Episode 6 transcript

Who likes voice notes? I like voice notes. Do you, Em? We do love a voice note.

We’ve got some voice notes. This is Jen. For the love of God, chem snipers, please, please start campaigning for larger font sizes on packaging. This Gen X is wearing her glasses and cannot read the ingredients on this coffee syrup without taking a photo and zooming in.

Absolutely agree, Jen. The worst for me is being in the shower, because you can’t wear your glasses, obviously, in the shower. And I cannot, I cannot see what I’m using. So, I’m kind of holding it back, like, is this a shampoo?

Is this a conditioner? Is this a body lotion? What is this? Don’t know which part of my body to put anything on.

And it’s off a cliff edge again. It’s that 50 switch that we were talking about, is that you can kind of, although I’ve always had perfect eyesight, you have not always had perfect eyesight, have you? Blind as bats since age 7. Really?

Since age 7? So, in fact, we’ll talk about this in a little bit, ’cause I’ve got another voice note from someone else that kind of touches on this. So, we’ll go into that. But yeah, my eyes, I think one eye’s -5 and one is -5.50, which is pretty short-sighted.

But it’s more later with you, isn’t it? I’ve never seen you in glasses. Yeah, I would say, so my eyesight was always, was so good. You know, I could, I mean, it’s one of the few things that I could completely, I could read things that were, miles away and was absolutely— my eyesight was brilliant.

And just a decade of working on my phone has either destroyed my eyesight. So, I don’t know whether it’s age or whether it’s just general kind of wear and tear. I don’t like to pick you up on anything, Em, but are we really going to go with working on my phone? Or are we going to go with mindless scrolling?

Just throwing it out there. Well, Well, there’s— I mean, my, my job has been— my job is, is doing a lot of social media for people. I mean, it is mindless scrolling. Yeah, I do fuck about on— yeah, I, I have chatted about on— there we go— I have chatted about on social media for a good, for a good decade.

Yeah, and my eyesight has got really, really bad, so I’m absolutely with Jen. My eyesight is really not very good. I haven’t officially ever bought proper glasses either. Do you go for eye tests?

I’ve been for one eye test. Oh mate, you’ve got— look, I don’t want to get— I don’t want to start lecturing people on health, but you go— I went for an eye test 2 years ago, partly because I was having blinding headaches, which I never normally get headaches, and it turned out my blood pressure was through the roof. And they could tell this by looking at your retina and the blood vessels going— This is what, this is what my research has shown. I’ve done some research on this, and high blood pressure is Big, big risk factor for your eyes.

It’s a massive thing. High blood pressure is everything from brain aneurysms to you name it, is, is, it’s preventable and it’s kind of, yeah, and it can be nasty if it’s not looked after. So yeah, so that, that was, I’m on kind of a very low dose of blood pressure meds now, but it was all came from that eye test. And things like glaucoma as well, they can pick up on that really early.

So if you get that really early, you’re okay. And most people don’t know that they’ve got it until it’s too late. So that’s also kind of it. But I have, I have a lot of floaters.

Oh, I do as well. It’s so annoying, isn’t it? So annoying. Yeah, so I, I will, I will, I will go and get my eyes tested because I do need— I do know, I know now that I definitely need proper glasses.

I, I looked through, I looked through my friend’s glasses and it was a, it was a whole different experience, and I realised actually I really can’t see. So yeah, I’m completely with Jen and her voice note there. It’s an app, it’s awful. I can’t see anything.

Right, let’s have a bit more from Jen. I was in the supermarket and I was having to scrutinise ingredients on behalf of my teenagers this time. They’re 15 and almost 18, and they are getting, they are shredding to get snatched for summer. I think that’s, I think I’ve got that right.

Let’s just hold it right there. Okay, I don’t even know what get snatched means. Well, What I mean, you know, this is not a phrase I’m proud of, but from my mid-20s to my mid-30s, it was pretty much all about getting snatched. And I don’t think it meant that.

Yeah, it meant something very different to us. I think I know what shredding is, so I think I know that she’s kind of like— are they going keto? Is that what that is? Is that you need to lose, you need to lose the weight to put on the muscle or something like that?

