Salima Saxton on cancer, honesty, estrangement, and creative work in real life. Salima is Ben’s longtime friend, and they talk about her cancer diagnosis and what she calls an unexpected new “year of undoing”, a return to herself rather than a neat reinvention story.
“Be the sky, not the weather. The weather passes through.”
They discuss why the language of “brave” can feel wrong, why “What can I do?” often misses the mark, and what Salima means by being a “bad patient”.
The conversation turns to Salima’s Substack essay “Builder Dad” on estrangement and what outsiders routinely misunderstand.
“‘Blood is thicker than water’ is not advice I believe in.”
Salima also shares the hardest things to write in memoir: telling the whole truth, including the parts that do not flatter you.
The chat then touches on anti-heroine storytelling, friendship breakups, social media’s double edge, and what creative work looks like without romantic routines: write where you can, start small, “plod”, find mentors, and build community.
“There’s never a perfect moment. Start with something tiny and plod.”
A lighter finish includes an overrated/underrated game (champagne, dressing up, height, hustle culture, social media, coconut oil), Salima’s plan to audition again, and why dark humour matters when things get rough.
“A sense of humour is absolutely vital. You either laugh or you crack.”
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.
Contents
00:00 30-year friendship, Himalayas, coconut oil
01:23 Cancer diagnosis and a new “year of undoing”
03:41 Returning to the 18-year-old self
05:07 Illness clarifies relationships, energy is finite
07:29 Why “brave” and “What can I do?” can land badly
09:02 “Bad patient”: performing “good” on an overstretched NHS ward
13:05 Honest female voices, dissonance, anti-heroine truth
15:28 “Builder Dad”, estrangement, and searching for father figures
17:57 What people get wrong about estrangement and friendship breakups
21:29 Hypervigilance and the hidden inner life
23:31 The hardest memoir scene: dad’s death and anger at mum
26:15 Writing about mum: respect, friction, truth
29:44 Childhood contradictions: hippie roots, no heating, love of glamour
30:37 No perfect routine: writing around kids, work, real life
33:09 Ditch the artist romance: money, time, and the true cost
35:00 Tiny wins: one sentence still counts
36:49 Bed writing, socks, and self-trickery
38:06 Overrated/underrated game
41:31 Social media love/hate and quiet communities
43:59 2026 as the “year of saying yes”, auditions, dark humour
46:37 Advice to creatives: start small, “plod”, mentors, community
50:15 Long friendships and gratitude
Transcript (lightly edited, transcribed by LLM AI, so mistakes are very possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Salima Saxton. Salima is a brilliant writer, performer, and podcaster herself. She has her memoir the Year of Undoing, which should be out in 2027. She's also my friend of 30 years or maybe more. Before we had mobile phones. She was my friend. She was my first friend I know to actually have had a mobile phone.
I've directed her for the London stage. I've climbed mountains to go and visit her and we still argue about who is taller. Salima welcome.
Salima: Thank you so much. Just to clarify one thing, I am certainly tall now I cannot believe we've been friends for 30 years. That's terrifying.
Ben: Says something about our age.
You are also gonna shrink more than me.
Salima: Oh God. You have to get that in, don't you? All I remember is that you arrived exhausted halfway up the Himalayas very early one morning when I was living there
Ben: I carried coconut oil. Do you remember that? .
Salima: Yes. I remember that very clearly. [ ]
Salima: As a proper friend, someone who carries coconut oil halfway up the Himalayas.
Ben: You are having a year of undoing or maybe more than in a year. What are you undoing this year and what are you trying to rebuild in its place and why are we undoing anything?
Salima: Oh, great. Just give me five questions in one, why don't you? So this year was unexpected, so this year I got quite unwell. I had a cancer diagnosis, which has involved two massive surgeries and a lot of chemo. And I'm on the, I'm on the mend now, so I'm, very blessed in that it was caught in time and everything.
But I wasn't expecting this latest year of undoing the year of undoing that I write about in my memoir, which by the way, you are in was about changing our lives when we left London, when Carl's mental health had gone up in the air, is the politest way of putting it. And we changed our lives radically overnight.
One lesson I have learnt in these last few months with the further I'm doing and I'll get more into what I'm doing actually means in a minute, is not a midlife crisis. Is what? Which is what many people seem to think it means. Is that, I thought that year, that neat little memoir year would be it.
I romantically thought I would get through this year and then it's plain sailing until my hundredth birthday and I'll die in my sleep. The end. And what I have really learned over these last few months, and perhaps a little bit too late in my life, considering I'm in my late forties and I've known you for a hundred years, is that we're constant.
There's going to be. There. There 's that old saying, isn't there about, be the sky, don't be the weather. The weather just passes through, right? We're the sky. So we just have to be, we just have to remind ourselves that we are that big blue sky and that the weather will pass through no matter what.
And I think I've always thought that for other people, but I didn't include myself in that rather childishly. So I always assumed that, yeah, that can happen to other people, all these things, but it's not going to happen to me. And then it did.
