Oenone Forbat

Full transcript

Home Again – Interview with Oenone Forbat

Introduction

Oenone: And we got talking to his manager and we were like, "Oh, we're having an afterparty at ours." And then they came back and we couldn't get rid of them. Anyway, we woke up in the morning and everyone was messaging us like, "Do you know who that was?" And we were like, "Who?"

Ella: Hi, I'm Ella.

Matt: And I'm Matt, and you're listening to Home Again, a podcast from SpareRoom about the places we live.

Ella: Where we ask our guests to pick three homes and tell us how they shaped their lives.

Matt: So Ella, who are we talking to today?

Ella: So our guest today is Oenone Forbat. I know Oenone from her fitness influencer content, but since then she sort of pivoted and now she speaks a lot more about challenging what it means to be an influencer.

Matt: And she's written a book about this, I believe, called Bad Influence, and she is also a podcast host. She's got Everything Is Content, and it's really interesting on this 'cause she's sort of been through that journey of the rise of social media and what it was like to have followers in the early days versus now, and how that's changed. The way we look at it has changed, the way influence itself has changed. So I think it's gonna be a really fascinating conversation.

Ella: Yeah, definitely. I'm really excited for this one.

Matt: Oenone, welcome. Great to have you here.

Oenone: Thank you so much for having me.

Matt: And we see you brought a friend with you.

Oenone: I have. I genuinely think she's my daughter, but obviously she is my dog.

Matt: What's her name?

Oenone: This is Astrid.

Matt: Hi, Astrid. Welcome.

Oenone: She's very happy to be here.

Matt: How has it been choosing three places to talk about?

Oenone: I was so instinctual with this. The minute I knew I had to send them over, I just whipped three off the top of my head. And then in the time since, I've been panicking that they weren't the best choices. But actually, I think they're a nice, broad spectrum of my life. I've moved so many times, especially in the last 18 months, so I did have a lot to choose from. But I feel okay with the choices.

Home 1

Matt: And what is the first place you've chosen to talk about?

Oenone: So the first place I've chosen to speak about was my second-year house at uni, where I was living with seven other girls, and it was when I was at uni in Cardiff. And the thing that I remember which really makes me laugh is we were like, "This is a pretty expensive house that we're moving into." And it was, I think, £315 a month. At that point in time, all of our friends were like, "Whoa, it's over £300 a month." And God, we had no idea what was gonna happen to us when everyone moved to London. It was a really big shock to the system.

Matt: And was that one of those where you were a solid group of friends, or was it a group of some slight randoms invited in? 'Cause it's a big house.

Oenone: It is a big house. This is quite funny actually, 'cause there were three of us who were already friends, and then we kind of made friends with another four... How many were there of us? Maybe there were seven in total. I need to add up.

Anyway, there were two sets of flats where someone knew someone. We all went to the pub once—I don't really know who'd organised it—and we said, "Should we all live together?" Someone thought it was a good idea. And one of the girls, Poppy, me and her... I was like, "I love all of the girls, but I really don't know about that Poppy girl." And she went back to her friends like, "I really like all of them, but I don't know about that Oenone girl." I was like, "I think she's a bit quiet," and she's like, "I think she's a bit loud."

Anyway, twelve years later, she's my best friend and we hang out all the time. But it was so funny, just on that initial meeting we were like, "I don't think we're gonna gel, but I love everyone else." And we ended up having some really crazy times in that house.

Ella: It's so surprising as well when you live with people. Sometimes friends actually aren't the best people to live with. Sometimes it is the people that at first on that instinctual meeting you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure about them," but you live together and you're like, "Oh my God, we're soulmates."

Oenone: I know. I think also that time at university—and I think about it all the time and I really miss it—is just open-ended hours sat by the TV, probably quite hungover, someone getting up and down going to the corner shop to bring back more snacks, and you're just watching Come Dine With Me or Four in a Bed. At the time you don't realise how amazing that is. You'll never, ever have that time again.

I have so many memories of all of us just under blankets, squished onto the sofa, kind of getting a bit sweaty actually because we've been festering there for hours, ordering pizza and then getting another pizza. It was really happy times.

Matt: It's funny, we had a similar thing before my son was born—he's 13 now—where me and my wife used to wake up on a Sunday morning: Hollyoaks Omnibus, Diet Coke, shit crisps from the shop around the corner. You look back on it and you go, "How did we have that amount of time just to do nothing?"

Oenone: I know. But do you not also think it's... I know people talk about rotting and stuff, but I feel like you're not allowed to relax like that anymore. I think the lie-in has become a thing of the past. You've gotta be... and it's happened to me, like I'm up and at it. I feel quite guilty if I have a lie-in now. On the weekend I'd slept until 8:00, and I felt quite bad about that. I don't even have any kids.

