything that you felt." So I quite like a sentence that maybe has a clash. The best thing about the book for me was something for the first time had finally captured what happens if I go and speak somewhere. I'd never been able to marry the two. I'd never been able to get the writing to match up to the kind of way that I like to speak about things. I think the other thing was there's a lot of noise in the world. And when you speak about these things, people are moving on to the next thing all the time. I wanted to grab attention. Nobody has described it quite like that before, so I thank you for that because it means a lot.

Ben (00:44:32):

Well, when I met you and heard you in person, I thought, "This is definitely the person who has written this book. She's not used to ghost writer. This is her," which you can sometimes see. You know you always little wonder. I was like, "No, this is her voice."

Lucy (00:44:51):

That's a lovely thing to say and very validating. But yeah, no, definitely not.

Ben (00:44:55):

I'll reflect on one other thing because your writing particularly on some of those harder parts are neither super clinical nor morbid, nor have they kind of gone so lyrical that you just think that this has got off towards high art. There was a sentence on disaster which I just pulled out because it really struck; partly just because of its construction. "Disasters are about total loss, tangible losses of a person, a house, a place, and intangible losses of a feeling of safety, trust in authority." Just the way you have these contrasts and the losses come back and the tangible and intangible as just a kind of normal-ish sentence coming through on that. The other thing about your writing which came through to me is it seemed to be rooted in yes, your childhood, yes, Liverpool. But also working class and also feminism or being a woman. I was interested to how much that has been influenced. This idea that the working class voices are often not that well understood, not well represented. I think you can say the argument is the same for female voices even today. How important is that to you, and is that a theme which kind of sat at the surface of your writing? Or is it just more of an undercurrent across the fact that that is who you are?

Lucy (00:46:25):

Yeah, it's a really interesting one because I think-- Sometimes only after you put something out or when you are kind of slightly pushed or tested on something you realize where your activism lies. The other thing of course, as you know with a process like this goes out into the world and people draw different things from it. So the role of the woman in emergency planning has definitely been something that people have really picked up in that. There's certainly, I think six or seven times in the book where I make a clear distinction that by perhaps-- You talked earlier about how difficult it is to sell something that's only a story. I make the point in the book that I'm called a hysteric, I'm called a fantasist.

I didn't want it to sort of beat people over the head. And also, I wanted to be very clear that this was very much a book of allyship; lots of people working together. But certainly there's a theme in the book, I think of the unheard voice which is a very important theme for me across the gamut. We're seeing it in the Covid inquiry. We're seeing it in other disaster inquiries constantly. Who gets their voice heard at the table and why was probably the bigger theme for me. And then since the book has been out, I think partly because sometimes I'll deal with it in quite a light and very perhaps quite, gently combative way, it has been a chance to explore through things like magazine articles and things how women... In my case, I talk a lot about advising in the pandemic. There was a very, very privileged wealthy lens on how people would respond to something like lockdown.

When you come from a place like Birkenhead, you certainly know that nobody is going to get through lockdown easily. You've responded to the Grenfell disaster. You understand challenges around housing and lack of garden. The point that I'm making in both the book and then in some of my social media is trying to penetrate places like Westminster with the idea that people have very different lived experiences on the ground. I think the biggest thing for me would be challenging the who gets heard. Another aspect of that is we are very, very bad at listening to any group that probably isn't. There's a long history and emergency planning of a lens of white male heterosexual. It's great to see that being challenged more and more in my field of practice and very, very robustly.

Ben (00:49:16):

Another thing which comes through-- And maybe it comes through even more in in person, is the fact you are very funny. There is a slight thing through the book, but obviously it's kind of shadowed by all of the hope, last disaster.

Lucy (00:49:33):

You had to take out some of the jokes.

Ben (00:49:35):

Yeah. I mean, I guess this is it, because that's the other thing having been a bystander or just really close to all of this. I guess you call it gallows humor, but actually, it's strangely really important to get through if you can't laugh. And I found some of the acquaintances or friends or peers of that who just somehow couldn't find something to laugh about have really suffered more. Maybe it's a kind of almost-- I wouldn't want to say condition because you're just seeing a certain lens to it. But this ability to laugh through things. Another thing which happens-- maybe it's every two or three chapters-- maybe not quite of that, is you seem to get pranked a lot.

