
Alonement
Francesca Specter
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Top 10 Alonement Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Alonement episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Alonement for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Alonement episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

02/25/22 • 51 min
As far as being 'alone' goes, my guest Erling Kagge has experienced the extreme end of the spectrum. The first man to ever complete the Three Poles challenge (that's Mount Everest, the North Pole and the South Pole) on foot, Erling once spent 50 days alone, without radio contact, during his solo South Pole expedition in 1992 – a feat which saw him featured on the cover of Time magazine the following year. While it's impossible not to be awed by Erling's achievements, this podcast has always – at its core – celebrated those more moderate, everyday form of aloneness accessible to us all. Which is why the next part of this famous Polar explorer's career is so fascinating: he went on to write books with beautifully-simple, inclusive titles, Walking: One Step At A Time and Silence: In The Age Of Noise, which offer a guide, based on Erling's unique vantage point, of how we can access the stillness and solitude inside our own minds through simple everyday practices. 'After having travelled to hundreds of countries,' he tells me, 'My interpretation is the universe in your own mind – your body, your soul – is just as mysterious and huge as the universe stretching out to the stars and the planets'.
We discuss, among other things:
- Why Erling found living in London lonelier than 50 days & nights alone in the South Pole
- How being a Polar explorer can affect your relationships
- The relationship between time alone and fulfilling your life's potential
- How being close to nature helps you to be present
You can order Erling Kagge's book, Silence In The Age Of Noise, now from Amazon and Waterstones.
You can also order my book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, which is based on this very podcast, now from Amazon and Waterstones.
Thank you so much to Flash Pack for sponsoring this season of the podcast. Flash Pack is a travel company that offers boutique group adventures for solo travellers in their 30s and 40s. Visit flashpack.com/alonement to learn more and quote ALONEMENT at check-out for £100 off your first trip.
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With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
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09/02/21 • 59 min
Emma John is an award winning journalist and author. Her most recent book, Self-Contained, is a memoir which chronicles what it’s like to enter your 40s without having been in a serious long-term relationship. It’s a book that celebrates the fullness of single life – the highs and lows.
Our conversation is an unapologetic, unflinching look at the single experience, with a particular emphasis on how hobbies, interests and platonic relationships, as long as shorter-term romantic ones, can become centre stage – filling the space a relationship might otherwise.
We also discuss:
- What it means to be ‘self-contained’
- The difficulty of trying to write a narrative as a single woman (Who hasn’t met someone at the end/without a happy ending) - What is my narrative arc- without the happy ending?
- The one constant in your life is you
- The myth that it’s only OK to be single if you’re living a hedonistic, free lifestyle
- Why solo travel isn’t really solitary – especially if you’re in South Carolina
- Why following your passion can be a brilliant reason for doing things alone
- Why your life starts right now – not when you meet your ‘Other Half’
Emma John’s book, Self Contained, is available to buy now.
My book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, is also out now from Amazon, Waterstones and all good bookshops.
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With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

08/19/21 • 48 min
Hello, my worker bees! So let's face it, the perfect office probably doesn't exist – but if it did, it would be the brainchild of Alex Soojung Kim Pang, PHD, a Silicon Valley consultant and a futurist who has spent the last two decades researching the nature of people, work and technology. Alex totally transformed how I think about the 'work-life balance' – we spoke about the need to instead create a sense of 'harmony' in your working day, instead (which also takes into account how much solo/social time you need as an individual). He proved a fascinating guest – we chatted about:
- Getting the right balance of social interaction and focussed solitude at work
- The relationship between 'rest' and being alone
- How to find a greater degree of purpose and 'flow' in our working days
- The need to create a distraction-free office environment post-pandemic
- Whether the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ are useful – or not
- Why we need to bring back the communal office lunchtime
& more!
Happy listening.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book, Rest, is available to buy now.
My book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, is also out now from Amazon, Waterstones and all good bookshops.
Social links:
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Contact: [email protected]
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

11/21/23 • 43 min
'That's the root of perfectionism: that chronic deficit thinking, the belief that we're not good enough. That we're not attractive enough, smart enough, fit enough, whatever it might be. In order to compensate for those feelings, we project on to the world a perfect persona that we feel like everybody wants to see – that we should be, essentially. And it's exhausting if you have to keep that up in every single interaction.'
Welcome back to another season of Alonement. My first guest on this season is Dr Thomas Curran, a world leading expert on perfectionism and the author of The Perfection Trap: The Power Of Good Enough In A World That Always Wants More. Endorsed by the likes of Adam Grant and, more recently, Gwyneth Paltrow, The Perfection Trap is the culmination of years of academic research, interwoven with other expert voices, and as well as being rooted in academia it’s also chatty, engaging and honest, which was not something I expected from an academic text. In this conversation, we chat about the relationship between alone time and perfectionism. This includes how solitude can sometimes be used as a space to recover from perfectionism, for practising a hobby that you’re not, technically, very good at – purely for the joy of it. But also the danger of bringing your own perfectionist tendencies along, like trying to get a PB every time you go for a solo run. We also touch on the potential loneliness of relocating you have to do as an academic professor – or any lifestyle, like digital nomadism, that involves rootlessness and moving around a lot. Finally, we discuss how time outside – specifically cycling in nature – is Thom’s favourite kind of alonement, and how sometimes finding joy in solitude can come to our rescue in our lowest moments.
Thank you to our season sponsor Sensate, a palm-sized infrasonic stress and anti-anxiety device. Visit getsensate.com/alonement for 10% off your first device (you can also use the code ALONEMENT at checkout).
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