Ben: And so are you rebuilding anything or We just undoing like a midlife crisis would've been easier.
That's like standard.
Salima: Yeah. Midlife is just buying a motorbike. Or I don't know. Yeah. Leaving your marriage or just like turning a table upside down. No, this is slower. This is me coming back to myself. This is me coming back to the 18-year-old that, like I feel like I lost that girl for many years.
And that girl who wasn't intimidated by Mark, I arrived at Cambridge, didn't I? State school kid. Wasn't intimidated by the fact that you all knew each other and you did, all of you knew each other and was just interested and you know how I was just curious and enthusiastic and pretty optimistic.
Still always worried about everything as you remember, but I just assumed everything would work out, and I think I lost that a bit over the years and got closer to catastrophizing about everything. You know this more than anybody.
Ben: I still thought you had it, have it even, although, I guess perhaps that's one of the things we're just growing older with all of these things is more, we get more baggage to catastrophize over.
We've got 30, 31 years of it.
Salima: Yeah.
Ben: Compared to when we were 17, 18. But I guess what's, is there any small or maybe weird detail from the last few weeks then, which is captured? How has your life changed from that in terms of capturing back the younger you?
Salima: This is gonna sound quite brutal, but I'm not gonna talk about the beauty of walking through the fields and living in the moment because I haven't found that has happened for me.
And I think for a lot of people when they have health scares, they fall in love with the everyday and domesticity and the normal stuff that hasn't happened for me. What has happened for me though is that I. I'm really aware, first of all, of who I want to talk to or spend any time with.
And you know this about me. I've collected people over the years where I've just hung on to friendships for sentimentality. But over this period, some people you included, have appeared for me and. And just being, and just speaking very truthfully and reminded me of who I was.
Other people have disappeared, have totally disintegrated in these people I wouldn't expect. And in observing all these new dynamics in my life, which I wasn't expecting over illness, I've really realized I've had a, I've got a real awareness of that. My energy is finite and I must only spend energy on the people that I really love or the people that I'm very energized by, or who really see me.
But I used to compromise a lot more. So I've done the opposite. I haven't become like that. Sanguine wise little owl over these last few months. As you know from reading some of my essays, I've become like a pretty cantankerous bad patient, but I see real beauty in that.
Yeah, for my own take.
Ben: I think there's actually really relatively few people who do this mindfulness thing. Maybe they write about it on Instagram occasionally, but that's probably fake, I reckon. You've got a handful of monks dying breed. Yes. And some mothers because I remember now, this is ages ago now, this is over 30.
This is over 30 years as well. When my dad had cancer, he got a bit annoyed when people used to say, oh, you're being brave. And he was like. It's just, there's no bravery stuff about it.
Salima: Yeah, exactly. I can't, there are certain words and phrases that I haven't been able to stand over the last few months.
Yeah, so definitely you are being brave. You are so courageous. You're and also, the, what the famous, what can I do, which I think is the worst question to ask anybody who is unwell, what can I do? Really puts the onus on that person. And I think when, whether you've just had a baby, whether you are unwell, whether you're going through divorce, like you just need people to turn up.
Just to call you or just to check in or just to send the thing or whatever that you haven't got space in your brain to know what to ask that person to do.
Ben: If you'd figured it out, you'd be doing it.
Salima: And I think it's a little bit of a get out of jail card for people because then they feel they can give themselves a pat on the back.
They've said to the person, what can I do? And so they've done their duty, but actually, yeah.
Ben:I don't even remember. In Cambridge one of my close friends Nadia died and it was a little bit like that. Although you're surrounded by 18 and 19 year olds, they don't really know how to react.
Anyway, although it hasn't changed that much in 30 years, 'cause most people don't come close to death for quite a long time. COVID changed that a little bit, but you've written this series, I guess this is your sort of second year titled bad patient. I'm interested, what does being a bad patient mean, mean to you?
'cause it isn't just really being cantankerous, it's like you say, being a little bit more you, but with these different elements to it. Why did you decide to write about being a bad patient and what, what does bad patient mean? Because actually it isn't being bad. It's bad. That sense of, again, when we were young, when bad was actually good.
Salima: Exactly. I suppose a bit of it is like. Because I didn't feel that I was being good enough, or grateful enough, because people told me early on, while I was lucky, it was lucky it's been found, it is lucky that we've, we were doing this. It's lucky this is happening, and I didn't really feel lucky at all, until very recently.
Since I've had, since it's out. There's a bit of me that feels lucky. Now I can see how that is. How I will feel more like that in six months time possibly. But back then I didn't. And also I gave the impression in my NHS ward that I was a very kind and kindly patient, but I wasn't, I was doing that in order to make sure the nurses took care of me.
So I knew I needed to be charming and kind and ask after their son and ask whatever, so that they came back and checked on me because I could see how overworked everybody was and I could see what they were fighting against. So I knew they had to remember me, remember my name, and they had to like me so bad.
Patient was also outta that, in that I was very consciously being good.