Lucy (00:50:18):

Yes.

Ben (00:50:19):

I was interested in what's the best prank, the worst prank, and do you actually end up pranking anyone else, or are you just always the one who goes, "Yeah, that's right. I'll just walk naked in this suit around this site because I trust the forensic people to have my back," or whatever that is. Best prank, worst prank, and do you end up pranking anyone else?

Lucy (00:50:46):

Well, it's a really good point, I think about the humor because when I started in the field, there was definitely a recourse to gallows humor. There has even been kind of journal and scientific articles written about gallows humor. What I'm always very clear on-- and this is very genuine-- is for me, the humor is never, ever, as you can imagine about the incident or anybody affected by it. But what we are is a very-- It's a very intimate collaborative, I think; a disaster response team in whatever guys it takes. We're very self-deprecating. And in the same way as we go to those basic needs that people need in disaster, we're also looking after each other. So a lot of pomp and ceremony is stripped back and people are looking after each other and making sure they've got the paracetamol they need or whatever.

So there's a lots of camaraderie. It's very militaristic in that way, I think. For me, the humor, I mean, probably for all sorts of reasons some of the funniest moments as I say, never at the instant, mainly at my expense should probably stay locked in the annals of my memory. I can't think I've ever pranked anybody. The one thing I do remember in the book is falling for-- So I say in the book that we often use celebrities in our disaster scenarios. I don't because I think it causes all sorts of confusion, but it's quite a common thing to do. I've had this notification that we've had a major plane crash and all of the spice girls are on it and I run upstairs and activate all of my colleagues.

They point out that actually, "No, just ring the airline back and check that it's an exercise." And of course, for the history of pop, fortunately it definitely was. So there's always those moments and then you sit back and think, "Gosh, what a crazy day." I do tweet moments that are slightly more-- they've got that levity in them. So we have what's called the Lucy Inject, which is when I put into a scenario something that I consider perfectly possible, but my colleagues will often laugh at that scenario. So we tend to have a lighter experience now. There's a group of us on Twitter that will also pick a disaster movie and tweet through it and tweet the moments. We're quite skeptical sometimes and quite harsh on various movie creators.

But it's interesting the point of the lightness. I know it's so trite and it belongs only on bathroom walls. But the phrase, "Live, love, laugh," that's always how I've done. Working in this field you know how fragile life is and you laugh, I think differently as an emergency planner. Everything tastes more intense. You love differently, you laugh differently, and you live differently. I just think that that's what gets you through. We've just had a major event for the emergency planners. One of the things that we talked about was how-- We haven't really done much face-to-face stuff for four years. It was like de-mobbing from a war. It was so lovely to see everybody. I've just seen the edits of the award ceremony that we did; a kind of lighthearted award ceremony, and all you could hear is me laughing. We needed that.

Ben (00:54:21):

I mean, it's a great part of the book because it sits in really great counterpoint to all the loss that we read about. Another element which comes through in the book is some of your stories of personal loss, which I think you could have edited out. Some of this is around miscarriage and some of it is around your own personal. I don't know whether you want to comment on why you left that in. It's obviously interlinked very much in who you are and how that think through. It does seem to me it has been taboo subjects again. It's a motherhood subject that we kind of don't talk about probably for the wrong reasons, but it's a very strong theme. I don't know whether you reflect on it today and whether that has also been very meaningful to mothers or people who'd like to be mothers who'd been reading the work. Was it really important for you to keep that in and to explain how that made you feel?

Lucy (00:55:22):

Yeah. Again, thank you for that. Yes, it was. And certainly when the book goes kind of out on the road and you're doing the book festivals, that's a great connector. Again, it's a bit like your experiences with disasters and the disaster statistics. One woman might never experience pregnancy loss and one woman might experience 10 pregnancy losses. It's not an equal spread. So you end up meeting women out on the road and their partners who it was the first time they explained it. When I originally wrote my PhD thesis, I wrote a chapter about-- I mentioned before, this kind of intimate ethnography that I was doing. The whole time that I was doing my field work for my PhD in some form or other, I was in early pregnancy, and I lost several pregnancies.

