“I’m mad for the road”, Kathryn Thomas is telling us, and we’re laughing, because aren’t we all? It used to be the weather that dictated many a national conversation. These days it’s travel. Or the lack thereof. With travel restricted like we have never known before, getting on the road and just going, somewhere, anywhere, away from your own home, holds as much appeal now as escaping the four walls in the early weeks of lockdown, even if it was just for a supermarket trip. We are all mad for the road. Foreign roads would, of course, be the dream, but national interests must take precedent now.
Honing this national travel preoccupation, Kathryn Thomas’ entrepreneurial mind got busy planning during lockdown, and with the steerage of Frontier Films, (her long-time associates from back in the No Frontiers travel show days), she pitched an idea to RTÉ of her and two-year-old daughter Ellie travelling the highways and byways of Ireland, in a camper van. We’re guessing it took RTÉ, and Discover Ireland, all of three minutes to green light this perfectly timed staycation series No Place Like Home, which is packed with inspirational and informative ideas for short breaks. It will air at 18.30 on RTÉ One from August 9th for four weeks.
From an idea to a complete series, and with a live show every Sunday evening, that’s some quick turnaround. However, pas de problème if you have someone like Kathryn Thomas on board! Because this 41-year-old mum- of-one is some operator. With energy to burn, it’s no wonder she runs a fitness bootcamp (Pure Results camps resume next month. She will also be filling in for Ray D’Arcy on Radio One for the month of August!). It’s always said that you should do what you’re good at, and Kathryn does. She plays to all her strengths.
On a typical all-seasons-in-one Irish summer’s day, we visit her and her husband Padraig McLoughlin, and their 2-year-old daughter Ellie at home in Inchicore, Dublin 8, to talk about the new show, her first year of marriage, and how she and her husband, (a restaurateur and director of Food and Beverage at Kildare Village), rebuilt their businesses and kept their heads during the worst days of lockdown.
The sun is peeking its head out just a little today, and gosh are we relieved. The dreary weather has not been helping the mood of the nation.
It has rained for what seems like an eternity. And with the enormity of what we are all going through, it makes it harder still. C’mon sun!
Nevertheless here you are looking sunny in your yellow! And we love the new haircut, too! Did you – in the words of Bridget [from RTÉ’s Bridget & Eamon] – “go for the choppy changey” because you needed your hair to give you a lift, too?!
My hair – like everybody’s – was tired and sad and emotionally drained! But the funniest thing was when I walked in from the hairdresser. Ellie said, “Mummy your hair is not black anymore, it’s yellow”, [laughs]!
Out of the mouth of babes! You’re a year married on the 18th of August. What a year it’s been!
And at the beginning of lockdown I did not know if we’d get to our first year wedding anniversary [laughs]…oh, you better not write that…!
Kathryn, we have to write that because every partnered person in the land will surely relate! Lockdown was hard on all relationships. Sure, you’re love’s young dream now…
Ah, we are! We’ve never been happier actually. It’s been a fast year though: honeymoon in August, away again at Christmas, then Operation Transformation, then lockdown… how is that a year?
And, in March at the start of all this, you and Ellie had a bit of a fluey health scare. By the time the option for testing was made available, however, your symptoms had gone…
Yeah, they wouldn’t test me because I hadn’t the full range of symptoms…I never had the cough, but I had the fever.
You think you had it though, don’t you?
I do! But I think everybody who had a slight ‘anything’, thinks they’ve had it! My entire family think they’ve had it [laughs]. And everyone in my social circle thinks they’ve had it! But we’re all good now, which is the main thing. [Ellie comes and joins us for a toddler chat before retreating to her daddy’s knee for a cuddle].
So, Kathryn, a travel show! You’re back to where it all began 19 years ago!
They’re digging me out of the grave! It’s like I’ve come full circle – aged 41! I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing?!
Well, it’s consequential – Covid has forced you! On No Frontiers you would have gone to the far ends of the earth to bungee jump, cliff climb or sand dune trek, but now you’re stuck at home so, what will you be doing?
When I first pitched the idea I had paramotoring across Wexford into Banna Bay on the list, and they were like, “Jesus, she has not changed a bit [laughs]”. But of course because of social distancing, tandem flying and a lot of those extreme sports are off the list so I’ll be doing a bit of diving, surfing, camping, cycling and driving in a camper van with Ellie and Padraig, to four different parts of Ireland that mean something to me. I can’t wait! I am mad for the road!
Join the club! Where will these roads take you?
Wexford, because that’s where I spent a lot of my childhood summers, travelling on then to Cork because that’s where I first did my Pure Results retreat and then onto west Kerry, because that’s where my mother’s side of the family all come from, and then on up to north Mayo because that’s where Padraig’s family are from. We’ll finish off with a day surfing in Sligo with Kian from Westlife.
Sounds fun, but busy, because won’t you also be on air, filling in for Ray D’Arcy on Radio One throughout the month of August, too? Not to mention the resumption of Pure Results bootcamps in September. You might be struggling with the three day childcare you were hoping to reduce to!
Yeah, I know! We might have to get an au pair! And a bigger house!
The house! Let’s talk about it, we’ve spent the morning here with you, and we love it.
We love it too. We’re here ten years, but last year we put in a new utility room, a downstairs toilet, a dressing room, and a nursery, which then became a nursery/dressing room! It’s great, but no matter how big or small your house is when you have a child you always want more space. That’s something we’ll need to think about in the future.
There’s a lovely community feel here, with your neighbours back doors all open for the chats.