Ben: There is no altruism. Maybe we are kind to others, so others are kind to us.
Salima: I was buying biscuits for everybody and everything, but that again, that was to be like, oh, the lovely lady in bed one A, so that they come back and check on me because I could see what happened when you didn't behave.
I am, I had to have this nasal gastric tube inserted, which was horrendous. And another lady in the ward was arguing about why I should get this special window bed because that's like the best bed. And she was so rude about it. But then she effectively got punished because.
The matron came to see her and then like they weren't checking on her as much I could see, so I could really see things, really see, that's no one's fault. It's just natural
Ben: They're all overworked already, right? So
Salima: They're all exhausted. They don't get paid for their lunch break.
They don't get paid for their breaks. As I met incredible gems there, I was also working the system. So I was really aware from very early on there was a real dichotomy between who I was perceived to be and who I actually was.
Ben: But I think maybe you're just being honest about it. I think the majority of us, most of the time are like that and there's only small glimpses of when I think we're feeling particularly 150% good, then we can have that excess and it spills over into the spills over into the world.
Salima: Yeah, because also I was humoring people all the time, but then that's how I got an extra blanket, or that's how I got a bit longer with the consultant or whatever.
And also look, I'm, I was very lucky in that I had a combination of private healthcare and NHS healthcare for all of this. So like straddling the two systems and and obviously I'm incredibly privileged to be in that situation, but, but
Ben: You're also really unlucky that you had to be in that situation at all.
Salima: Yeah, and also, but just like how much work, how much emotional work I had to do whilst in the NHS, whereas that didn't exist for me within the private sector. I didn't have to do any of that work.
Ben: Do you think there's do you think people are more receptive now to this, I guess honest writing about how things really are, not how we would want them to be or how we wish them to be, but how things really are.
Salima: I think so. Particularly from women. I think they might have received it from men, but I think it's a much, it's much newer that we'll receive this from. A female voice.
Ben: The lived experience of women. I guess you, you explored this on your own podcast that it's been so undertold for so long. We don't have those boluses of stories and they're not what they tell us in the movies or the books, or at least the bestselling books.
It's actually the range of experience and what you can feel is just it's a myriad of everything. Yes. And that hasn't really been expressed.
Salima: And also that there's going to be a constant dissonance between what you are feeling. There, the heroine doesn't exist.
Like the, he, the heroine is made up of the villain and the heroine always you like for all of us. And I think we've only been ready to hear that. From Women's Voices relatively recently. So I, and for me, is really the cornerstone of my writing. When I'm writing memoir or fiction, I'm just finished I'm just finishing a novel as well about a kind of anti heroine, and that's really important for me because I cannot stand it. That's part of the reason that we get on so well because you are so blunt, cannot stand people, what's the word, Ben? When someone's not ready.
Ben: They're pretending
Salima: They just pretend. That's as simple as that, right?
Yeah. You can dress it up. Not so ways, but like I know if I ask you a question, you'll answer me truthfully, even if I don't like hearing the answer.
Ben: Yes.
Salima: That's right, that's why I married Carl. Carl's similar, right? In that he'll, that's, I always say that's part of the reason I married him, because he'll say things to me and I don't like the answer, but.
Answer, then I feel safe. But I think that is a direct result of having been raised by someone like my dad, where I never knew where I was.
Ben: Yeah. Never got the answer. That's a good segue. You wrote this long essay memoir piece, build a Dad.
Salima: Yes.
Ben: I'm interested in what you were trying to understand in that piece, writing from your perspective?
Salima: I was estranged from my dad for the last 10 years. I chose to be estranged from him. He was a kind of alcoholic, he was an alcoholic. And I had a very difficult relationship with him. Not really, I think anymore because of the alcoholism, but because of who he was, which was an overused term at the moment.
But, a kind of narcissistic self engrossed. Artist who didn't really, beco didn't become the artist that he thought he deserved, he should be, and was very angry and bitter really, and bored. He was a very bored man. And he wasn't really cut out for fatherhood. I can see that really clearly now.
So builder dad has fed really into my memoir. I write a lot about it because in the year of undoing, my dad also died and left explicit instructions for me not to be invited to his funeral, and he cut me out of his will. So it, my relationship with my dad is ongoing, even though he's dead. And
Builder dad. That Substack piece was really about the fact that I have looked around for years. Other examples of father figures, not necessarily even fathers in the traditional sense, but people who are playing that kind of role and were always seeking edges of that even…. Don't you remember that very much older boyfriend that I had?
Like that was definitely part of it, seeking that kind of like male elder reassurance, and trying to work out for me what a father was because I didn't really know what a father was meant to be. Luckily I've married somebody who I think is an amazing father.
And he's had to work it out himself 'cause he wasn't fathered in a traditional sense either. But I am quite obsessed by the ideas of motherhood and fatherhood and what they mean to all of us, and, and what we all come from. They're dominant themes in my life.