And what that did was I was working on the flood recovery that I was writing about, but it endeared-- The other women affected by the flood, they changed their relationship with me, they get me a chair, they get me a cup of tea. So I wrote this chapter about intimate auto ethnography and I took it out because that wasn't what the thesis was about. And what was important to me was it is relevant, I think, to who I am as an emergency planner. It's very relevant to who I am as a woman. It was very relevant to me and Tom. But also, there were these very important parallels. The form that I was asked to fill in when I would lose an early pregnancy is the same form that I'd helped design for disaster response.

We essentially use the same kind of, "What would you like done with the tissue?" It's the same form. So you would go from workshops on the Monday, to how you would use this form in practice, to filling it in on the Thursday. And I thought that was really important to me. It allowed me to have discussions about-- again, going back to the earlier point-- about being a woman in this field and kind of keeping some of this from the wider world. As with all editorial processes, I think that you write it and then it made sense. Some people have said to me, "Did you feel it was too much?" I'm very comfortable. But the nicest thing for me was-- and it still happens-- it happened only last week, is actually particularly partners of women who say that the way that I've described it has for the first time given them an insight into what their partner loses, what the products of conception as they are euphemistically called feel like to lose. So I've had some lovely thank you letters, particularly from men, and that that was enough. That was justification really.

Ben (00:58:04):

Does Tom read your work before it goes out? I think you describe him as a man of fewer words, and he's a really important presence; not the one where there was so many words written about. My impression is family and him in particularly, I think used the word scaffold in one of your notes. That seemed really just such a correct word. I don't know if you wanted to have a little comment on the importance of Tom, either to you or how as a theme through the book. There were other pieces of loss around that as well; our relationship with our work and our relationship with how all of that works. But yeah, I just wanted to note that there was a really important piece of scaffold there. And that definitely comes through the book about how that is an anchor for all parts of your life as well.

Lucy (00:59:02):

Yeah, it's funny because it's such an important theme. And I think again, that was a reason for talking about the pregnancies as well because that's a two person-- and in fact, of course, wider family; grandparents and others as well. That's a two person journey. There was a lovely theme that I'm able to draw out of basically not bringing work home. I met a prison officer this week who had read the book and they were saying that that was the part that made them go out and buy the book for their partner because they wanted to say, "Lucy does something different." But it's got that same thing that I might come home and be a bit difficult or a bit inside my own head, but this is why.

So one of the lines that I have the most response to actually is the line that says, "The hardest part of working in disaster is going home." So it was an acknowledgement and an appreciation of maybe how difficult that was. He didn't read my work and also didn't really tend to know what I was up to. And then for legal reasons when the book was just about to be published, he had to prove he'd read it and signed a disclaimer. So that was quite funny. He said something very similar to actually what my dad said. My dad basically very honestly said, "Well, I bought a copy when it was out because it's you, you're my daughter. But what I didn't expect, I didn't expect it to be a page turner." Tom said something similar like, "I don't like reading, but this is really good." So he was pleased. I remember he was reading in bed and he shut it and he just put it down in the bed and he went, "Fly me." I’ll always remember that.

But he is the scaffold. One of the things that I think again, a lot of people have responded to at the book festivals and in discussion of it is, "You can do anything when you are coming home to scaffold, kept going home to support." I don't get carried away because that's how you rattle the fate. "He has gone very quiet so he's probably leaving me out there somewhere." People would say, "Where does the strength come from or where does the joy come from?" It's coming home to him. But the joy as well was also that this was not his world. I used to be quite envious of colleagues and couples who were both-- say police officers. I was like, "How brilliant must it be for you to be able to sort of share your day?" And now I think through the process of writing the book I've realized what a gift it was to not bring that home. So yes, his view was very important and continues to be on it really. And it's his book as well. I think that that's the other thing. There's a big theme about him towards the end which I won't spoil, but also the babies were his too. So he's a huge part of that.

Ben (01:02:00):

Yeah, that's very important. I guess turning back to the whole area of disaster, what do you think is perhaps most misunderstood, either in and around disaster or in and around what disaster responders or planners do?

Lucy (01:02:18):

Well, I think the biggest issue we have, and I name it in the book after the most recent James Bond films. I do genuinely think that the Skyfall effect is a huge problem in disaster management. And this is the idea that this amazing capability is coming over the hill to save us. It's one of the problems we have with climate change as well. It's not. It's people like me and my colleagues and there's a tea club and there's a basement in a town hall where we use a lot of Excel spreadsheets. I always get asked to do quick summaries of my day or would I wear a body camera so people could see what exciting stuff I do. I'm like, "I might literally just be on a phone for an hour talking about a flood rescue strategy," whiteboards and Microsoft Word. It's not always very glamorous.

