CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE IS such that women, with the appropriate levels of hormonal commitment, can now have what Sarah in the 13th episode of the Ink Jockey podcast series The End of the Line, directed by Mark Heywood, refers to as her ‘lady eggs’ frozen for perpetuity.

More of a conventional podcast than the fictional episodes we’ve heard in this series up to now, the work takes the shtick of radio DJ Sarah Story and cites the contexts of some of her listeners in this regard. It isn’t a personal rant, but is equally empassioned and informed about a controversial issue.

Why would you want to freeze your eggs? Well, there’s a whole bunch of reasons, expenses and sacrifices. The beauty of it all is that if you decided to never attempt to use them to germinate seeds — for babies — that is still your choice. Indeed, even the gesture of freezing said eggs is a completely private decision, between one woman and her ovaries.

Story’s focus reaches beyond the technicalities and cost of the procedure and into the thinking behind little girls’ dreams which, she is emphatic, never really features ideas like ‘when I grow up I want to be a mummy’, particularly, little girls on the cusp of womanhood and all its strange changes and mixed promises.

It’s an intelligent contribution to the series, and its ‘real life’ scenario plays well into an understanding of the series’s premises, lending the project more muscle, in some respects than the fictional monologues, which are very emotional. It lacks the jazziness and the verve, however, of those fictional characters, and Story’s smooth talk-show host voice and tone makes you feels as though you’ve tuned into radioland. This is, of course, not a bad thing; it puts the whole issue of producing young in the front and centre of your thinking and tosses possibilities and realities hither and yon around it.

Take a listen!

Sarah is written and directed by Mark Heywood. It features technical input by Lynne McConway and casting by Sydney Aldridge. With music by Daisy Chute and Cerian of the Heard Collective, it is performed by DJ Sarah Story as herself and is the thirteenth in a series of podcasts produced by Ink Jockey collectively called The End of the Line.