Ben: And what do you think outsiders misunderstand about what estrangement is or what estrangement is in, in your experience, although I guess this was two ways you chose first, and then in some ways he was making a point in his will. But is there anything you think on the outside looking in, it's just oh, this, these are the pieces that you just really don't get?
Salima: Oh yes. And I've had many people's opinions over the years. Normally really well-meaning, but just not understanding, so the most obvious. People literally have quoted blood is thicker than water at me so many times, which I don't believe. I don't believe in that. And many people ask me, what will happen to you when your father dies if you don't?
Resolve it. But look for me, and I can't speak for other people, I would say that my father died many years before he actually died. So there wasn't a big moment when he actually passed away, and I heard that he had done. I didn't disintegrate into some big thing and if only, I felt really sad.
He had just never been able to be the father that I had wanted. But I had been grieving for my dad probably since I was a teenager, to be honest. So I think that's an odd thing to hold above someone's head. It's like holding someone's finger to a flame, but what if they die?
What if they die? I don't believe in mending, fractured and often harmful relationships. Just because somebody might die. That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Ben: And I guess this points to the fact that the family we choose, or the friends we choose in some ways then are more important and could be more painful if friend, I've seen this now, getting a little bit older that I've seen some friendships have broken up, and I look at that and say, actually that's more painful than other things.
Salima: I've had friendships dissolve and it's been really painful. I was very good friends with somebody and. I think I kind of misunderstood that friendship because we became friends when our kids were tiny. And she was a school mom. And I, somebody once said that when they saw us together, it always looked like we were having a party.
Wherever we were, we were always laughing and things. And that friendship, she walked away from that friendship. It wasn't me at all, and I was heartbroken. I was completely heartbroken. I never quite understood it. Nothing there, there wasn't a big argument or anything, and who knows what it would be from her point of view, but I was really blindsided by it.
And, but also look, when you've got tiny kids, I had three tiny kids who knew where my brain was at that point. But yeah. But coming back to people misunderstanding, estrangement, everyone's obsessed at the moment about Brooklyn Beckham.
Ben: Yes.
Salima: And sure, okay, writing on your Instagram stories. And it's all very public.
But even though that's all he really understands, isn't it? That's how he's grown. That's his language. He doesn't understand privacy and handwritten letters. Obviously, that's not how the Beckhams have brought him up. But who knows, who knows? And I think that's the main thing that I would say to anybody who judges quite harshly about estrangement, unless you were there. It's very difficult to know what's happened in the
Ben: Yeah. Understanding that in the li well, understanding one's own inner life is hard enough, right? Like, how am I actually feeling, let alone other people's inner lives?
Salima: And also, Ben, if you think about it, you were around, like you were around when I was 18, 19.
And you wouldn't, I didn't talk about it then. So you wouldn't have seen me, we had that nice house, didn't we? It all looked quite pretty. I dunno whether I did ever mention anything, but I think I kept it all fairly,
Ben: not until we are flatmates in our twenties, then it,
Salima: right exactly.
You do it, we had that lovely thatched house and I had piano lessons and then I went to Cambridge and I was head girl and it all looked very beautiful and in control. But things were very out of control actually. Things were really out of control. That's partly why I loved school so much.
I would never have shown that to people wouldn't have believed it at the
Ben: time. Yeah. Even if you did, it would be like, this is the thing about some nonfiction is if you wrote it as fiction, nowadays, people don't believe you.
Salima: Yeah.
Ben: It has to be written as well, no, this is my inner life. This is how this
Salima: course, what, and also look, I think with alcoholism as well, it was all kinds of things. I became a very hypervigilant kind of kid because I could just sense things turning in the evening or I knew and things wouldn't go the wrong way at home when, when it was all gonna explode. And then everything would be fine in the morning.
Nobody would talk about it. Like I remember going to a birthday party when I was about 10 and my dad was really drunk and I was very upset. And my mom just said, put on a party dress. Here's the present. And we just left. And she called me to blow my nose. And then I went to the party and I was completely fine at the party and I remember enjoying it.
There was a magician, I remember really loving it, but I was very used to, from quite early on, just going, okay, that's happened. Blow your nose. Don't tell anybody. Get on with it.
Ben: Wow. So what's your story? E either bit of the story, bad patient or build a dad or anything which you've most resisted writing down, but I guess have written down or there's something which is resisting at the moment and you think, oh, maybe I'm, it's not even gonna make it in.
Salima: The hardest thing to write about has been the day of my dad's death, not because of the news, but because of my behavior with my mother on that day. So mothers,
Ben: mothers do it to us, right?
Salima: They do. So my mom, although she's been divorced by that point for nearly 30 years, was catatonic with grief and I lost my temper.
And behaved really badly. You'll have to read my memoir to see just how badly, but I just
Ben: but you did manage to write about it then if you're not gonna
Salima: leave it out. No, I'm not gonna leave it out because I think it's a really important thing for people to read about. If you're going to write about estrangement and you're going to write about difficult dads that I think you are owed, you owe the readers like all of it.