Matt: I don't think morning routines had been invented back then.

Oenone: No, I don't think so.

Matt: It's like this idea that you should be up and have read half a book by the time you've made breakfast.

Oenone: Yeah.

Ella: And how was it? Seven people's a lot of people to live with. Five is the most I ever lived with, and that was a lot.

Oenone: It was a lot. It was such a big house, was the good thing. So me and my friend Yaz were on the bottom floor, then there were three girls on the middle floor, and then there were... How many were there? There must've been four upstairs. But anyway, everyone was quite spread out.

Luckily, because I was definitely the worst for being out the most, my room was by the front door at the front of the house. So quite a lot of escapades could go on on my end, and I wouldn't be disrupting the girl on the top floor who was doing a really serious degree. Sometimes it was difficult, but it was always really fun 'cause you always felt there were people around.

The other thing that I should've mentioned at the top was the reason this was quite an interesting time for me was I, at the end of my first year of uni, decided to change my course. I wasn't allowed to go straight in; they made me wait a year. So when I was living in this house in Cardiff in my second year of uni, I wasn't actually at uni. I was just living there. And my parents were like, "Why are you paying rent? Just come home."

This is when I started getting into the gym and going really religiously and started posting on Instagram. It was that that was the seedling for me ultimately becoming an influencer that year, 'cause I didn't really have anything to do.

Matt: And did you then go on and do the rest of the course you changed to?

Oenone: Yeah, so then I had to start back in second year when everyone else was in third year, and I lived with the same girls, but five of us that time, so a few went off. I rejoined in that year. But at the same time, it feels so ridiculous now, but I'd got about 3,000 followers at this point, and we honestly thought I was famous. We were walking around Cardiff like, "Let's get champagne," like, "Oh my God, no one look at me." 'Cause there was no such thing as an influencer; there weren't that many people that had that many followers.

Nothing was happening from it. We were just really excited that I had 3,000 people, which is loads of people, but in modern parlance, unless you've got a million followers, you're not an influencer or whatever.

Then I went back and started doing my degree, but I had gotten really, in hindsight, addicted to posting on social media because I was getting such a dopamine rush from getting all of this engagement, and it was so organic at that time. Your content would get seen. I got more likes probably than I do now with the way that the algorithms worked, or maybe there weren't really algorithms at that time.

I was studying for a degree in English Literature with a view to maybe go into journalism, or I had been doing Spanish as well, and I was like, "Maybe I should keep doing that and go into translation." And then by the time I finished uni, I'd done a PT course on the side and told my parents I was gonna move to London as a personal trainer influencer, and they were quite confused by that.

Matt: It's not one of the obvious options that comes up on the careers advice tick list, is it?

Oenone: No, definitely not.

Ella: So Cardiff seems like it was quite a formative place for you then, kind of figuring out who you were, what you wanted to do, where you wanted to be.

Oenone: The biggest thing for me was actually... I was a day student, but I'd gone to a private boarding school in Somerset. When I look back at that, I didn't know it at the time, but you're obviously surrounded by a lot of people that have specific ideals or thoughts or ways they think that the world works. When I went to university, I was encouraged to recognise, one, my level of privilege, but also how ignorant I was to so many things.

The friendships that I built at university have become my long... I'm still friends with my friends from school, but it changed something in me. It kind of flipped everything I thought on its head. Not that I think I even had politics when I was at school, which is a level of privilege in and of itself, but I became much more politically engaged, I became really interested in feminism, and I became much more academically driven, which is such a sorry thing to say when thinking about how much money my dad spent on my education.

It was really formative, and actually it became the starting point for everything that I do now: meeting those people, being in a different space. It makes me really sad how exclusive and expensive university is. I mean, I have not paid off... I do pay my student loan, but it just seems to be getting more and more. I don't even look at it.

Beyond just its educational merit, university gave me so much in terms of freedom, finding out about myself, finding out about other people, learning about the world. I feel like people really need that space and time to grow. It's like a mini limbo stage before you enter into the real world.

Now when I look back, if I had children, you almost want to advise them against it. 'Cause if you can get into a job at 18 and work your way up, and you've got an idea of what you want to do, unless it's a vocation that needs a degree, it's so expensive that it almost feels pointless.

Even back to that morning routine thing, we were so hedonistic at uni, but in a really fun, silly, formative way, which I think was useful to us. Younger people are under so much pressure, so much strain. I don't even know if they have that much fun anymore. Everything's very heavy very quickly, which makes me sad because a lot of the fun...