There's this huge misperception I think, of what we have at our disposal. But of course, the other side of that is what we also have at our disposal that we perhaps underestimate is just the amazingness of each other. One thing I find very difficult watching something like the Covid inquiry is that by necessity, and for many understandable reasons, it will tell the stories of what went wrong. But if you are me and you plan for a pandemic since 2004, you also got to see all the things that went much better than we ever had hope. I write a lot about things like our death care professionals, our registrars, our mortuary staff, our funeral directors who far exceeded the best case in our plans. The supermarkets far exceeded the best case scenarios we had, and that's not the story we'll tell. So I think sometimes we both simultaneously underestimate the fellow humans and overestimate the kind of quality of the Avengers response that we're going to get.

Ben (01:04:13):

That really resonates with me particularly also in climate work like you mentioned. Technology itself will not save us. On the other hand, we can save us because it'll only come from us. So you don't want to be in a position of helplessness thinking, "Well, I can't do anything, so I'm not going to do anything." On the other hand, you also don't want to say, "Well, it's just going to be done by someone else. Some other technology is going to come along." So you've got this interesting dilemma between actually, "Well, it may be some form of technology, but that's only going to be driven and powered by the people. You can't just let it be someone else."

Lucy (01:04:52):

Yeah, absolutely.

Ben (01:04:53):

Maybe that dovetails into the last kind of few questions. One was kind of around what people or organizations can do. So I've read in your work the things like citizens’ aid and things that you can do. And maybe on a sort of personal level, you might want to think about some of these situations that you might have. I was wondering any reflections on that. Then maybe at one level up, most of us work for organizations of some sort. So either small or large. I guess the larger ones normally think of some sort of planning, but it's usually to do with if the internet goes down or something like that, so it's sort of backup. Are there any thoughts that you have for maybe if you're working with a smaller or medium sized organization or even up into the larger ones about how we should be thinking about this?

I mean, it's not something that you need to spend 50% of your time on. But a little bit of time or resource seems to be able to go a long way, particularly because one of the themes I talked about right at the start is that a lot of these are kind of predictable surprises. You don't know exactly what the surprise will be, but you'll know it. I do quite a lot of work in healthcare and I've been in sort of 20 years speaking to virologists. They're saying, "Yeah, some sort of viral pandemic every 10 to 20 years is roughly what we would expect whether that's a different kind of flu or a different kind of virus. We can't tell you exactly what year it will be, but it will happen." And I guess the same, you can think about people living around San Francisco. They don't know when in the next hundred or 200 years that there will be some sort of earthquake, but it seems extremely likely that there will be. And so they think about that. But actually, it seems to be the same at the company or the personal level. So I don't know if you had any reflections about what we should think about.

Lucy (01:06:44):

Yeah. So taking the second one first, I think one of the things that we often do in emergency management is we sell to our kind of executive team that these are really good kind of business ideas anyway. It often improves the quality of other types of planning if you are looking at the kind of foresight issues and you are looking at risk. The fairly easy sell is that risk management is part of effective strategic management. It's an interesting one. I've been introduced recently at a couple of conferences where people have said, "If we keep getting our safety culture right and we keep getting our risks right, Lucy shouldn't be needed anymore." I don't think that's the case. I think we will always see emergencies and tragedies. We cannot design them out completely.

So thinking about as an organization how to overcome them when they do happen is important. We're following various seismic events at the moment and that's an example where people will have very high expectations of the warnings they're given, and when we know, and how much we know. That's what it is to live on this mother earth, isn't it? Her do her thing all the time. So one of the difficulties I think is making your peace with the idea of constant environmental and seismic and sociotechnical challenge. The lessons for both households and businesses are the same and preparedness is a win. The only downside to it is that sometimes done badly, people will feel scared.

So if you go in and go, "Oh my goodness, where's your insurance?" If you've done all of this, people will feel unnerved. But looking at things like what they would do in certain scenarios, thinking about prepping a go bag, looking at your insurance cover whether you are a household-- so many households now are underinsured. Looking at your insurance as a business, these just make good sense. So I think that's probably one of the things that I would most like to encourage. I tweet regularly ideas about going into the winter doing both an adult first aid course and a pediatric first aid course, learning about citizen aid which is how to support with more kind of catastrophic medical injuries; all of those kind of things. Knowing where your defibrillator is and just upping your level of preparedness skills really.