Yeah. 'cause if anyone's reading this that has any overlaps with this kind of thing, I want them to know that they're not imagining it or by themselves. I think that's what I felt for years. Oh, I'm making this up slightly. Yeah. Drunks drink whiskey for breakfast and they beat their children, don't they?
Black and bloom. But when it's emotional stuff, like I hit my dad never hit me. When he was very drunk, I pushed my dad. I hit my dad as a teenager in a very out of control way. And know, we hear about the extremes, don't we? We hear about, yeah.
You are beat in black and blue by a parent, or you hear about the other extreme, the kind of like the best of the best parents, but this kind of murky middle, which left me. Pretty I was always worried really as a kid, and you knew me from the tail end of that, where I was so happy to be at Cambridge and be meeting people and doing all these exciting things.
But
Ben: and as part of your point that it's. I guess it's not that it's okay to behave badly, but that it happens and it happens. I'm guessing you're still talking to your mom and life also goes on and we have to admit that these things happen. And put it where it is and potentially learn from it, or at least acknowledge it and see what happens in the future.
Salima: And also look, you know my mom, mommy has had a very difficult life. She came here at 16 from Pakistan Scholarship to Guda and Lama. Amazing, but a fish outta water, obviously. Then even had, got, had an arranged marriage, then left that it was an abusive relationship.
Then married my father and was with my father for years and years. Living in the middle of the eighties British countryside, where she really was like the only South Asian for a hundred miles and everyone thought she ran like the local Indian takeaway. And my mom. I owe my mom a lot.
'cause my mom kept everything going. Always. And you know what she's strong at. She's got some overlap with your mom, hasn't she? Actually. In terms of what they demand of us, what they expect from us. But it hasn't always been easy with my mom, you know.
She's not an easy woman. But I also admire my mother and I do respect my mother. But we don't always get on.
Ben: Is your mother as present in the year of undoing as your father or,
Salima: Yes, she is. Although that's the interesting thing about writing a memoir, isn't it? Because I also feel that I want.
Look after my mother.
Ben: Yeah.
Salima: She's alive.
Ben: She's gonna read it. Probably.
Salima: Yeah. Although I've told her not to read it because of my dad and everything, but no, I, because no more, not because she's gonna read it or even, because even if she wasn't alive, I would feel the same about my mom actually, because for all the difficulties and complications my mom has.
Really, I, I know. My mom would always do anything for me or my sister. We might not agree with it. We might not agree with oh, the way she thinks about it, she is, she's a very strong, a strong woman who's also pretty blunt, yeah, I'm truthful about my mom in the year of undoing, and we went to live with my mom for the first few weeks when we left London, and that wasn't always easy, particularly she's got a much more traditional Pakistani way of like bringing up children compared to my EZ fair, more relaxed way of being with kids.
So that wasn't easy, but
Ben: I still remember. Your mum is teaching me how when you put things in a bin, you can eke out a little bit more volume depending on the way that you turn around your cartons. And I think about that sometimes when I reverse it goes, oh, you know what? That's crazy. Silly was who was, mum was the one who advocated this way of bin filling.
So there you have it. I don't think that says anything about anything, but I do remember it
Salima: also. But you know what, my, my parents were, before it was fashionable, like in the eighties and nineties when all my friends had immaculate Kneehigh white socks and like fabric conditioned, school uniforms.
My mother knitted my brown socks. We lived on dhal and rice and stew. Everything was composted. She didn't believe in heating, so being a child around my parents wasn't the most cozy experience. We lived in this massive house that we couldn't really afford, so we only heated half of it. And the other half was just absolutely, I like, icy basically.
And my dad would run over pheasants and then pluck them at the kitchen table. They were like hippies in many ways.
Ben: Does that make the book? 'cause I guess that's not the year, but that's the background.
Salima: Yeah, it does because it also explains how. Why I am me and what, what creates the contradictions within me.
Like I am more material minded. Partly because of that, because there's a lot of discomfort
Ben: Yeah.
Salima: In childhood. As I like glamor.
Ben: Yeah. We often go the other way, don't we?
Salima: Yeah. So I like the aesthetic is really important to me, I think because my house was just full of books.
Ben: Yeah. Still filling your teenage hole.
Salima: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Ben: And as in your creative process then, are you more of a procrastinator or do you get it all out? Are you a morning writer? Evening writer, 3:00 AM writer. Anything goes. And from your performing stuff, has that informed how your creative process works?
Do you have things or rituals you go to? What? What is your writing process?
Salima: I have no writing process. I, and I think that is informed from being an actor. So I'm really aware that like sometimes you're just not in the mood and sometimes it's just impossible. But you've gotta get, I don't know, 2000 words done by the end of the day.
So maybe we start at midnight or maybe I'll write it in the morning or maybe I like it, so I try to be quite instinctual about it. And obviously I've got three kids. I'm so busy with my family, home life, so I'm not, like I'm not a single white man who can just go to my office. And write for.
I don't… that's nothing to do with being white.
