The end of term might have caught me out in terms of the blog side of this endeavour, but from a recording and editing perspective, we started the summer holidays with a bang.

No sooner had the end of term speeches and subsequent hog roast finished (an annual tradition that is as delicious as it is predictable) than Ben and I were holed up in my office, much to the chagrin of the site team, who were more than irritated that we hadn’t followed the majority of our colleagues out of the door for an early finish.

Although actually, when we finished recording we did bump into a colleague who had just held a parental meeting, some five and a half weeks before he’s likely to set eyes on the child who was the subject of the meeting, so as pointless endeavours go, us recording three back-to-back episodes of a podcast no one will listen to was not even breaking into the top ten.

I say no one will listen and already I know that not to be true, as some people have clearly listened to episode 17, which was the first of the three we recorded that afternoon (and of the five that we have recorded to date this summer holiday, despite only being a week in). Indeed, all were edited and uploaded to Buzzsprout before August began.

But we do know our listening figures will dip this summer, because our relatively small (but for this stage of our podcast journey, certainly respectable) listenership is made up of teachers who like to listen to us on their commute to work. Those teachers won’t be commuting, hence they won’t be listening. But we’ve made lots of episodes anyway, because we’re still very much trying to establish ourselves as proper podcasters at this stage and a six-week gap in episode releases does not seem a prudent move. Also, when the listeners do return, they’ll be going back to work after a long time of not being at work, so having a backlog of us to listen to might be nice for them. Admittedly it might not, but one imagines that those who choose to listen do quite like it, because it would be a strangely punishing regime otherwise.

Episode 17, bizarrely, is the first one where it does actually sound like we work in a school. So often our recordings have been late at night on a Saturday that we’ve become quite disengaged with our own raison d’être. Recording immediately after the end of term and ‘on location’ definitely gives this episode more of a ‘made by actual teachers’ vibe. Hopefully not to its detriment…

I like this one as an episode. You can hear we’re in pretty good spirits and a bit demob happy, but we’re also exhausted, so there’s still a few spiky moments. Feedback seems to be that people quite like it when we argue and some of the funniest moments have occurred either when we’ve argued on a recording, or, unbeknownst to the listener, we’ve had a bit of an argument off air.

We’re pretty forgiving of each other and we genuinely do get on, so no argument ever lasts for more than a few minutes anyway.

We were actually pretty efficient with this recording too. It was one of the easiest to edit and not much needed to be cut. We had been aiming to make a much shorter episode and on that score we failed miserably, but the final result has come in at under 40 minutes, which seems to be broadly where our shorter episodes sit these days. A far cry from the twenty-something minutes of the first five episodes, but we’ve come a long way since then.

Although, ironically, ‘the list’ in this is quite similar to ‘the list’ in episode 5. But it does have a summer holiday ‘qualification’ that allows for a little artistic license, I think.

Possibly the days of the list are numbered anyway (as are the items on most of the lists – numbered I mean). We’ve got some grand plans for September, albeit a lot depends on me learning to use some new software, which I am trying to do, but which so far is proving quite challenging.

As for the postcard—a pile of antique luggage definitely has some summer holiday vibes, so I think it’s quite serendipitous that I picked that one out of the pile.

Whatever changes we make in September, we’re keeping the postcard bit. Ben won’t like it, but I bought a hundred of them, so we’re not even having that debate for another 90 episodes…