Yes, snatch. I had to look it up, right? Because I don’t have, you know, Gen Z kids or anything, so Uh, snatched, it’s kind of like thin waist. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I was having to look at the fat content of skimmed cow’s milk versus no sugar, low-fat oat milk, because obviously they sent me out because, you know, even though they— I’m working full-time and they are on holidays, they just felt too weak to walk to the shops, and I couldn’t see a bloody thing because I forgot my glasses. So I had to take a photo, zoomed in, still couldn’t read it, and had to WhatsApp them to ask them to report back to me. So that is, that is my life now. There’s so much about motherhood just there.

They couldn’t even go to the shops themselves, they’re too weak, they want a snatched waist. But also, but also, um, um, they’re taking the picture of something while you’re out and enlarging it. I think you could quite accurately age someone. You know how you can age a tree by like slicing it and counting the rings.

I reckon if you took somebody’s phone and worked out what percentage of photos in their camera roll are, you know, the backs of food packets or shampoo labels, and the higher the percentage, then the older you are. I think you could write a scientific paper on that, I think. The one that I’ve got loads of is that my little one, as you know, has been kind of in and out of hospital loads over the past couple of years. And one of the triggers that we’ve got to watch out for is a temperature spiking.

So we’re always doing— we’ve got these little— they have— it’s the ones they have in the hospital, these little disposable thermometers. And it’s just like a white strip, a little thin strip, and you pop it under your arm for 3 minutes and it’s got these microscopic little dots on the end and you count them up and that’s the temperature. And I can’t, even with glasses, with varifocals, with contacts, whatever I’ve got on my eyes, I cannot see the damn things. And so my phone, honestly, is 60% bloody thermometers.

Yeah, I think, but also I think there was a real moment, I don’t know whether your eyesight has got worse in recent years as well, that you’ve got the general decline too, but there was a real moment where I was sort of slightly kidding myself and I was like, shit, they’ve really, really reduced the font size on all of this packaging. It did not occur to me and suddenly you realise Like, is everything really, really that small? And then you’re left with the slow realisation is that no, it’s atrophy. You are— your eyesight is degrading and it’s now fuckity fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s the correct medical term there. All the optometrists listening will recognise fuckity fucked. So this is one, this is a nice one. This is from Nighean.

I hope I’m pronouncing that right. I’ve been wearing glasses, or rather I had to wear— start wearing glasses when I was probably about 8. And, you know, in the ’70s and ’80s, that wasn’t much fun because you ended up looking like Deirdre Barlow most of the time, if not actually wearing National Health glasses, which were horrific. So I had to deal with that.

So now I’ve got this severe PTSD from my childhood of wearing— and also extremely blind. Went extremely blind very quickly. This is virtually my, my— I was exactly the same. 7, I think I was 7 for glasses, National Health ones to start with. And to be fair, some of the nicknames, quite creative.

This is like early ’80s we’re talking here when I started wearing them, and there was a Ford Sierra out which was the XR4i, so I became known as the XR four eyes. So, you know, moderately creative. We really weren’t nice to children with glasses, were we? Anything different was wasn’t it?

You could pretty much guarantee a pile-on of abuse at some point, whether it was glasses or, you know, colour of your hair or just anything. Anything. Yeah, being ginger and wearing glasses would have been— that was a tough gig. That was a tough playground experience, I would imagine.

Tough few years at primary school. Double whammy. But then as you get older, ginger hair, glasses, cool as fuck. You see, I always wanted glasses.

I always thought they looked great. I was also very unaware that there was mitigate, you can mitigate the damage that you’re doing to your eyes. I mean, I kind of knew that, but I was unaware of what, of how much lifestyle impacted. I thought you kind of just had bad eyesight.

I didn’t realise that lifestyle really made it so much worse for you. And what, and is this like what, screen time and stuff? Boringly, it’s all the things. It’s all, anything that’s good for your heart is gonna be good for your eyes.

So exercise is good for your eyes, diet, sleep, Blinking, that’s not so good for your heart, to be honest with you, but you do need to, you need to do a lot of blinking. So the reason why looking at screens is really bad is because you kind of become fixated on your screens and you don’t blink as much. But if you’re out and you’re looking at things at different distances and you’re in nature and you’re in sort of real life, you will naturally just blink more, and that helps your eyes. And so as we age, we’re more likely to get dry-eyed, but we’re also more likely to get teary-eyed.