08/18/22 • 58 min
Iona Bain is a personal finance expert who appears regularly on BBC Morning Live and writes a weekly column for the i Paper. She’s written two books, her second is Own It – a millennial guide to investing. On a personal level, she’s also recently made the big step of buying her first flat as a solo buyer – a process she described to me in an email as a ‘learning curve’. In this episode, we discuss questions around solo finance – including the cost of living alone and the dreaded ‘single’ supplement’ – which, as many of you will know, is the additional cost often associated with doing things solo, from getting a hotel room to buying food in the supermarket. So many of you had specific questions you wanted me to ask Iona, so in the second half of this episode I’ll be bringing out some crowd-sourced audience questions.
We discuss, among other things:
- How Iona went from a musician who stored cash from gigs in a piggy bank, to a leading money expert.
- Iona's journey to buying her own place alone (and why she's transparent about having had help)
- Why our relationship with money is about more than just numbers – there's emotion involved, too
- The Single Supplement and how to navigate it
- How learning to spend time alone can help us not only save, but also spend on what matters to us
You can order Iona Bain's latest book, Own It, now from Bookshop.org.
You can also order my book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, which is based on this very podcast, now from Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.org.
Thank you so much to Flash Pack for sponsoring this season of the podcast. Flash Pack is a travel company that offers boutique group adventures for solo travellers in their 30s and 40s. Visit flashpack.com/alonement to learn more and quote ALONEMENT at check-out for £100 off your first trip.
Twitter:
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Contact: [email protected]
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

08/26/21 • 50 min
On the show this week I have Lorraine Candy, one of the most influential people on the UK’s magazine industry and formerly editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan, ELLE & latterly Sunday Times Style. Lorraine is also the host of the Postcards from Midlife podcast, and author of new book, Mum, What’s Wrong With You – a funny, practical manual for anyone raising teenage girls. I found this conversation so refreshing – Lorraine is full of helpful advice about looking after yourself and living your most grounded, authentic life. We discuss:
- The joys of cold water swimming
- How alone time underpins self-awareness
- The ‘distraction’ problem inherent in the wellness industry
- How tuning in with your individual energy levels can have a game-changing effect on your work output
- The relationship between hormonal changes and mental health
- & much more
Lorraine Candy's book, 'Mum, What's Wrong With You?': 101 Things Only Mothers of Teenage Girls Know, is available to buy now.
My book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, is also out now from Amazon, Waterstones and all good bookshops.
Social links:
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Contact: [email protected]
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

09/17/20 • 39 min
If I could sum up Felicity Cloake's lifestyle in two words, it would be: solo glamour. From cooking up solo dining feasts to taking an independent six-week cycling holiday across France (albeit joined by pals at intervals along the way), the Guardian food writer and author truly lives her philosophy that, in her words, 'you are worth eating something nice for on your own'. I love and have been thoroughly inspired by the tips for solo dining she shares on this episode, which all alonement fans need to hear about. I was equally nodding along as she talked candidly about loneliness as something that can occur even when you're in the physical presence of others. All in all, many a fascinating morsel (forgive me) in this episode – I hope you enjoy listening.
Felicity's New Statesman article referenced towards the beginning of the episode is 'Solo dining is on the rise. And it's easy to see why' – you can read it here.
You can buy Felicity's travel memoir, One More Croissant For The Road, from Amazon, Waterstones and all good bookshops.
Twitter: @ChezSpecter @felicitycloake
Instagram: @alonementofficial @felicitycloake
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