Ben: But sometimes I was thinking about this famous sculptor, about a hundred years ago. Giacometti was really famous, but he had essentially two women running after him. So he could do sculpture 12 hours a day.
They would literally feed him and make everything, everything goes, and it can work fine and no. Consensus genius art, but the enablement to have that genius art done to dedicate yourself to art is a strain on everything else around your life. Yeah. And that is really interesting how many artists are like that.
I wouldn't like to say it all because it isn't always like that, but it is interesting when you look at those that there is a cost to all of that.
Salima: And also I'm not willing to sacrifice family life for that. So I could be more boundaried and say to the kids, when you come home from school, mommy's in her office.
I don't know. I have Carl's office. Don't disturb me until 5:00 PM or whatever. But I don't, I just, that for me just doesn't feel right. And I've always wished, like even when I wrote a novel that didn't get published, but they got me a literary agent. When I was writing that, the kids were tiny, so I would just write, I'd write it even in the car at pickup, I would just have my laptop.
I'd get there half an hour early and I'd just do an extra half an hour of cafe bits and pieces like that, so I think also. There's a romance that people attach to writers, to actors, to artists, but I think we need to really get rid of that romance because I think it's quite damaging for a lot of people.
Ben: It's really rare. There's some who have that in them, like Giacometti, but it is really rare.
Salima: I was gonna say, let's say you're a trust fund baby, and you've. You don't have to think about money or anything like that, then of course, great. And then you can go and writers retreats and you can write your novel halfway up, a mountain on a beach, Bali, whatever.
But the reality is 99% of people that I know who are doing anything creative are, if not struggling, are very aware of finances, right? Because increasingly. These kinds of lines of work don't pay huge amounts. And you have to
Ben: fit it in with the rest of your life,
Salima: fit it in. And also if you want other elements of your life, do you want a long term partner?
Do you want children? Maybe not, but if you do want those other things, you also take up time and energy. Yeah. And some days, your 16-year-old comes home, she says, pulls up from her boyfriend. You can't just disappear. And go back to, you've gotta just sit on her bed with her for that.
That's the end of your day. There's no way around that.
Ben: What's the best advice you have that you've subsequently just ignored?
Salima: The best advice I've had, but then I've then ignored why is it the best advice?
Ben: It doesn't need to be best, but there's some, like I'm I'm always ignoring this whole, oh, you've got a show, not tell.
Salima: oh, I see.
Ben: Let's just ignore that, or I don't know. It could just be advice. Yeah. It might be more funnier because it's like classic advice and then actually it's not reality.
Salima: So I think you make a good point about the routine thing. In that, I would say, let's just blast out to smithereens, because you're never gonna start, if you are a normal-ish person, that's just never you.
There's never gonna be the perfect moment and the perfect space to do it. Yeah. But often people write their first novel whilst they're in the office, and then they get, eventually get a book deal, and then they realize maybe they can write full-time or whatever, and that's like the lottery winning writer, so yeah.
Ben: I ignore sometimes the thousand words a day thing in the sense that sometimes I just do one sentence and that's you know what? That's a win. I've managed to even get a sentence like, I was just sitting on the loo and I thought of one sentence. Yes, I'll take that, that
Salima: I've just noticed something down.
Or I just know I noted down something about or what's it called that the Japanese way of repairing things with gold.
Ben: Yes. [Kintsugi]... Something
Salima: like that. Exactly. I just noted something about it the other day and I was like, okay, yeah. And then I will write more on that, but I haven't …
Ben: One day….
Salima: I've just added it to my manuscript and I might expand on it or I might not, who knows?
Maybe that just that thought in a week's time could end up taking you somewhere interesting. So I think that's it. Like not waiting for the perfect. Moment to start anything and also remembering as well, much like we remember as actors, right? Or directors that like when you're in the rehearsal space or when you're in your early drafts, just get something down or just do something.
Just play with some words. Pick up the script that's already written or write your own thing and it can be absolute gobbledy gook, but then that gobbledy go will become something.
Ben:. Do you have any rituals or quirky rituals or even quirky rituals? Just generally. I still remember, so this is the coconut oil.
Again, it was coconut oil with green socks. Like I don't remember why I remember the green socks, but there was a for skin moisturizing. But do you do anything?
Salima: These are socks your wife actually sent me. They're very cozy pink socks I live in. I still have to convince myself that I'm not working. I still have to trick… Do you remember when I was revising finals and things like, I was very much like never in the library. Like handles buy cookies, like incense has been in my bed. Like I still write often in my bed under a duvet on the sofa. I've always made it very nice.
So I'm like, oh, I'm just opening my laptop and Oh, I just happen to be writing. Yeah. It would be disastrous going to a library every day.
Ben: Then it feels like work.
Salima: I had to kid myself.
Ben: I remember advising, spending a lot of time just sleeping.
Salima: But you got that kind of super brain for those kinds of things you didn't need, you didn't need to do what the rest of us needed to do…
Ben: Let's do, I dunno if you played this little game, we'll just do, it's, we do overrated or underrated. So I give you a thing and you say whether you think this is overrated or underrated or maybe even correctly rated. And you can just say, you can just say why or not. Okay. Champagne overrated or underrated?