So, you know, that kind of, you know, watery, watery eye. Okay, how do we get dry eye and teary eye? What’s going on here? So weirdly, teary eyes because you’ve got dry eye, and that’s because you’re not blinking as much.

Oh, and so your body compensates by getting teary? I guess. I mean, I mean, you’ll be shocked to learn I’m not an expert. There’s no bicarbonate of soda tricks here.

Um, women, as they go through the menopause, can often become more dry-eyed, so it might be hormonal, it might be something to do with that, so it might be aging. So I don’t know, this is predominantly female thing. Yeah, so you need to spend time outside. You should only look at a screen for about 20 minutes at a time, and then take a break and look at something at a different distance.

Go and maybe do some rapid blinking. But I think this is probably quite news for parents because if you’ve just let your kids game for an hour, and they’re gaming, and then they’ve spent time because their homework was all online, and then they do some gaming, and then they go and watch the television, I’m thinking how different it is for my little one who’s, you know, she’s coming up for 5, but it is, you know, we are, it’s something we’re conscious of, but she’s no stranger to an iPad. Do you know what I mean? And that’s something we never had.

These are all things, ’cause apparently there is a growth in, an epidemic in, or whatever, of short-sightedness. So it’s like any other part of your body. It needs, it will benefit from exercise, and it will also benefit from a good diet, particularly fishy, omega-3 oily fish, because the retina has got DHA in it. Listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Hey, you have been researching. Okay, I have been researching, I have been researching, but I’m going to wind up with a head torch. Some shops are so dark, you know, as well. If you go out and you’re having dinner with friends, all of you put your torches up, your torches on your phone so you can read the menu, and we’re all holding the menu You know, arm’s length away.

On the very, very rare occasions we go out on an evening for a meal, that’s the one I always spot. It’s, yeah, it’s low light. If it’s a low-light candlelit dinner, you have no idea what’s on that menu. You can’t, you can’t read a bloody thing, and you’re having to put your— all of you putting your torches on like it’s some kind of nuclear reactor, bright light at your table.

And you can, you could age everybody in a restaurant based on how they read that menu. The restaurants can’t win because if it’s, if you’ve got the mood lighting, then nobody can see a thing and people are grabbing their phones. Or if you’ve got the harsh lighting, then it’s, you’re very aware of your thinning hair. Well, this is actually, this is actually, that’s a really good point because in some ways my deteriorating eyesight is a blessing.

Because I look at, I look at my reflection and I can’t, I can’t, I’m just a hazy Vaseline blur basically. Like the Vaseline on the lens, the soft focus. This is it. This is it.

I’m like, okay, I look fine, I can face, I can face the world. And actually, in reality, everybody can see my moustache and my hair. All of it. I can’t see my chin hair, I can’t see my moustache, my hair in my nostrils probably need clipping.

So, in many ways, it’s a gift. It’s a gift. I can see why men would, would like get into the habit of stroking their beard, because sometimes if you’ve got, if you’ve got a little bit of a kind of a prickly chin hair coming through, you’re your hand is just drawn to it. You’re just like, oh, that’s really lovely.

But, but seriously, sometimes if I put my glasses on and if it’s a well-lit bathroom— so the, the most brutal one is looking at— so if you catch yourself in a mirror in, say, a changing room or something like that, awful. They’re so bright. Marks Spencer’s changing rooms are really, really— well, they’re unforgiving, but they’re unforgiving because they’re, you know, real, probably. So you, you know, you catch yourself in there, just like, I look like a piece of shit.

But why, why don’t the change— the, the people who make the changing rooms, the designers is the word I’m probably looking for, like, why don’t they make them more flattering? Because surely flattering mirror, flattering lighting, you buy more. Yeah, I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? And instead you’re just like, I am never trying on anything ever again, I look horrendous.

Anyway, yeah, so diabetes, lifestyle, blood sugar, these are all modifiable factors that can prevent further eyesight damage. Well, so that was all spurred on from a couple of voice notes. So thank you, Jen, and to Nighean. We’ll be sending you both Sniper’s Alley mugs whether you like it or not.

They’re coming your way. One person said no. I said I’ll send it anyway. So, it’s come to my attention that some people have never heard the phrase sniper’s alley.