We are the luckiest people in the world with our neighbours. They have keys, and we are in and out of each other houses. Ludmila Korol, who VIP met this morning when you were in her garden picking pears, is an artist, and sometimes during lockdown I would go down to her studio, which is like an art gallery. It was a respite. (Peppa Pig finishes on the tv and Ellie trundles over looking for a sandwich.)
Having a two-year-old in lockdown, how has that been?
Loads of people were saying that it must have been really hard having a toddler because she’s not independent enough to be on her own. But the positivity and innocence from Ellie on the darkest of days was a total tonic. Because we didn’t have to explain anything to her, she didn’t get it, she just loved being with us.
You talk about dark days, and dark days there were. Can you recall your worst?
I’ll be very honest and tell you that in the first three weeks of lockdown Padraig and I did nearly kill each other! My business was going down the swanny; Padraig didn’t know what was happening with his; we had no childcare; we were running out to get the shopping; washing everything down – it was terrifying. We also had a retreat happening at the time so we had to evacuate everybody and pay people back for courses they had already paid for. Padraig had also never worked from home before and so we were on top of each other.
Voices raised and teeth gritted. And there’s a toddler running around.
All the exasperated phone calls about work, and to my sister who was in the US and was starting to figure out what to do, and if to come home. Those couple of weeks were difficult – we were short with each other, I was short with Ellie, and it was a case of yes everybody’s job is important, but because I work for myself I’d end up working from when I put Ellie to bed until 2am in the morning. But then slowly we just got into a rhythm.
Structure saves us.
I can’t tell you how life changing that was. We took shifts, the weather was lovely and I made sure that during Ellie’s nap time I did my training, because it was the one thing that kept me sane. Don’t get me wrong I drank an awful lot of wine! Some people thought lockdown felt like Christmas. For me, it didn’t! It felt more like a bad movie that you were stuck in! Like Groundhog Day in your own gaff!
We have to confess that in the height of lockdown we did not bake one loaf of banana bread, play one board game with the kids, or clean out any wardrobe.
At the beginning I cleared out the spice rack and my wardrobe. But that was it! We had the greatest intentions of doing the garden, painting the sitting room, getting the front of the house done, but nothing! We did nothing! Actually the one thing I did do was learn some songs!
Songs? Really? Why?
Well, everyone else was learning Spanish and all sorts of stuff, and I was like, if and when we can have the biggest sing-song in history, I don’t want to be, “Aw, I don’t know that verse”, which is always me. So, I learnt Red Haired Mary, Follow Me Up To Carlow, Raglan Road and A Song For Ireland! I cannot wait to have the sing-song, which my family are dreading [laughs]! We have had a few inebriated Zoom calls already with the in-laws where they’ve been on the receiving end of me! God love them!
Making the most of it, which we’ve all got very good at. But we’re finding increasingly that stories of airborne transmission of covid, and global daily death tolls, are sending us into a state of anxiety. Are you worried?
No, not personally, and not for my family either because my mum and dad are not high risk. But am I anxious about the world and coronavirus? Yes. There has been no true light shed on the enormity of what is happening in Africa and India and Brazil, and the numbers that we are reading are not the real figures. I have been in shanty towns in India, and when you live in as densely a populated city as Delhi, containment cannot happen. And then you see what’s happening in the States, in a first world country.
We are lucky where we live.
We are. But we all still live on the same planet and to see how massively a virus has affected the world is worrying. And I don’t mean to be negative, but they’re predicting that the next virus could be an even more virulent strain of bird flu, forty times more potent than this. You could let your head go down all sorts of rabbit holes, but there’s no point. This is the biggest lesson in mindfulness ever. I think we are very lucky to live where we do.
We must pay tribute to Dr Tony Holohan and the committed work he did for all of us, at such a difficult time for him, and for his family.
The one thing we were all given was family time, and it was the one thing we realised was the most precious. And yet his family sacrificed him, at a time when they needed him most. And for that reason alone, you go,
‘What do I need to do? I still need to be careful, I need to wear a mask, I need to not go on my foreign holidays’.
You’ve always got an itch to travel though. When would you be comfortable to next step foot on a plane?
I’d get on a plane tomorrow. But it is not the right thing to do right now because we have no visibility on a second wave, and it is not fair to those who are high risk. And that’s the whole thing, because yes I want to get away, I want nothing more, but it’s not about what I want, it’s about acting in our national interest. If you’re getting on a flight just because you feel you need a break, I really think you need to re-evaluate.
You had to re-evaluate your Pure Results bootcamps in the early days of lockdown and take it online. Financially that must have been challenging, even though few emerged unscathed, except if you made face masks, hand sanitizer, Perspex or air conditioning units!
That’s it, everyone has just had to be very creative! For us, we had the staff, but not the technology or the funds to go big and fancy with live apps. But all I knew was that I needed to keep the business afloat,
I needed to keep the staff paid and I needed to keep some momentum for my clients. So in the space of four days we were online using a Facebook page, Zoom, chefs doing cook-a-longs, trainers doing classes, and me in lockdown doing wellness workouts, from home.
And helping others helped you find structure – win win. As we move forward, what’s the hope now?
I just hope that we get to a place where we are comfortable living in our communities, countries, continents. And, that the fear is in some way eradicated, but I think that’s going to take time. I’m also desperate to give people hugs. I think the whole world needs hugs now!
INTERVIEW: Bianca Luykx
PHOTOGRAPHY: Lili Forberg; misslili.net
STYLING: Megan Fox
MAKEUP: Dearbhla Keenan, Brown Sugar; brownsugar.ie
HAIR: Norma Jean, Brown Sugar; brownsugar.ie