Hello everyone, this is episode 124 of the VictorPep Verica podcast and I just want to start

today with something slightly different and that is a little shout out to one of our listeners

and that is Muhammad S from Iran and I just wanted to say thanks for the super nice email

you sent and it really made me smile this morning when I got it.

So thank you and to all of the listeners, Muhammad is an English teacher in Iran, so that's

cool and actually you might be surprised to know that Iran is actually fourth on the

VictorPep listeners count out of all of various countries, it goes US, China, India, then

Iran.

So obviously there's quite a lot of people in Iran, well at least a few dozen who were

interested in learning and improving their English, so that's cool.

And to get us started today, I have a short quote from one of my old favourites and that

is the German poet and writer Rainier Wilker and this is from the book Letters to a Young

Poet and I really recommend this book, it's only really, really short, it's ten letters

and these letters, letters that Realka wrote when he was relatively young and he was writing

them to a young man who was around 18 or 19 who was uncertain about their life, they

were weren't sure if they should go into the army and become an officer or if they should

become a writer or a poet and so they started writing to Rainier Wilker who at this time

was becoming a more well-known poet and just asking for their help and advice.

And Realka wrote back these letters which are just, for one of a better word, beautiful,

really poetic, really full of elegantly put advice and they're so quotable and yes that

mean that they're one of my favourite pieces of writing, period and I often come back

to them and reread them and try and get inside from them.

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