Yeah, I’m going to go as far as saying round about 3 quarters of the people I’ve spoken to about the phrase sniper’s alley have no idea what it means. And I include my wife in this, several people I work with. It’s not quite as well known as we thought, it’s fair to say. It’s almost, almost like we didn’t thoroughly research it before we embarked on this crazy little project.

I think what I’ll do to kind of explain it and to give a bit of, a bit of backstory, right, just very briefly, the, the kind of start, the origin story of Sniper’s Alley, the podcast, was that it was, um, early May, me and Em were WhatsApping away as per. I messaged them and, and said, I think we should do a podcast called Sniper’s Alley for cool people in their 50s, I think is what I put. If you know any, that’d be great. Yeah, because we’re not, but somebody out there might be.

And then you basically said yeah, and then we started. And the reason I mentioned this is because of the speed this happened. So I think that was a Wednesday night we had this conversation. By the Saturday, we bought the domain name, made a website, and done the branding.

And then 10 days after that we recorded the first batch of episodes. Now, a normal adult with a brain would have actually done a little test run recording first before spending money on a website and all that sort of thing. So what I want to get across is that— is the speed that this happened. Yes, because I, I do genuinely believe that if you have an idea, you should just do it.

And the worst thing you can do is overthink stuff, because the minute you start thinking about things, all the kind of doubts creep in, and then this thing that could have happened Didn’t happen. And so we did the whole thing at pace in completely the wrong order, acknowledge that now. Didn’t research the name at all. Turns out hardly anyone knows what Sniper’s Alley means.

And here we are, episode 6, explaining what the podcast’s name is all about. But I also, can I just say that I think this is a very Gen X thing, and I think when you are in Sniper’s Alley, round about your 50s, I don’t think you fuck about. I think if you have an idea, you should just do it. And hopefully we all have many years in front of us, but there is a clock ticking and it’s just like, just fucking do it.

It sounds a bit morbid, but there is a feeling of you don’t actually have loads of time to sit around and mull over whether or not you’re brave enough to do something or whether you’re good enough to do something or whatever. Just, you know, it is a bit like just fucking do it. Just fucking do it. So Nike, if you wanna use them, that as a slogan.

Just fucking do it. It’s got a bit more, got a bit more weight, that. I think that’s quite good. Uh, so, so that’s where we find ourselves.

So, you know, within 10 days we recorded the first 3 episodes, and then we, you know, within a month we’d put them all out. And sort of here we are. And genuinely, thank you for listening. It was, it was not by any means guaranteed that anyone would, but we, we’ve seen the figures and quite literally some people are listening.

So, what does the term mean to you? What does the term sniper’s alley mean to you? Well, my understanding is that it’s a health thing, and it’s referring to that time of life, round about your 50s, so like 45 to 65-ish. And it’s that time of life where unfortunately people start getting afflicted by more serious health issues, injuries, illnesses, whatever.

And I think the first time I heard it, I think was about 3 or 4 years back, And it was on Gone Fishing, you know, the Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer show. And on one of the Christmas episodes, their guest was Arabella Weir, who was in The Fast Show with Paul. And she was talking about how she was chatting with a friend from Northern Ireland, and they were talking about somebody who was in their— I think in that case it was in their 60s or 70s. And this friend of hers said, oh, we call that Sniper’s Alley.

And I think that was the first time I heard it. And it sort of It sort of stuck with me because it’s such a kind of strong mental image, isn’t it? And that’s very much the ethos of that show. Well, it was all— it was a show.

And I think the way they approached— I thought it was brilliant TV. Did you like it? I absolutely loved it. And the reason— I mean, if people haven’t watched it, they should watch it.

But the reason why that show exists is because Bob was very unwell. He was very poorly and he had heart surgery. And he became very unhappy after that heart surgery. And they went fishing, and that became their thing.

So, health is a constant kind of companion on that show. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn’t dominate the whole thing. So, they’re very aware that they are in sniper’s alley.

They’re very aware, and they’re very kind of sort of funny about it. But they’re living the life that makes them happy. And you’ve heard it in relation to other things though as well, not just Health. So, I spoke to my brother-in-law about the phrase, and he said he had heard it, but never connected with health, and always connected with— but, and it was always referring to where you found yourself at work.