I mean, once—sorry, I'm going off on a tangent—once at that house on Harriet Street, me and Poppy brought back Big Narstie. I don't know if you know who that is. He wasn't that famous at the time, and we'd been on a night out at this club called Buffalo, which we loved, and we'd snuck upstairs, and there was a gig on. Somehow we got talking to him and his manager, and we were like, "Oh, we're having an afterparty at ours." It was just me and her.

And then they came back, and we couldn't get rid of them. All we had was this really cheap booze. So we were sat in our living room like, "Oh my God, I don't actually know what to do." And all of the girls were texting us like, "Guys, can you be quiet?" 'Cause we were playing music really loudly on the speaker.

We put it on Snapchat, 'cause I think we were using Snapchat at the time. Anyway, we woke up in the morning, and everyone was messaging us like, "Do you know who that was?" And we were like, "Who?" And they're like, "That was Big Narstie." Years later, we saw his manager on the street in London, and we went up to him, and he remembered us, which was quite funny.

Matt: It's totally true what you were saying about having to sit down and work out the value of your degree to your career. Half of the value of a degree at least is nothing to do with what you study or what it's gonna financially bring you. It's just about some safe space to work out who you really are and who your people are. And that is priceless.

But it does put people off having that, unless you can quantify it and go, "This is the correct thing to do for my course of life." And it's a really sad thing, isn't it?

Oenone: I think it is sad. And also, you get this thing which doesn't exist except in sitcoms and at uni, which is where you have your friends in a five-minute walkable distance. You've got a group of lads who live in a house that you all kind of hang out with. I remember us having food fights across the street to the boys that lived in the house opposite. They were throwing avocados, trying to get them in our windows.

It's like the Friends thing. You'd all go round and watch TV at a friend's house, you'd text each other, you'd meet up, and you'd get ready. You think, or I thought, that that would continue into adulthood. In my 30s we're doing Google Docs: who's free on the sixth of December? We're booking holidays in May for next July.

If I want to see someone on a Thursday, you can't just text someone and be like, "Do you want to go to the pub?" You need to turn up at their house and be like, "Do you feel like going out?" and kinda drag them out of bed.

It was such a fun, special time where you do have these unbridled hours. Obviously you are meant to be studying, and a lot of it was spent studying, but a lot of it was also basically like living in a sitcom where you're just hanging out with your mates all the time. I always have a vision that that's gonna happen again, and I don't think it will. Maybe when you're retired, if you're really rich, you could sort of get all of your friends to move into some sort of commune.

Matt: I love that idea. But no, we're pretty lucky. We live in southeast London, and gradually various friends of ours have ended up gathering there, I think 'cause it's relatively cheap for London. And we do have people who just sort of text and go, "We're going to the pub. Do you want to come?"

Oenone: That's so nice.

Matt: And we'll go. But we are aware that we're lucky.

Oenone: The other person who had this—and actually I've lived there before because my sister lives in Cheltenham—she has a downstairs floor which is basically an empty flat. And she's like, "Just come and live with us." Her husband is an ex-rugby player, and so all of his rugby-playing friends also live in Cheltenham. So they are constantly just with... I've never met anyone that has this set of friends. She's friends with all the wives, and all their children are the same age. That doesn't exist anywhere else, but it's the most amazing thing.

They literally have an inbuilt friendship group of 20 people within walking distance, and that is so aspirational to me. But like you said, it's quite unusual in London. Maybe it does happen more when you have kids 'cause you're kind of on the same vibe.

I'm at the age where two of my best friends, who both of them have just had babies, have just moved to just outside of London, and then a couple of other friends have just moved in with boyfriends. Someone's trying out East London. We're all suddenly really spread out, everyone's work is getting really serious, and no one has that much time. It feels like that's never gonna come back. But maybe it's something that comes back when you have kids and you're sort of all back on the same path.

Ella: Yeah, I think it's different life events. Like you said, having kids is a way of bringing you together. Being in uni brings you together. And I think it can be place-dependent as well, because I lived in Cardiff for a couple of years. I love Cardiff. And one of the things I loved about it is that it's a city, but it's all very condensed. All the shops are in one place, all the places to go out in one place. I'm assuming you lived in kind of the studenty area of Cardiff, in Cathays?

Oenone: Yeah, so that house is in Cathays, and then there was Roath, but that was more for people that were at Cardiff Med. But then we'd be friends with them as well.

And also, I worked everywhere in Cardiff. I worked at River Island, Ted Baker, Burger & Lobster. I used to work at Glam Nightclub as well. I was one of the door girls, and I used to let all my friends in for free, so they'd give me £5 and then I'd hand it back to them. No one ever actually caught me, but I think I did eventually get fired.

