In episode 354 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Adam The Sartorial Gardener.

Adam runs an Instagram account where, as the title suggests, he documents his life tending and working on his garden whilst looking very dapper and elegant at the same time.

Adam also posts on the account to cherish the memory of his wife Evanne, who tragically died of brain cancer on April 29th 2025.

Adam and Evanne met at university in Lancaster where he met her on the very first seminar he ever attended.

Evanne was originally diagnosed before Adam met her, on December 28th 2018.

They graduated together in 2022 but tragically, in November that year, her brain cancer returned and she was re-diagnosed with a grade 3 form of the tumour.

Adam and Evanne had originally planned to get married in July/August 2025. However, because of Evanne’s prognosis and decline, they moved it forward and after getting engaged in March 2023, got married in March 2025, just one month before she died.

During their time at university, there was a small garden at the end of the road of the flat where they both lived together. Adam started volunteering there and Evanne took pictures of the bees and flowers there as part of her degree.

From that point, Adam’s desire to do horticulture and gardening for a career was born.

In this episode, we first discuss Adam’s triple diagnosis of dyslexia, dyspraxia and dysgraphia and how that impacted his childhood and adolescence. We also discuss how the early diagnosis and having a hugely supportive state-school environment allowed him to thrive alongside these conditions, manage them and succeed by going to university.

We then discuss the love story of meeting Evanne, how they navigated the brain cancer treatment, the story of their marriage, and Evanne’s tragic decline from her second diagnosis.

We discuss the grief he has gone through in the last year since her death, his desire to keep her memory alive through the gardening account, and a hike he did in September 2025 alongside Adam and Evanne’s friends and family, which raised £3,300 for brain cancer research charities.

We came across Adam through his interview on friend of the pod JD’s ‘What’s On Your Mind?’ channel.

As always, #itsokaytovent

You can follow Adam on social media here: https://www.instagram.com/the_sartorial_gardener/

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In episode 353 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked back in with academic, author and commentator Dr Ashley Frawley.

Ashley currently works as Senior Editor at Compact Magazine, as well as holding roles of sociologist and Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the MCC Brussels in Belgium.

We first checked in with Ashley in JCIP #253 in August 2024.

In Ashley’s Part 1, we discussed her academic journey, the influence of Frank Furedi on her views and career, her critiques of ‘therapy culture’, her view that there is a crisis of meaning in Western society right now, an eating disorder she had from the ages of 14-21 and how she overcame it.

In the last year, Ashley has written and commented on a range of issues, including the assisted suicide debate in the UK, trans discourse, Islamism’s influence in the West and has commissioned articles in Compact, including issues like Tucker Carlson’s recent political direction and ‘black post-liberalism’.

The most spicy recent article we saw on Compact she commissioned, which went semi-viral was by a writer called Helen Andrews called ‘The Great Feminisation’. In the article, Helen argued that Western society has been slowly feminised over the last 20 years, to the detriment of political debate, and argued that cancel culture itself is a feminine phenomenon, propagated and executed mostly by female activists.

Naturally, we wanted to find out more and interrogate the pros and cons of this argument, as well as covering other issues Ashley has spoke about through a mental health lens.

As always, #itsokaytovent

Please find links to all the articles we discussed in the podcast below:

• The Fall of Maternal Liberalism - Dr Ashley Frawley
• The Great Feminisation - Helen Andrews
• Boys Without Men - Dr Ashley Frawley

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In episode 352 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with Tom Festa.

We came across Tom through friend of the pod Mark Ferris as Tom was fundraising for Mark’s stepson Callum and his treatment for brain cancer through his ‘Race Around The World’ journey.

Initially starting it as a personal journey for himself, Tom came across Callum’s GoFundMe page.

He didn’t know Callum or his family but after finding out about Callum’s love for education, as a teacher himself, he chose Callum's story to fundraise for.

In May 2025, he took his mum out to Canada with him and he ran his first half-marathon.

From there, he travelled to Brazil and ran his first marathon on August 31st 2025.

Then, in October 2025, he travelled to China and did a 7-day trek up and down the Great Wall, walking over 65,000 kilometres.

And finally, he flew to Perth in Australia, where he completed an ‘ironman’ in December 2025 and visited some family members. His friends also flew out and joined him out there too.

Tragically, in-between the time we organised this podcast and recorded it, on 26th January 2026, Callum died from the cancer he had been getting treatment for, with his funeral held on Friday 13th February 2026.

In this episode we discuss the origins of Tom’s fitness journey, which came following the end of a 10-year-relationship. We discuss the aftermath of it, the crisis it provoked and how he used the campaign to give him a new purpose of raising money for Callum for the time he did.

For Tom’s mental health journey, we discuss the grief of losing his grandfather on his mum’s side, which brought on a form of cleaning OCD and health OCD which became permanent in him.

We unpack the traits this presented in his mental health back then and why, why it carried on beyond the grief and into adulthood and whether it presented in him prior to that point under the surface.

We then discuss how he's managed the OCD, navigated a healthy life alongside it, and how running has quietened these traits for the period of time he’s been doing it for.

As always, #itsokaytovent

You can follow Tom on social media below:

• Instagram

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