Ben Pester
speaker
327 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4 Jul
Ben Pester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
London Review Bookshop Podcast · Claire-Louise Bennett & Ben Pester: Magic & Mechanics · 4 Jul 2026
podcast
I felt my knees give as I trod on spongy areas of the playground surface.
There were these divots all over the place left over from old climbing frames.
Replacements were always placed in some new spot so the whole playground was potted with air pockets.
The experience of walking over them was like feeling a grave underfoot.
The cold was insufferable.
I shivered.
I felt completely skinless, but nobody seemed to notice.
The other parents were in shirts with small knitted jumpers over the top and seemed fine.
The top-earning fathers of my daughter's class had their sleeves rolled up, forearms with brutal quantities of hair, heavy watches, their dark chinos tied across their arses which seemed to be swollen like bee allergies.
Others were wearing sportswear cowls that fluttered in the breeze.
They all had a calmness for parenting, I always thought, a natural gentleness I lack.
One of them came to talk to me.
All right, Tom, it was Aidan or Andrew or Drew or something like that.
His kid, his older kid, had been in my son's year when he attended this school.
His son did not go to the same secondary school as my son.
I doubt they were even in touch anymore by this time.
Hiya, I said.
You all right, mate?
You look a bit peaky.
I didn't know how to respond.
Showing 181–200 of 327 · page 10 of 17
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