I knew everyone. I knew every bouncer, and we were just out. It was so fun 'cause I remember we would take a £10 note out on a night out, and you'd come home with change. And we would've been out all night and have got a taxi. It was just so cheap at that time.

Because I was still with the uni lot, but I ended up making lots of friends with just people who were from Cardiff and lived in Wales. I don't think I went home that summer either, weirdly. I think I really wanted to get away. My parents live in the middle of nowhere. I can't drive, which is really silly, but they live in the Mendips. It's really isolated and secluded.

Because I'd gone to a boarding school, none of my friends lived where I lived. They all lived in London or other areas. So to me, the idea of stepping out and being able to go to a shop or have friends around the corner was a massive novelty. I'd never had that. I'd always have to ask my mum, "Mum, please, can you come and pick me up at 2:00 in the morning from whatever place?" So it was a really nice taste of freedom, but in a soft way because, like you said, everything's really condensed. It always felt very safe.

Home 2

Matt: And the second place you've chosen to talk about is in London. Did you end up in London after uni, or did you take a bit more of a circuitous route to get there?

Oenone: No, I came straight to London when I finished my degree. Both my parents grew up in London. My mum grew up in Clapham South, and the flat she lived in, my grandparents carried on living in until they passed away. So I spent loads of my childhood in and around Clapham South and Balham, and I knew it quite well.

When I moved to London, I knew that I wanted to be south because it was the area that I was most familiar with. This isn't the flat we're gonna talk about, but I first started off in Brixton Hill, then I went to Streatham, then I went to Balham, and then I eventually ended up in the flat we're gonna talk about in Clapham Junction.

It's so funny 'cause I've always loved Clapham because all of my childhood pictures were of me in the park. But obviously being a posh white blonde woman moving to Clapham, everyone's just like, "Oh, of course you moved to Clapham." And I feel so defensive about the fact that I'm like, this is actually my ancestral home! I'm living here because I love it.

Anyway, I went through a breakup after lockdowns—I think a lot of people did. I moved in quite quickly with my partner, and then we lived together through the lockdown, and we probably moved in too soon. I was like, "I want to live by myself, I think."

I found this flat online, and I showed pictures to my friends, and they were all like, "Hmm, I don't know. It's a bit kind of grotty and run-down."

I was like, "No, honestly, the floorboards, the ceilings are so high. You don't understand. It's amazing."

And they were all like, "I really don't think it's very nice."

So I got my mum to drive up to London and said, "Come and see this flat with me. We have to go and see it straight away."

She was like, "I love it. I can completely see your vision."

Everyone didn't believe me, but it was really run-down. I don't think they'd touched it since whenever whoever had bought it. They must be making so much money on it. The kitchen was just completely run-down. Everything was run-down, but it was completely unfurnished: old fireplaces, wooden floors, really high ceilings, and it had a garden at the back. Astrid was one when I moved in there.

I had a bit of furniture from with my ex, but I spent this time just turning this flat into a place that felt like a home. I'm really obsessed with natural light, and 'cause I work from home so much, it had the most beautiful light that would come in at different parts of the day.

I used to sit in the living room, and every season I'd take a picture out of the back garden, which was literally just rotting wood with a shed at the back that I turned into a little painting room, but these trees that would always change colour.

Even though it kind of bankrupted me living there eventually... I was like, "I can't actually afford to be living here." In my head I was like, "I earn this much a month, so I can spend all of that on rent." And that isn't good financial planning. But there was something about living there with my little dog in my mid-20s. All of the cupboards were stuffed with clothes, my plates were just sort of on the side, I had so much stuff. I was like, "I am Carrie Bradshaw." I just felt so cosmopolitan and fun.

I'd been in a really serious relationship at quite a young-ish age, and we'd been acting like we were more grown-up than we were. Kind of playing house, basically. And then I suddenly got this second wind of freedom. I lived really close to Archer Street on Clapham High Street, which I don't know if you've ever been to, and I was just in there constantly with my friends.

We felt at the time, 'cause I must have been 27... I was 27, and we felt like we were really old and cool, so we thought we were too old to be there, but also having a fab time. I could run down the hill in eight minutes in my heels to get to Archer Street, and I'd be like, "Girls, let's go."

After being in lockdown and just being inside so much... And I took lockdown very seriously 'cause all my family are doctors. If I'd been outside for an hour, I just wouldn't eat for the rest of the day if I'd had no food in, 'cause I was such a stickler for the rules. I went through this—not a second adolescence—but I got to really enjoy that time that I'd lost in the pandemic when I was living in this flat. The year I turned 28, I still think 2022 was the best year of my life. I had so much fun.

