Okay, fine. I give in. I too want the bougie country life. I want a partner making gooseberry pie in the kitchen while I gaze at the sunset over the mountain and make pottery. Or internet content, as the case may be.
Or maybe I just binged on The Simpler Life? with James and William, a new podcast from the endearing pair behind the Currabinny Cookbook and Currabinny food truck, late of Chatham Row in Dublin. James Kavanagh is a man who knows how to produce content: his Instagram feed is a delight of influencer charm brought to you in brocade coats and dimpled grins; his podcast What Did You Eat This Week? ran for two seasons. If you’re among his 166,000 Instagram followers or you watched the Great Inspo Home Adventure, on Virgin Media, you’lll be aware that Kavanagh and his partner, the chef and artist William Murray, had long been pondering a Dublin exit.
Through their TV show they visited homes across the country, and I doubt it’s a spoiler at this point to reveal that they ultimately found a place for themselves in a corner of Co Kilkenny on the river Barrow, with views of the Blackstairs mountains. On the new podcast, where they talk frankly and largely unscripted, we hear a little about the decision to leave the city, the search for their bucolic idyll, and their dreams of settling in east Co Cork or west Co Waterford before the reality of house prices sent them elsewhere: destination Kilkenny, where they landed along the Carlow border in a spot on the river with a lush garden not too far from the lights of Kilkenny city.
Kavanagh and Murray take us through their move and introduce us to their new world of polytunnels and elderflower cordial through their own dialogue and a loosely structured approach that allows for digressions on, among other things, Murray’s avoidance of planned parties and Kavanagh’s disdain for the smell of dogs. And, of course, there’s the inevitable nod to country life: in the first four episodes of The Simpler Life? we have already learned of hive baiting, the dangers of hemlock ingestion, and the pros of a buffet table. We’ve experienced, via the hosts’ recounting, buyer’s remorse and local explorations, and learned plenty about the joys of knowing your neighbours and the sensitivities of wisteria.
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Yet it’s hard to see this as a standalone endeavour: the podcast works best when consumed alongside the visual delights of the hosts’ lively Instagram feeds, where the conversation points come to life in aesthetic vignettes. These two are a multimedia operation, canny in their candid conversations, and ultimately winning because of an authentic approach to the medium and their story. The Simpler Life? lacks narrative structure, but that’s clearly not the point: if you’re charmed by Kavanagh and Murray – and it’s kind of hard not to be, particularly when they bicker unguardedly and surface some of the tensions their lifestyle leap is bound to produce – this podcast is a diverting, jealousy-stoking addition to their output.