12/19/23 • 42 min
Getting engaged to your partner is typically a time for celebration. But for today’s guest Max Dickins, it was .... more complicated. As he prepared to propose to his girlfriend, Naomi, he had an uncomfortable revelation: he couldn’t think of anyone to ask to be his best man. This prompted a personal crisis for the writer and comedian – one which inspired him to address the dwindling friendship connections in his own life ...... and to investigate the topic of male mental health and loneliness more. The result was his brilliant non-fiction book, Billy No Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem.
This is a wide-ranging discussion, which actually opens with a chat about the romance of solitude – sometimes Max has always valued, but once used as an excuse for why he sometimes had no one to see at weekends. We also cover gendered attitudes towards both solitude and loneliness, which was really interesting and definitely opened my eyes. I hope you enjoy listening.
Thank you to our season sponsor Sensate, a palm-sized infrasonic stress and anti-anxiety device. Visit getsensate.com/alonement for 10% off your first device.
Takeaways
- Solitude and loneliness are not the same; solitude is a choice to spend time alone, while loneliness is a subjective feeling of unhappiness with social connections.
- Gender plays a significant role in the association of solitude and loneliness, with historical and cultural factors influencing the gendered distinctions.
- Toxic masculinity can contribute to extreme solitude and the need to outdo each other in terms of solitude, which can be pathological.
- The social biome is a balance of different types of relationships, including close friendships, casual connections, and moments of solitude.
- Weekend loneliness is a phenomenon that affects many individuals, particularly men, who may feel isolated and lacking social connections during weekends.
- Understanding and appreciating the value of solitude can lead to a healthier balance in relationships and personal well-being.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:00 Gendered Perspectives on Solitude
06:00 Toxic Masculinity and Extreme Solitude
09:00 The Rationalisation of Solitude
10:00 Loneliness vs. Solitude
12:00 The Social Biome and Balance
15:00 The Friendship Problem for Men
20:00 Exploring Masculinity and Gender Conditioning
23:00 Gendered Behaviours and Barriers to Connection
29:00 Weekend Loneliness and its Impact
34:00 Reevaluating the Value of Solitude
38:00 Reflections on the Book and the Importance of Conversation
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

06/14/21 • 56 min
Hello, hello, hello! Welcome to a 3-part miniseries of Alonement produced for Loneliness Awareness Week in collaboration with the Marmalade Trust.
My first guest is Alex Holmes, an author, podcaster and mental health educator. On his podcast, Time To Talk, Alex interviews his guests about mental health, masculinity, identity and emotional education. His book of the same name, Time To Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging and Connection, came out earlier this year. Alex reached out to me a couple of months ago on Instagram to say hello, ahead of a panel event we’ll be doing together at a literary festival later this year. Unbeknown to him, I was putting together the line-up for this mini-series – and I jumped at the chance to have him on.
I was so grateful to have this conversation with Alex, who proved so generous in every sense – generous with his time for coming on and generous with his honesty and vulnerability in what he shares. First up, we talk about his own experience of growing up feeling lonely – despite being part of a loving family – and how he came to terms with this. Later on, we discuss how owning your imperfections, far from alienating you, can actually become a force for connection. That’s a lot of other good stuff in there too. But, in a nutshell, have a listen – and I hope you enjoy.
SOCIALS
You can find Alex on Instagram at @byalexholmes.
As ever, follow Alonement on Instagram @alonementofficial, and follow host Francesca Specter on Twitter @ChezSpecter
You can learn more about the Marmalade Trust and the work they do on Twitter (@marmaladetrust) and Instagram (marmalade_trust)
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

03/11/22 • 51 min
My guest this week, Oliver Burkeman, may be many things – but he's not a productivity expert. Thankfully, the former Guardian columnist rejects both the societal obsession with productivity hacking and the idea of being an expert (he'd much prefer to be regarded as a work in progress tackling the problems he personally struggles with through his work, he tells me on this episode). While Oliver makes no lofty claims about his wisdom, I'm going to do it for him. The bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks – a provocative title when you find out it refers to the average human lifespan – and other personal development books such as Addicted To Busy is a soothing balm to anyone who finds themselves chronically trying to do everything, and feeling inadequate in the process. During this episode, we discuss the value of taking time for yourself within a busy, people-focused life; the unexpected overlap between an obsession with productivity and spending time alone; and we also talk about why coworking spaces are the absolute best for alone togetherness.
You can order Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks, now from Amazon and Waterstones.
You can also order my book, Alonement: How To Be Alone and Absolutely Own It, which is based on this very podcast, now from Amazon and Waterstones.
Thank you so much to Flash Pack for sponsoring this season of the podcast. Flash Pack is a travel company that offers boutique group adventures for solo travellers in their 30s and 40s. Visit flashpack.com/alonement to learn more and quote ALONEMENT at check-out for £100 off your first trip.
Twitter:
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Contact: [email protected]
With a one-off payment of £5, you can listen to the Alonement podcast ad-free. https://plus.acast.com/s/alonement.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Alonement have?
Alonement currently has 92 episodes available.
What topics does Alonement cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Podcasts and Relationships.
What is the most popular episode on Alonement?
The episode title 'Erling Kagge: 50 Days Alone In The South Pole' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Alonement?
The average episode length on Alonement is 43 minutes.
How often are episodes of Alonement released?
Episodes of Alonement are typically released every 6 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Alonement?
The first episode of Alonement was released on Mar 2, 2020.
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