Ella: There's something really poetic about sort of going through a breakdown of a relationship and then being able to build your life back up again. Moving in somewhere unfurnished, and it all being a bit run-down, and it being a bit of a labour of love to get it to be a safe space for you. Did it kind of feel like that?

Oenone: Yeah. There was something about it that felt so me, like my home. It was really fun because I think it was really exciting to feel like I could host and do... He's a lovely guy and we're still friends, but there were just things about our relationship where we would rub against each other. We had very different ideals on what we wanted and different things, how we liked to live our lives. I just felt like, "Ooh, I can do whatever I want. I can have my friends round whenever I want."

Another really key thing that happened at this flat was there were always different people moving in upstairs. One day this woman was in the hallway, and she said, "Oh, hi, I'm Polly."

And I was like, "Hi, Polly, nice to meet you."

She was like, "I've owned this flat since the '80s or '90s, but I've been working in Africa as an artist, and I've just come back and I'm gonna live here now. It's nice to meet you."

We became really good friends. She's in her 50s, but never got married, never had children. Has lived such an interesting life. Does this beautiful print art of different animals, and a lot of it is inspired by her time in Africa. She hadn't lived in this flat for years, and she was like, "I thought I'll just come back to London and see what it would be like to live here now."

I love her so much and I really miss her. We still talk, but I don't live near to her. She would stick her head out of her window in the morning in the summer, and I'd be having a cup of tea, and I'd look up, and then we'd have a chat. She had a dog called Martha. We'd get drunk in her kitchen and talk about our lives.

It's so interesting because I found it really empowering that she was in her 50s, and she was single, and that she didn't feel like she'd missed out. I'd be constantly trying to get her to go on dates 'cause I was going on loads of dates, and she was like, "I just don't have any interest."

I was like, "That is fascinating." I was very interested in it at that time. It felt like a really cool... If you could peel off the front of that house—'cause it was a house that was split into two flats—you could just see us living these parallel lives across different decades. There was just something really sweet about it, and we became genuinely really, really close friends. That was lovely as well.

Matt: It speaks a little bit to what you were talking about earlier about the thread of going to uni and working out who you are, and then living with your partner and feeling like you'd become grown-ups too quickly. When you're a kid, you think of being a kid to being an adult as this linear thing, and then you arrive, and you're an adult. But knowing when you're an adult is such a hard thing to work out, and seeing different people at different places in that journey is sometimes really empowering 'cause you realise there's lots of different ways to take that journey. You know what I mean?

Oenone: Did you see the new research from the BBC where they said that you're actually in adolescence from 16 to 32? Adulthood starts at 32, which I'm really pleased about 'cause I'm 32 in March, so that all checks out.

Everyone does things so differently, and I've got a very non-linear life anyway with my work. In some ways, I always thought that I wasn't really doing anything, and then it took me writing my memoir to be like, "Oh God, I've actually kind of built something." It's actually not the easiest path, but it felt easy when I was doing it for some strange reason.

There were areas where I was really growing up quite quickly, kind of creating a life for myself and being very independent, and then, on the other hand, letting loose and having a lot of freedom. Nothing is as linear or as obvious as you want it to be, or as neat.

After that breakup, I restarted my podcast Adulting, but I called it Timelines, which was basically about what we're talking about because I kept getting messages from people being like, "Aren't you scared because you're 28 and single?"

And I was like, "But I'm 28. What do you mean?"

So then I interviewed loads of different people about what stages in their life they did things or the choices that they made. People that got divorced, had children later on in life, completely changed their career in their 50s—people that had hugely life-changing events happen to them. I spoke to a girl who got breast cancer when she was in her 20s and how that changed her life.

All of that was recorded in that flat on my sofa as well, which was lovely. It was, again, like a rebirthing. But I think as well it was so much to do with COVID that we didn't realise at the time how much that had impacted us and our perception of ourselves. Coming out again, I think a lot of us did go a bit stir-crazy.

Ella: That's interesting. Like you were saying, it was after COVID, obviously a time when we were all inside, sort of stuck by ourselves, to then decide to go and live on your own feels a bit counterintuitive—to then be in your own space again.

Oenone: Yeah, I think that I just wanted... also 'cause I work from home and I create from home, and I'm really creative. I always want to be making things and painting things, and I've always kind of liked being a bit of a mess. Not literally a mess, but I like having stuff everywhere, and I need room to kind of spread out. I've always been very good on my own, and having Astrid probably made a massive difference 'cause she's just always with me. I never really felt like I was by myself.

Lots of my friends were still living in and around South London at that time, so it was such a social time living in that flat. I had loads of barbecues. I was always hosting, I was always cooking, I constantly had people coming in and out of that flat, which is something that I really loved and really enjoyed.

