Okay, fine. I give in. I want the stuffy country life too. I want a partner who will bake gooseberry pie in the kitchen while I watch the sunset over the mountains and make pottery. Or internet content, as the case may be.
Or maybe I was just devouring The Simpler Life? with James and William, a new podcast from the likeable duo behind the Currabinny Cookbook and Currabinny Food Truck, who used to live in Dublin’s Chatham Row. James Kavanagh is a man who knows how to produce content: his Instagram feed is a delight of influencer charm, presented in brocade coats and dimpled faces; his podcast What Did You Eat This Week? ran for two seasons. If you’re one of his 166,000 Instagram followers, or watched Great Inspo Home Adventure on Virgin Media, you’ll know that Kavanagh and his partner, chef and artist William Murray, have long been considering an exit from Dublin.
As part of their TV show, they visited homes across the country and I don’t think it’s a spoiler at this point to reveal that they ultimately found a place of their own in a corner of Co Kilkenny by the River Barrow, overlooking the Blackstairs Mountains. In the new podcast, where they speak openly and largely unscripted, we learn 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 drove them elsewhere: destination Kilkenny, where they landed on the Carlow border in a riverside spot with a lush garden not far from the lights of Kilkenny city.
Kavanagh and Murray guide us through their move, introducing us to their new world of polytunnels and elderflower cordial, through their own dialogue and a loosely structured approach that allows for digressions, including about 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’ve already learned about beehive bait, the dangers of ingesting hemlock and the benefits of a buffet. Through the hosts’ narratives we’ve experienced post-purchase regret and local exploration, and learned a lot about the joys of knowing your neighbours and the sensitivities of wisteria.
Still, it’s hard to see this as a standalone endeavor: The podcast works best when consumed alongside the visual delights of the hosts’ vibrant Instagram feeds, where the talking points come to life in aesthetic vignettes. These two are a multimedia company, smart in their candid conversations, and ultimately win through an authentic approach to the medium and their story. The Simpler Life? lacks a 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, especially when they bicker unguardedly and some of the tensions their lifestyle change inevitably brings to the surface—this podcast is a fun, jealousy-inducing addition to their oeuvre.