Salima: I think you know what I'm going to say. Underrated, but vintage champagne overrated.
Ben: Okay. And that's 'cause vintage champagne just doesn't taste very good
Salima: Exactly as you found out.
Ben: Okay. Alright. Dressing up. Overrated or underrated?
Salima: Underrated. Always feel better when you're dressing up. You can never be overdressed.
Ben: Never overdressed. Very good. Being tall, is this overrated or underrated?
Salima: Overrated. There's no need.
Ben: Yeah. What is With all these tall people
Salima: There's no need.
Ben: Your head on the doors
Salima: There's heels, there are step ladders. Many ways to get around things.
Ben: Hustling, hustle, culture.
Salima: Underrated, underrated.
Ben: We've all gotta be doing something. Side jobs.
Salima: Yeah. Always. Even if it's just to keep you awake, like even if you don't really need to just, I think it's like you are really great at that, right? If you think about what you cram into your life. You managed to hold down this very serious job.
I don't really understand what you do. And you do things like this. You are always doing creative side projects and things that you always have done right?
Ben: Yeah. So hustling is also underrated. Okay.
Salima: Yeah.
Ben: Social media
Salima: quick aside, do you think that's partly being second gen immigrants?
Ben: They might be attached to it. I think there's also a little, for me, it's a little bit. Money, although a lot of these things aren't money, but it's like you're doing things, then your opportunity might happen. Yeah. You're not doing anything. Opportunity won't happen particularly creatively where
Salima: yeah,
Ben: It doesn't, and then a little bit actually was not quite death, but Nadia dying and my dad dying.
But the little bit, just knowing, if you want to get on and do things, you should need to do it because you don't know. What's, you dunno what's gonna happen. Yeah. And then a little bit I think is the immigrant thing, but I think that just, you just get that from your parents so it,
Salima: Yeah.
Ben: It doesn't necessarily have to be that, but obviously if you think about why people tend to immigrate or tend to leave their home country, there will tend to be a bit of hustle. Because if you were very comfortable where you were in your home place, then usually you don't wanna move. Because it's comfortable.
So why are you moving? So I think there is like a little bit of that and I guess I'm probably, I get bored a bit as well. Yeah. And then it's what do you do with boredom? Am I sometimes being bored for a tiny bit and then it would be like, you gotta do something.
Salima: Yeah, I agree. I think that's heavily linked to the immigrant experience though. Like your mom and my mom, neither of them are still people.
Ben: Yeah, they're not, that's true.
Salima: No. So both of us have grown up with mothers who were like, busyness is a necessary part of existence.
Ben: Yes. I think that's true, although it is hard to know whether that's just our sort of mothers, but then you get them from immigrant mothers, don't you?
Okay. Last couple on overrated, underrated social media. Overrated or underrated?
Salima: I would say neither. Okay. Because I love it and I hate it.
Ben: So it's correctly rated or it's like it's both.
Salima: Both. It's both. Yeah. Yeah. I'm confused by social media. I've met some great friends over social media and actually it helped me get my publishing deal because of that moth talk that I did.
It went viral and then the publishers were very interested in my pitch, I think partly because of that. So it has really helped benefited me. But I'm not immune to comparisons and forgetting. Like you were saying about my bad patient writing and how people write about having realized certain things on social media when they become unwell or something.
Ben: Yeah.
Salima: So often it's just curated.
Ben: We're not immune to the algorithm and the things. I think that's all true. I do think that we do sometimes underrate other communities that it can bring, I see this in autistic communities and other special interest communities and 'cause they're not loud, right?
Yeah. Groups of communities which are interested in street food or buses or landscape or geocaching. And I think so. If you've just got a geocaching Instagram, that's all you are seeing, you don't actually complain about it much 'cause it's doing your thing so it's not noisy. So I do think there are actually, quite a lot of those quiet communities there probably are overshadowed by all of the other noisy stuff, but there are interesting things happening.
So it is, it's a complex one, which just reflects humanity, right?
Salima: Yeah, exactly. Although I love seeing your newest foodie things.
Ben: Yeah. I'm going into food again, yeah, I'm just really interested about food com and particularly London. I think London is underrated for food and if you want to eat cheaply you can, but you generally have to go out of zone one and you have to go for slightly more interesting food.
Okay. Last one, because it's been our recurring theme. Coconut oil. Is this now underrated or overrated?
Salima: Underrated. I still absolutely adore coconut oil. Still good. I cook with it. I eat, make chocolate from it. I moisturize my sculpt with it once a week. I use it as a body moisturizer. I pretend to my kids.
It's a medicine. I'm still pretty obsessed with coconut oil.
Ben: Okay. So it is a magic ingredient. All great. It's,
Salima: Yeah.
Ben: Okay. And so in terms of current projects, you have two books on the go, the Substack, you do your own podcast. Yeah. Anything else you wanna mention in terms of current and future projects?
