It’s probably worth mentioning that I wasn’t very well during the recordings of the first three episodes. I’m not sure if it comes across to others, but when I relisten to those episodes now, I can hear that I am quite blocked up. But I persevered and powered through.

Episode 3 was recorded on the same day as the first two episodes, but we did afford ourselves a bit of a break between episodes 2 and 3.

We were a little more confident going in on this one. We’d had a fairly good morning and had listened to the unedited raw material for the first two episodes (not something we could imagine doing these days, as it now seems to take us longer to record one episode than it took us to record all three of our debut efforts).

We also thought the source material here was stronger and the DfE seemed a fairly safe target. So much so that we used them again for episode 4.

It’s still a bit too ‘formatty’ here, but at this stage, I’d not had a chance to edit the first two episodes, so I didn’t know how much we could get away with if we deviated from the original plan. But there is a different energy to this and I think it was the strongest of the first three. Certainly, if we’d wanted to push on from here and become a proper teacher podcast with a clear focus on secondary education, this was the template.

Somehow, we seem instead to have found ourselves mainly talking about biscuits and supermarkets in later episodes, so it turns out we ignored the template. But episode 3 is the closest to being what it says on the tin.

And now to the postcard…

As with the first two episodes, I rather made this up, but unlike with those two, the Reading Museum gift shop did not come to my rescue. I couldn’t find a Banksy postcard anywhere, and this is presumably because they aren’t for sale, because all rights are attributable to Banksy. Or something. I really don’t know how copyright works.

But there is a Banksy on the side of the building formerly known as Reading Gaol—the building that incarcerated Oscar Wilde for the crime of living in less enlightened times.

And someone did deface it a few days after it appeared.

They did manage to clean most of the graffiti off and now the artwork is covered by a large Perspex cover to prevent further vandalism. But you can still see the work of the vandal if you really pay attention.

I have, fortunately, managed to find a few open-source images on the internet of the work, so I can share the image here today, even if it is not technically a postcard and I lied.