So, when you were in Sniper’s Alley, it was when you were at work and the— you were going to be popped off by HR, effectively. So, it was at a— it was the— it was a very dangerous age that you found yourself career-wise, that you were going to be the person up for redundancy. You were going to be the person who lost their job in the next round of redundancies because of your age, and possibly because you’d been there for 20 years, your salary had increased, you were becoming quite expensive, and you were replaceable. So, Sniper’s Alley for him was the time when your career was most at risk, and he’d only ever heard it in that capacity.

And I think that that is true in terms of finding yourself on the redundancy list, but also finding yourself then unable to be employed again. So, you were in sniper’s alley in 2 kinds of ways, is that you lost your job and you couldn’t find a job. We are going to, in one of the next episodes, we’re going to be talking about this, aren’t we? We’re going to be talking about kind of midlife career changes, whether it’s something that you want to do because you have the urge, or whether you’re forced into it.

Or, I read some interesting things recently about how a lot of boomers aren’t retiring when maybe people thought they would, whether that’s for financial reasons or just because they don’t want to, you know, whatever. And so these Gen X people kind of find themselves squished in the middle, and it’s quite a tricky position to be in. So this is something that we’re going to be covering quite soon. But yeah, so it’s interesting that it doesn’t always apply to health.

It’s, it’s like you say, it’s other aspects of life. And I think we should— like, I, I, I want to acknowledge that because I’ve done quite a deep dive into trying to find out where this phrase first occurred. And the earliest mention I can find of Sniper’s Alley referring to health was round about 2004 in a newspaper article. Now, round about 10 years before that, when the Bosnian War was going on, well, the phrase is Sniper Alley, and this was to do with the siege of Sarajevo, which went on for, I think, 4 years.

And you had this horrific situation where you had civilians trying best as they can to get on with their everyday lives whilst the city is under siege. And you had snipers up in the high-rise buildings above the boulevards in the middle of the city, and also in the mountains on the outskirts as well. And they were murdering civilians. The kind of term for those streets in the middle of Sarajevo, they became known as Sniper Alley.

And so, I think we have to acknowledge that it’s— the meaning has obviously changed, but that could be where the phrase originated. And it’s not out of the ordinary because there’s a lot of phrases that we use day to day that come from war, like over the top. Yeah. Is the famous one from the trenches in World War I.

Shell shock. Yeah, I mean, I did read an article which is by a doctor, which is by a surgeon, that refers to this age as Sniper Alley, but the next decade as the Minefield. So, you’re going through a minefield. So, like you said, you know, these are phrases that have been used now in medical terms.

So, and we should say, when we talk about Sniper Alley, it’s obviously not. An official medical term. But what, as far as I can find out from the research I’ve done, and obviously if anyone knows any different, it would be fantastic to hear more about it. Susie Dent, are you listening?

Are you? Let’s, let’s get Susie on. She’ll be good at this. But it seems to be the, the phrase gained popularity round about the early 2000s, and it was informally in medical circles.

I think it was more that kind of gallows humor that you get amongst people who deal with really serious situations, whether they’re— whether that’s, you know, people dealing with life and death in hospitals, or I would imagine there’s some gallows humour goes on in the funeral business, armed forces, all these kind of situations. And so, it seems to be that the sniper’s alley phrase in it referring to health and that time of your life seems to have come from kind of medical circles. That’s certainly what we can find so far. I mean, the phrase has definitely cut true.

So the phrase— there are enough people I know who know the phrase. So when I’ve talked about it, there are enough people who’ve gone, that’s a great name, that’s really clever. But there are also people who’ve never heard it before. So what we’ve basically done for episode 6 here, we’ve done what we should have done in episode 1.

Let’s be honest about this. But we have now explained what Sniper’s Alley means. I hope it kind of makes sense. That’s kind of where we’re at really.

And we’ve, you know, we’ve got some really interesting topics and guests coming up, and I think we’ll have more and more messages and voice notes coming in, which I’m really interested in. If anyone has got any other kind of theories on where the, the phrase came from and where they heard it, I’d be really interested to know. snipers-alley.co.uk, if you go on the contact page, there’s a million ways you can get in touch. We love voice notes. Have we mentioned that?

We love voice notes. That’s where we are and how we got here.