Ben (01:09:13):

So I go into some places-- I do a lot of site visits, and I'm often feeling quite comforted when I see a kind of safety culture, again, depending on the site and industry. You've mentioned this. You can kind of sense it, the signs are clear, they're well kept, and all of these type of things. But on occasion I've gone to places which have some of this or even all of this, but it's tipped over slightly into tick box. So they've set it all up but they've actually forgotten the bit about the preparedness is that other layer. Is there something to do with how we don't want to make it a bureaucracy because we kind of wanted to make it a slightly living thing? And I guess there is a slight tension sometimes.

So I got to do it in the extreme. So Silicon Valley sometimes says, "We got to move fast and break things." And I always kind of think, "Well, can we not just move quite quickly and just not break anything rather than...?" That seems to be much more sensible with that sort of thing. But there is maybe a little bit of attention. I don't think there is with actually true being prepared because as you say, I think that's sort of sensible. But where can it go wrong in terms of just getting a tick box culture and a bureaucratic culture, and how do you have this tension between the risk and opportunity side? Because on one hand, if we never took any risk; you never leave the house, you don't do anything so it's a kind of tension to think about. I've met some people also who I would say at the margin, perhaps a little bit too scared. You also have to live your life and deal with the fact that risk is all around us and accepting that. So I don't know if you have any thoughts or comments about that balance and bureaucracy and how you should think about risk, but also the reward about going out and living life.

Lucy (01:11:03):

Yeah. And it's such a challenge. The biggest evaluation I think I did was once I became a parent because then it's, "How do you not impose on those beautiful children that need to go out and live their lives and do their own adventures?" How do you not impose those worries on them? That has been a really interesting balance for me. So both of mine are very active and both of them are into quite high risk sport. So that's a true test of letting people live their own lives, do their own risk assessment. I remember a young youth worker saying to me many years ago, "It's you that's not normal." And she was quite glad that people didn't worry about the risk all the time.

You have to live and we wouldn't get innovation, we wouldn't get excitement. The NASA kind of-- the bravery and the ambition that goes with risk taking. So I'm all for a kind of quite risk tolerant society, but that does its assessment well, that does its mitigation well. Then as you say, something that's very important to me is the overt signs of safety culture. So I'm very interested in an organization where if I go into somewhere and they've got their very good food standard rating and food hygiene rating on the wall, but I can see the staff are miserable. There are other indicators that we all use to look.

I've also talked a lot more recently-- and I've just done a big interview on it-- about instinct, the power of instinct in our guts where the ancient Greeks believed all our emotions lived. Knowing when something's very wrong which I talk about in the rollercoaster chapter. So I think it is a really difficult one. The other thing that's happening is people have had their risk calibration completely discombobulated by the pandemic. This was starting to be very wary of. But what we did as a nation and several nations follow the same sort of path is we terrified our public. So what would've felt like something in their gift to weigh up, they're now very afraid. And now we continue to terrify them. The world's gone to hell in a Hancock, here's an environmental crisis, you can't swim in your own river. We're constantly bombarding people with information that makes them afraid. And that as mentioned before has a fundamental effect on parts of the brain. So one of the things I think I would recommend people do is remind themselves-- as I do towards the end of the book-- that the world has always been like this. Focus inwards, focus on what's controllable. But going back to the earlier point, you can't let it get in the way of life and living.

Ben (01:13:52):

Yeah. I think that's really right. That's one of the reasons I started with a question on hope because I strongly believe that in the long run, fear is not a winning strategy regardless of everything else. Governments, or organizations, or even people use fear at actually great long-term costs and I think we've learned that. People know, but obviously in the moment there is that. One comment on normal, there's a phrase I like which is that, "Everybody is somebody's weirdo."

Lucy (01:14:27):

Yeah.

