Episode Four: The Anna O Files Podcast

Written By Lex Brookman

Allow Anna Ogilvy to introduce herself…

Here’s the full written transcript for Episode Four of our podcast. All cited works will be listed below, along with the content warnings.

Lex: 

Hello listeners, and thank you for joining me on this breaking news update. There’s a startling new development in the Anna O case – we've unearthed some lost journals written by Anna Ogilvy herself, and we felt - due to the mass attention that this case is getting - it only right to share a selection of them with you now... Stay tuned.

Anna Ogilvy: 

Anna’s Notebook.

2019.

January 1st, another tepid New Year party at the flat. The family, of course, have their own shenanigans. Theo, drinking too much as usual. Mum, busy with House of Lords business. Dad, counting his money and tied to his phone. I plump for Indira and Doug and their giggly friends, and the wagon wheel of disappointment at the fireworks by the Embankment. I watched the spray of two bright colours by the London Eye. Doug, is stoned. Indie, is sympathetic.

I am bored and fidgety.

2018 is dead.

Long live 2019.

We troop home to the rented flat in Camden. We drink on into the morning - a New Year that feels curiously like the one before. They other’s are asleep as I write this. This notebook was a Christmas present from Mum. Probably purchased by one of her little minions at the Palace of Westminster gift shop.

Age is steeling up on me. I have nothing in my own name to show for it. Keats died at 25, Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice at 21. Raphael was already considered a genius at this stage. Even those unknowns from Uni are no columnists on ‘proper’ papers. I edit a tiny magazine with too few readers and too many pretentions, and no by-lines. I don’t have the stamina for novels. I don’t have the soul for poetry. This, will have to do.

At the start of every week, Pepys like, I will record my thoughts here. I will finally be a writer who actually writes something. Indira mocks me when I say things like that out loud.

Douglas is the pretentious one. The Ad Man prima donna with his peacocky stylings and ambitions. I am the work horse; the dark horse. I play the role too well.

No, this year can’t be another 12 months on the hamster wheel. It’s time to live. To breathe. To die, and be reborn.

I am going to write something this year.

Carpe diem and all of that crap.

January 7th.

The flat is our office.

The office is our flat.

Like all good startups, we live and breathe the magazine. Beer o’clock, siesta time. But more often, toil and trouble. The three amigos in our Camden flat. Indie is serenity incarnate. Doug is as Dougie-tastic as ever; smart, flamboyant, seethingly ambitious, intermittently kind, that poster-boy coolness. No man is a hero to his valet. It must be updated. No man is a hero to this with whom they share a bathroom in a small flat.

But life, surely, is more than 20-something marketing bro’s with faultless hair and too much moisturiser? The next birthday is the last acceptable one to celebrate. After that is an abyss of rising numbers and plummeting metabolism. It is wrinkles, belly fat and the slow gravitational slide into well-earned mediocrity. I sit here and pick up. my copy of IN COLD BLOOD, and read it, for the zillionth time.

I can write something like this.

I can be as waspish and austere as Truman Capote, with his tilted fedora and camp piggy eyes.

Apparently, Capote was inspired by a 300 word article in the New York Times. So I must hunt for inspiration too. I must write something.

I need a decent murder.

Lex: 

You can find out more on Anna's case and the mystery behind her resignation syndrome, in ANNA O by Matthew Blake, available now. This extract was from the Anna O audiobook read by Sarah Cullum. Stay tuned for more breaking news.


Content Warnings for THE ANNA O Podcast. and the book itself:

Murder

Psychosis / Therapy / Psychotherapy

Suicide

Death

Hospitals

Poisoning

Death of a Child 

Imprisonment 

Refugee Crisis 

Alcohol Dependency 

Drug Addiction 

True Crime / Consumption of True Crime

Lex Brookman
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Episode Five: The Anna O Files Podcast

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Episode Three: The Anna O Files Podcast