Exeter

And it only occurred to me this morning.

I was thinking, how am I going to structure this interview with you? And I remembered that I spent a period of time living in Exeter in the UK, in England.

And one of the moments that struck me being there, it was I was living there with an ex-partner and I went through this interesting experience of being Feeling kind of witch hunted myself without being too dramatic because, of course, I was perfectly safe on a physical level.

However, it was a similar theme.

I had there was a family member, my ex-partner, sister-in-law, that for some reason just painted me, cast me as the villain and saw me as an enemy through whatever means.

reason that was there was a there were rumors that went around that I'd said at her wedding that I it wasn't a very good wedding or something and that I'd been to better weddings when all I desperately wanted was the family's approval and to you know fit in and be kind to everyone so it's such a strange thing and then I remember reading this plaque somewhere in the town and that Exeter was the first and one of the last places that they burned witches in England.

And it just sent chills down my spine because of the echo of that personal experience.

And so I wonder, was there a personal thread for you in writing this book and that pulled you towards the story of witches?

On October 10th, William published his declaration in which, after drawing attention to James II's illegal acts, he stated that at the invitation of many lords spiritual and temporal, he was about to invade England for the purpose of securing a free and legal parliament by the decision of which he would abide.

On the 5th of November 1688, he landed at Torbay in Devonshire and soon after entered Exeter.

His landing in the west of England had not been looked for, and the preparations of his friends there were not ready, so that William was at first mortified by finding that no persons of importance joined him, though the people everywhere hailed him as their deliverer.

Meanwhile, James II had at last been aroused to a sense of his danger and was trying by every possible means to win back the favor of his people.

Get some sleep.

We'll have a coffee at Exeter services.

Oh, stupid car.

You said we should get it.

Chloe? Chloe?

Mm.

Exeter, love.

What?

The climate and weather podcast.

So today's guest is Peter Stott, professor in detection and attribution at the University of Exeter and a science fellow at the UK Met Office.

Welcome to the show, Peter.

Hello.

Put them together, you have a global temperature record.

And, um, the first I knew about it was a Friday morning when news came through that a whole load of Phil's emails had been hacked, had been published on the internet, and that people were claiming that they showed there was some big, uh, scandal going on.

The blogs were reporting it at the time, and, um, this had sort of blown up during the week, and that Friday morning I was in the office, in the Met Office in Exeter, and the instruction came through that we needed to know what was in these 45,000 emails or whatever it was.

So we had, we had a day to read them all, uh, read all of Phil Jones' emails to know what was in them, because we thought we needed to know because they'd been published.