The Podcast

The idea came to them, as most bad ideas do, at two in the morning, over a pot of pasta that had cost, by Nuria's careful calculation, ninety-four cents per person. "We should do a podcast," said Siobhan. "About this. About living in Dublin on no money. Everyone's skint. Everyone would listen." Nuria, who had moved from Valencia eighteen months earlier and was still recovering from the price of a pint, agreed at once. By the following weekend they had a name, "Skint in the City", two second-hand microphones and absolutely no plan.

They recorded the first episode on a Sunday afternoon in their kitchen in Phibsborough. Siobhan had written a list of topics on the back of an electricity bill, which she felt was thematically appropriate. Nuria had prepared nothing at all, on the grounds that the best conversations are spontaneous. This, it would turn out, was only partly true.

"Right, so, hi, and, like, welcome to Skint in the City," Siobhan began. "I'm Siobhan, and this is, well, you know, my flatmate." "Hello," said Nuria. "I am Nuria. I am from Valencia. I am, how do you say, broke." There was a pause. "So," said Siobhan. "Basically. Basically the thing is, right, Dublin is, like, really expensive, you know?" "Yes," said Nuria. "This is true." Another pause, longer this time.

It went on like that for forty-seven minutes. Siobhan, nervous, filled every silence with "like", "you know" and "I mean", sometimes all three at once. Nuria, nervous in a different way, translated her Spanish fillers straight into English, so that every other sentence began with "well, so, then" and ended with "no?" At one point they both said "anyway" at the same moment, apologized, said "no, you go" four times and then completely lost track of what either of them had been about to say.

There were other problems. The washing machine began its spin cycle twenty minutes in, and from then on the recording sounded as if it had been made inside a jet engine. Their neighbor knocked to borrow a tin opener and stayed for six minutes, most of which made it onto the episode. And Nuria's best tip of the day, a genuinely useful one about which supermarkets reduce their bread after seven o'clock, was lost forever because Siobhan had been sitting on the cable.

That evening they listened back with a bottle of the cheapest wine the corner shop sold. It was a long forty-seven minutes. Somewhere around the tin opener, Nuria started counting, and by the end she had a figure. "You said like two hundred and twelve times," she announced. Siobhan was outraged. "Well, you said no at the end of a sentence ninety-one times. I mean, that's not even a proper question, is it?" "It is a very important question in Spain, no?" "Ninety-two."

They uploaded it anyway, mainly because neither of them could face recording it again. In its first week, "Skint in the City" was downloaded nine times. Siobhan's mother accounted for four of those, Nuria's mother for three, and the remaining two, as far as they could work out, came from a single confused listener in Ohio.

Then, on the Friday, an email arrived. It was from a woman called Grainne who had just moved to Dublin from Galway for her first job. "I listened to the whole thing on the bus," she wrote. "To be honest, I couldn't really follow most of it because of the washing machine, but you sounded like my friends back home, and I've been a bit lonely here. Anyway, I'll definitely listen to the next one. Also, what was the thing about the bread?"

They read it three times. Then Siobhan got out the electricity bill, turned it over and wrote at the top: "Episode two. Bread. Washing machine OFF." Underneath, in smaller letters, Nuria added: "Fewer likes, no?" Siobhan, after a moment's thought, crossed out the "no?" and wrote, "Fair enough."