I remember when there was a massive heatwave, I bought a paddling pool for Astrid 'cause I was really worried that she was gonna overheat. It arrived, and it was massive. It was like a 20-person paddling pool that fit the whole of my back garden. So I invited all my friends around, they got in, and then when it was really hot, my friends were just coming around knocking on the door being like, "Can I come and work from your flat 'cause I'm so hot?"

I remember my friend Paddy coming around with his laptop being like, "Noni, I can't. I'm boiling." So I was just making coffee for my friends while they were sat in the paddling pool with their laptops leaning over the side. You couldn't make it up! It was such a funny, interesting, special time. Now I look back and I'm like, "Oh, it was really cool."

Matt: And what sort of brought the time at that flat to an end?

Oenone: Well, it was really expensive, and now it's even more expensive. I looked it up the other day. The cost of renting is ludicrous. So I was like, "I don't think I can really afford this."

Then I started dating a man who lived weirdly close by—very close. In fact, we had our first date and he said, "Why don't we go to this restaurant?" and I was like, "Oh my God, he's stalking me 'cause that's three minutes from my flat." Turned out it was three minutes from his flat in the other direction.

I was thinking about moving, and he said, "Why don't you just move in with me?" So I moved in with him, and I painted his whole flat pink. He had this gorgeous flat, but he'd never done anything to it; owned it for years and years. I said, "I'm gonna redo this."

And then we ended up breaking up, so I moved out, and his flat is still pink. I love that. Love a really nice, dusky, gorgeous pink.

I never really could afford it at the time. I felt like I could afford it, but it adds up very quickly. Again, it was so interesting talking to Polly, who lived above, 'cause she was saying when she bought her flat, she couldn't believe how much mine was up for rent. Especially 'cause she was like, "I don't think they've touched it since... I remember them buying that flat," 'cause they got them around a similar time.

Even that conversation was so interesting about the inaccessibility of these homes and what they mean. The way that we see the value of spaces and how much that's changed even in our lifetime, and people my age really struggling to have their own spaces, is interesting as well. Complete tangent!

Matt: No, but it's important stuff, isn't it? It affects how people live their lives, and the choices you can make, and the opportunities you can take, and all that stuff. It can be a real millstone for people.

Oenone: Totally.

Home 3

Ella: So I'm really intrigued about your third place, because this actually isn't in the UK. Do you want to talk about your flat in Paris?

Oenone: Yes. So this is actually pre-breaking up from pink house man—his actual name! I was like, "Oh, I've just realised, I don't have a real job. Why am I sitting in the same place? I could just go and live anywhere."

I got really obsessed with the idea of living in Paris. I had this idea for a novel, which I'm now writing—well, I started then, but it's very different now. I was like, "Maybe I'll just move to Paris. This will be really romantic. It'll be really cool." I don't even know if I'd been to Paris... maybe I'd been once, and I was like, "I'm gonna go."

I found this place and didn't really have my bearings of where it was. I went on the Eurostar, and I really wanted to take Astrid with me, but you can't have dogs on the Eurostar. So I emailed them and I said, "Look, she's like my emotional support animal. It's not a recognised thing in Europe, but I spend every waking day with her, and I don't know what to do. I really wanted to bring her."

They said, "Fill out this form." And the form was like, "Is she a registered guide dog? No. Has she been trained by anyone? No." So I filled everything out "no". I was like, they're obviously not gonna let her come. At the bottom, I just put, "She's really well-behaved, and she's really small."

I'd had to go through so many layers of people to get this form that they just approved it and let her travel with me on the Eurostar for a year for free. Which saying this is probably breaking some rules, but I think they were like, "This English woman is crazy," 'cause I was like, "Who could I speak to about potentially bringing this dog?"

Anyway, I was like, "This is great." So we got on the Eurostar. I had a suitcase, and the flat was literally at the base of the Sacré-Cœur. You'd go up a few steps, and the Sacré-Cœur was right there. The street was right where they filmed Amélie, and it was more incredible and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. It was like being in a film; I couldn't believe it.

It had this little courtyard out the back, and it was very snug: straight through the little kitchen, and a tiny little bedroom right by the window where you could see everyone walking past.

My pink house man came out to stay for bits, which was nice. But I mostly just wrote, and again, I guess it's this idea of figuring out who you are. I kind of went into a character. I haven't smoked for years, but I took up smoking Vogues because everyone was smoking. I thought, "Well, you have to immerse."

Ella: You have to in Paris, don't you, with a little coffee?