Salima: Yeah, so I've recently agreed with my acting agent, I'm gonna start auditioning again actually. So although I took a break from acting, with all the health issues, yeah, I've just thought, I'm just, this is the year of saying yes. So I'm just gonna go for everything and see and see what happens.
And also my energy is very up and down. I've still got a few more weeks of treatment, so I'm just trying to say yes to whatever I can and what, yeah, what works. If I have to not be able to do it because I'm still not feeling a hundred percent fine, but yes is 2026 for me.
Ben: What do you think, if you look back on this year, last year, are you gonna look back and find anything funny about this or oh, that was a thing, or you're still too much in the middle of it?
Salima: I sat because Carl, as his sense of humor is incredibly dark, already laughing at lots of it.
Listen, only three and a half weeks ago, I was dragging the drain from my wound along the corridor of an NHS ward to try and get someone to change the dressing. And Cole was just appalled, but I just knew that was the only way to make things happen. So we were laughing about that last night.
So I do think a sense of humor is absolutely vital for life, even more so than I even thought. Like I found, I've had some of the funniest moments. Over the last six to nine months, in really in situations that appear very dark. Yeah. And gruesome. I had some very funny moments.
Ben: Yeah. You either laugh or you crack.
Salima: Yeah. And also, look, I think the funniest things about life tend to be on that kind of precipice, right? Is it horrendous and are you going to sob or is it very funny? Like those. That they're the highest stakes, aren't they? So actually they can be the funniest things about life because actually most of life is pretty ridiculous considering we'll both be forgotten in a couple generations time.
Ben: Yeah.
Salima: We all think we are, these kinds of our egos as humans generally are pretty inflated considering what kind of little dots we actually are.
Ben: Yeah. Who's remembered from a hundred years ago? Like virtually nobody. Yeah. Famous people then. Great. Last couple of questions then. What do you think you've got anything to tell someone who's in the middle of a thing, which they're trying to do?
Find it hard to fix or maybe that they can't fix. And maybe we can broaden this out as also, do you have any thoughts to people who wanna be creative? Or I guess you've got lots of bits to talk about, like being a bad patient or building a dad and estrangement, but is there anything you'd like to offer as thoughts?
Salima: Yeah. I'd like to say plot. I think it's really important. Okay, so let's say you have a burning ambition to write a novel, for example, like lots of people do, they'd love to write a novel. They just dunno where to start. So start with the tiniest thing. So start with like a hundred words a day, like 50 words a day, like whatever, like on your bus route home.
Write 50 words. 50 times, seven times four. Oh God, I don't know. But that's up, that's 1400 words a month. So and that's with barely any effort whatsoever. So these little micro habits I think are really very vital. And like you were saying, you've just written one sentence that day, great.
So I think plot is a, is actually a word that can be used. In a way that we don't normally use. Like the mechanics of creating something are just like habits. It reminds me of how when you were in your twenties, you had on your computer these screensavers. Do you remember?
Ben: Yeah.
These are my, like lifetime goals.
Salima: Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember? Because I really remember that. I won't say what they were, but I do remember what they were.
Ben: I've hit a few of them. On
Salima: done. Yeah. Yeah. I think anything like that appeals to you. We've gone peak, manifesting peak, manifesting boards and all of that, but there's lots of different versions of that.
It doesn't have to be pretty. Collage that you put on your wall. It can be a screensaver or it can just be like some, like random notes that you make to yourself. So starting small I think is one massive thing. Start
Ben: small and plod.
Salima: Plod. And lastly, there's no. I need some help.
'cause I think these things are rarely created in a vacuum. So for example, years ago I did a favor and favor, those courses? Just an online writing course. 'cause my kids were tiny so I couldn't do the one that was like in their offices. And I just did a mini six week course of that.
And that got me, I think that was like how to write the first three chapters of a novel. And I think I wrote a few chapters from that. So whether you have a friend who is a writer or an actor or or you can find a mentor, I think that's really key to, rather than just taking yourself off and doing it.
And it also holds you accountable. Somebody who's gonna check in. It doesn't have to be something expensive. There's lots of versions of this, I think the collective, the community is really important when you're doing something creative.
Ben: That sounds excellent. So just start, plod keep going.
Find a mentor.
Salima: Yeah, exactly. And whatever that person is,
Ben: Excellent. Anything else you'd like to say?
Salima: I want to thank you for being my friend for so many years.
Ben: Let's hope it's gonna be we're, we could go for another 30 that should be within…..
Salima: Come on.
Ben: Yeah.
We'll be approaching 80 then…
Salima: I'm just living to a hundred remember
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Salima: So I can, we can do another, we can do another 30 to 40. Yeah. I think, 'cause look. On a serious point, it is rare that you find people who then know you in that way. I can use a shorthand with you. We can pick up when we haven't spoken for a long time, and I can speak to you very directly and in a shorthand that I can't with very many people.
Ben: That's true. Cherish your long term friendships. On that note, Salima, thank you.
Salima: Thank you so much.