What time are you up? I get up at 3.30am on weekdays, so I desperately try to lie in on Sundays, although these days with the curse of ageing I struggle to sleep past 8am. Plus, my cat goes ballistic at 6am. I’ll fidget in bed for an hour and a half until my wife asks me to please go away.
A morning routine? I’m just waiting for everyone else to get up. I might read downstairs while the cat hassles me, or watch Andrew Marr. We’ll often go for breakfast with friends: Cricks Corner in Dartmouth Park does excellent breakfast baps. And yes, we’ll have doughnuts. It’s Sunday. Don’t judge me.
Do you work? I try not to, but I’ll do as I’m told: being freelance, you always fear turning something down means you’ll never get a gig again. Knowing I have to do the Breakfast Show the following day means I’ll keep across the news, checking in with the team by early evening. It’s work adjacent.
How do you have fun? Sneaking in a game of pétanque on Hampstead Heath; the local club have made noises we should really be members. If Liverpool are playing, everything will, of course, be structured around the match. If they lost, the rest of the afternoon is a write off.
Sundays growing up? They were a bleak affair. I graduated from washing neighbours’ cars to working in a garden centre. It was tedious and poorly paid; humping around those huge bags of compost for old people, I think, is largely to blame for my present day back problems. After work we’d play board games at home. The one I remember most is, bizarrely, called Escape from Colditz.
Sunday evening? We’ll roast a chicken, too heavily seasoned if anything, and put the TV on. Week after week we boil up the carcass to make a stock and place the Tupperware in the fridge, where it’ll remain – totally unused, going mouldy – with all the other stocks we’ve previously made. And then it’s my chemically induced bedtime at 8pm: I’ll doom-scroll until the sleep-sprays and pills kick in.
Rick Edwards is the new co-presenter of the BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast Show, airing weekdays 6-9am