Ben (01:14:27):

And that's how we have it. But if you found the true normal, that would probably be the weirdest thing ever if you could really find it. Okay. Last couple of questions on this. So one was going back to Grenfell and another will just be on in general life advice or thoughts that you have. I just wanted to finish on this because investigations are ongoing and things. We have, I guess what I would say is the direct cause, the first order cause via refrigerator and things like that. But when I talk around in my community, a lot of the anger is going up a level and so you can talk about the building and the construction and the policy and that.

Then you can even go up another level because there is this systems piece that we seem to have which weighs against so many types of groups. So whether that's poverty, whether these are immigrants, people who don't speak the language of English and all of these type of things. I think that's where you get a lot of this sense of injustice that you go, "Okay, we have a proximal cause. It was poor police officer or poor policing decision." But that comes from this system of policing or things that we have on a hierarchy we think about. We have poor housing and poor individual building, but it seems to be a system about how we think about social housing or how we treat poor people and things like that. So obviously, there is no consensus or solution for this because if there was, I think we would be pursuing about it. But given that you have been in so many of these events and communities and things, do you have a thought on that systems piece as well about what we should be thinking about or how we could be doing-- which takes us from one cause up from, "Yes, poor cladding, and yes, poor buildings." But is there something we can do on this systems piece or the social politics that means that we could try and make these better decisions for the things and listen to people when they say they've got problems within all of that?

Lucy (01:16:37):

Yeah. This is where you get quite radical as a disaster planner, because these are terrible acts of what is essentially state violence. The only way to explore improving that is to in some ways challenge and even perhaps tear act some very existing systems. You mentioned how many disasters I've seen and how many inquiry reports that I've also seen that go with them. The themes are always the same. There's very similar themes in Grenfell as there were in Hillsborough, very similar in Southall, very similar in Marchioness. I can just list places for you. So one of the things for me is there is a fundamental requirement to agitate. One of the reasons I've been independent since 2004, I have my own business is because if you get involved in disaster response, they're inherently political and they're usually embarrassing somebody and groups quite senior within the state.

So for us to really improve how the UK handle disasters and prevent them would involve us asking some very difficult questions of where power is held. And there are big questions there as I've said before about equal voice, being able to flag early, being listened to, exploring why people are ignored in the response. They are shamed and condemned when they raise these issues. And that's a very common theme for me. Also, there's often a sort of follow the money type angle as well. And afterwards when what we call the tombstone imperative, when the dead have been lined up-- if you will. It can seem so easy and simple to have prevented something. I don't think people always understand how hard it can be to try and whistle blow before something. There has been a theme throughout today's podcast, the ability to whistle blow on a story, on a hunch, on an instinct. People will say, "We could have prevented it this way, or we could have done that, or we could have done..." I still don't know how you do that.

Ben (01:19:04):

Yeah. When those in power don't really want to listen, doesn't really matter what you tell them.

Lucy (01:19:10):

No.

Ben (01:19:11):

Great. Okay, last question. What do you have as, I guess life advice or thought that you'd like to share? We touched on a little bit in terms of preparedness planning and also not living in fear and things. But is there anything else you'd like to share about your experience having come across some of the worst of times, but also the best of humans?

Lucy (01:19:34):

Yeah. There's so many things. Don't go to work on a row. I was reflecting with a friend recently and she said, "A lot of people say that they live life as if it's precious and you might not be here tomorrow, or the people you love might not be here tomorrow. But you Lucy, really do." And what does that look like? Everybody I love knows that I love them. Every time I say goodbye to my children, every time I go to work, it's always on the premise of how fragile this is. I think if we remember that, it sets us up to perhaps be kinder to each other. I also think that one of the most important things to me is to go back to those basics about particularly as we go into yet another difficult winter or difficult times, is think about just that couple of things that can make a difference. I think people are very anxious about trying to save the whole world. You don't need to save the whole world, just make somebody a cup of tea. Just make that tiny little kind of chaos theory difference, and that's enough.

Ben (01:20:51):

Yeah. I think I have another quote here that you quote on grief really, but it's the sort of thing. "Grief is best dealt with in the tiniest of incremental steps. How about you make the cup of tea today? Shall we walk to the end of the drive? Let's redecorate the kitchen."

Lucy (01:21:09):

Yeah, absolutely.

Ben (01:21:11):

Excellent. So on that, Lucy, thank you very much. I will once again recommend the book, "When the Dust Settles." On that, please do grab your copy and thank you very much.

Lucy (01:21:12):

Thank you. Thank you for having me.