#(edit: turns out we need something simpler bc my brain is soup)

[aeolianblues]

@tellthemeerkatsitsfine, while I read your wonderful essay, I just wanted to jot down some of the timestamps of Jon and Russell talking about John during their show, where they refer to him by his proper name. I haven't done so in past episodes, but from where I am, I'm adding bits that I notice and will publish them from drafts soon/edit the post and add more as they come.

18 March 2007: ~57:20 "Our old flatmate John is really scared of the dark. I used to jump out at him and he'd get really scared".

8 April 2007: ~57:40 Mark Olver is accused by Jon of being a bad driver, but a better driver than Russell Howard, which Jon says is no big achievement, insinuating that Russell is a really distracted/bad driver. Mark says here, I'm a better driver than John Robins, to which Jon doesn't seem to agree (or disagree), saying, "we'll give him the right to reply next week." (This was during Russell's Australia trip, the second week that Mark co-hosted and before Robins sat in.)

Interesting to me because throughout the XFM years and even to the present day, John prides himself on being a good driver. Elis has literally said "you parallel park beautifully" to cheer John up on a bad day. Was John a worse driver in 2007? Did the improvement happen sometime during the intervening 7 years? IIRC (why the fuck do I know this) these were the Lanos years. I have heard John talk fondly of those, so I don't know.

8 April 2007: 01:17:20, Jon mentions he'll be at a Champions League game with John Robins later that week. John is still regularly in touch with his old flatmates, and also is still well into football.

29 July 2007: 01:02:30, Jon mentions on air that Russell had to accompany John into a chocolate shop because he fancied the girl behind the counter. Robins bought Jon Richardson chocolates and then got angry when Jon (who had recently vowed to only eat fair-trade chocolate recently) didn't eat them.

11 November 2007: 00:46:00, Jon has invited his former housemates Russell, John and Mark to a Christmas dinner, but none of them replied to his text invite for three days. Jon catches up with Robins a few days later, and at the end of their meeting John says, ‘oh yeah I’m free on 18th’, making Jon even more mad about how Jo one is replying to his text.

2 December 2007: 00:13:00, Jon has bought everyone in the studio an advent calendar, he gives Russell a Spider-Man or Island Princess one, I can’t tell which is going to whom, but Jon chastises Russell for eating all his calendar sweets in one day. Russell corrects him, revealing that the compulsive sweet eater was actually John Robins, not him (Russell revealed he didn’t end up eating any chocolates, which probably had to do with him being in a diet).