Oenone: Because at one point after a glass of wine I brought out a vape, and the look on people's faces! So I just thought, "Well, I can't."

At lunch I'd go and just have a glass of wine and some cheese, and I'd be writing in my book and sort of looking around. I picked up a bit of French, but I couldn't speak very good French, so I would kind of go, "Oui," just really quickly.

I got to know some of the people in the local area. There were these amazing, gorgeous wine bars that would just pop up, and then you couldn't find them again because they'd board them up so completely that you couldn't figure out where on the road they were. There'd be no rhyme or reason to when they'd be open: they'd be open at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday, and then 6:00 PM on a Friday, then not for two weeks...

So when they were open, I'd always go in, and I'd always be quite quiet because I was aware that the French aren't that big fans of very loud English women, which I am. So I kind of got on their good side. Sometimes they'd randomly be making food, and the food would just be incredible. But they wouldn't have a menu, and there'd be no... Again, you wouldn't know why they were doing it. They'd just be like, "We've got this gorgeous asparagus egg thing that my brother's making on this portable stove in the back of the bar." And it would always be amazing.

Other tourists would come in and clock me, knowing that I wasn't French, and try to talk to me. And I'd be like, "You can't, because you're gonna ruin my reputation in this bar as someone that's nice and polite and she can't really speak French, but she's no trouble." Especially if really loud Americans came in, I'd be like, "Oh no," because they'd all want to talk to me really loudly. I could tell the French people around me were like, "She's ruining the..." —Like I'm drawing in the wrong crowd.

That was really funny, and I loved living there. It was so interesting being in a different city. It's really dog-friendly, but they're not allowed in the parks. I almost got fined so many times. They have these little dog parks, which are tiny, about the size of this room, that are gravelly, but dogs aren't allowed on the grass. That was random.

It was so fun indulging and basically playing a character and being in a different place, but it made me love London and want to come back. Sometimes I think the importance of travel is making you love where you're from rather than making you want to go away forever.

Matt: It's really funny how in all three of the places you've talked about, there's an element of self-reinvention and an element of working out who you are. 'Cause sometimes if you live in a place for a long time, it becomes part of who you are. We've got a colleague who uses the phrase, "It's hard to read the label when you're in the jar." Exactly what you're saying is you step out of the jar, and it lets you see what you were in. Some people talk about houses they lived in for years, and I love this idea of home as an opportunity to reinvent yourself a bit.

Oenone: Yeah. For me it does feel like a pipe dream having a forever home. I'm freelance, I'm single, I work for myself, I don't really have anything tangible. The idea of maybe having enough for a deposit and then being viable for a mortgage, I can't really see when or if that will happen unless I do something that's really good. So I've got quite used to having to up and move.

I've got loads of stuff. You wouldn't believe how much stuff I fit in the flat; it's actually inconceivable, I don't know how I do it. So the idea of a forever home, whilst I love the idea of it, I can't quite imagine it, but it feels like a destination that I would love to end up in.

There is something very cool about experiencing new spaces. In the two places I lived growing up... one of them was the Lake District. I don't know why I didn't say that, actually. I grew up in the Lake District till I was eight, and the garden had this big forest out the back that was always full of flowers. It was like being in Beatrix Potter: there were hedgehogs and squirrels, and it was an amazing place to grow up.

Then we moved to where my parents live now in the Mendips. Both really isolated places that, whilst they were homes, they also could feel a bit like... I don't want to say prison, that's not the right word, but you sort of couldn't leave them. The containment of it almost was a bit suffocating, especially as you're getting older.

I think I am a bit flighty, and I've got quite itchy feet. I like something, and then I suddenly think, "Well actually, I want a change of scenery." But I think I will get tired, and I would like to kind of bed down and plant some roots. I don't know when that will be.

Ella: The three places that you've picked have all been sort of the opposite of that. They've been very central places in the middle of cities. Do you think you see yourself staying in a city, or do you think you're gonna reach that point and move a little bit further out?

Oenone: It's funny, 'cause I go back and forth, but I think I would want to stay in London forever. Lots of my friends say, "I want to stay there till I'm 40," but one of my things—and maybe this is selfish, 'cause I would like to have children, and I do think one of the things you probably shouldn't do as a parent is exercise the things that went wrong in your own childhood by practicing them on your children—is that I'd always want my children to be able to have agency, which is what I felt I never had.

I lost that sense of community 'cause I couldn't see friends after school, 'cause there was no one that lived nearby. It would be really important to me: I'd want to live somewhere where, if I had children, they had loads of people around. I love that the city is full of so much culture. Going back to my education and the way that I was taught, where the world kind of felt small in lots of ways, I would like my children to experience the breadth of human experience and all the different people.

That's one of the things that I love about a city, and the ease of it. I like going to the countryside. My mum's family are from Ireland, and I love going to Ireland and going along the west coast. I love going hiking, and I love going back to the Lake District. But ultimately, as my full-time place, I think it would have to be a city.

Matt: It's interesting, isn't it? This is entirely my theory rather than the truth, but I have this theory that most people are either a city person who likes to spend time in the country, or a country person who likes to spend time in the city.

All my life I have been slightly torn between the two 'cause I love being by the sea, I love being in the countryside, but the feeling I have when I get home to London after being away, and you sit on a bus on a bridge over the Thames or whatever the landmark is, everything settles. And I'm like, "This is home." I wasn't brought up in London, but you know the feeling when you feel it.

Oenone: Totally. It's really funny 'cause my mum, my whole life, where we'd been living really remotely, was like, "I just want to be in London." Every weekend we'd be in London 'cause all her brothers stayed near-ish London, and we would be seeing my granny all the time.

Then suddenly one day she just went, "Ugh, I can't think of anything worse than London. I want to live by the sea."

And I was like, "What?" All my life, all I remember her saying was, "I just want to be in London." That's all she'd ever known. And then something happened, and she was like, "All I want now is to be by the sea."

In lockdown, before I got Astrid, because my dad was a doctor, my parents had to be... What was it called when you couldn't be together? Quarantined, yeah. My mum had to be in quarantine, but my dad was going into hospitals, so she was in one section of the house and he was coming and going, and they couldn't hang out, and it's in the middle of nowhere.

So I was like, "Mum, I've bought you a dog." Which was really ignorant at the time, but she's gorgeous; she's called Mary. I was like, "Mum, you need to drive to Wales, buy this dog, and bring it home, 'cause you're gonna be by yourself."

They've lived in this house since I was eight, so over 20 years, and they'd never walked up the hill. People all day long walk up that hill 'cause it's a really famous place to go on walks. All we ever did was drive down the road to go wherever. And then they got this dog, and my parents are constantly just up and out in the Mendips.

It's so funny 'cause until they had a dog, they didn't really understand the concept of walking. It just gave them this whole new appreciation for the outdoors, which is really sweet. They do enjoy it more now, but I'd never really thought about that when I was younger: that we lived in the countryside, but we never experienced it. We were always driving to London, going into Bristol, going into town, being around people. I never once thought to just walk left up the house, which is honestly a really famous landmark walk. We never did until we'd all moved out.

So I think there is something in your theory. But then there are people I know that are just country people who cannot leave the countryside as well.

Matt: It has been a real joy talking to you about the places you've lived. It's been fascinating. Thank you.

Oenone: Thank you very much for having me.

Ending

Matt: That was fun.

Ella: That was really fun. I loved speaking to her. She really paints a picture with what she says. When she was describing the place she lived in Paris, I felt like I could really visualise it.

Matt: Yeah, and just kind of how she felt in places, and that sense of places allowing you to change. I hadn't thought about it in that way before.

Ella: Yeah, and what she said about picking them on gut instinct—I do wonder whether it's because those are places that she associated so much with changes in her life and formative things happening. Home really can be the place where that happens, where you find out something new about yourself.

Matt: I love it when people talk about places they didn't necessarily live for long, like the place in Paris, just a couple of months. But it feels like that's somewhere, if we met her again in 35 years and asked her the same questions, that might still be a pivotal moment.

Ella: It's strange the places that feel important to you in hindsight—other than, like you said, somewhere that you might have spent ten years, but actually it's somewhere that you lived for two months that means more to you.

Matt: Yeah, it's fascinating 'cause you have your own sense of what home is and your presumptions about what home means to other people, and it's lovely to have those kind of squashed and changed and re-examined, and make you think about something you hadn't thought about.

Ella: And it was a bonus that she had Astrid with her.

Matt: Always good to have a dog. We should insist on a dog every episode from now on.

Ella: Yeah, I'm gonna demand it, in fact.

Matt: Thanks so much to Oenone for joining us today. If you want to find out more about her, do head to the show notes, 'cause there's a link there to her book, Bad Influence, and to the podcast, Everything Is Content. I will also pop some links in there to her social channels so you can get updates and see what she's up to now.

Ella: If you enjoyed today's episode, you can leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch full video versions of Home Again over on our YouTube channel.

Matt: And to keep up to date with Home Again, just go to socials and follow us @homeagainpod, where you'll find details of upcoming guests, clips, and lots more. But for now, I've been Matt.

Ella: And I'm Ella, and this has been Home Again, a podcast brought to you by SpareRoom.

Matt: See you next time.

Ella: Bye.