Imogen Tinkler - on foraging, fairytales and altered career aspirations

Smashing The Ceiling

When you're in a box career-wise, it can be hard to get out of it. Sometimes it's pressure from others, or from society that keeps you in that box, or sometimes it's your own internal monologue telling you that you can't do anything else. Sometimes, life events send you on a different path.

Imogen Tinkler is a total inspiration in this area. After an adventurous childhood in Pakistan, and studying Russian with politics at uni, Imogen thought she was going to be a lawyer. After losing her mother, she re-considered her priorities, and subsequently forged a successful career in the charities and non-for-profit sector, becoming a director at the age of 31 and working with David Cameron and Gordon Brown. After her dad became ill, Imogen re-invented herself again though, quitting her job and starting a food business Bangers and Balls with her husband Duncan.

Imogen and Duncan are aiming to start a revolution from your kitchen table. They began with pop-up restaurants, but now take foraging expeditions, telling the tales of food surrounding you in the natural world and have written a new book, Foraging Fairytales, which has just gone straight into the Amazon Top 10.

As well as being a successful businesswoman and master marketeer, Imogen is also a keen wild swimmer with a love of the ocean and being in water, and she tells me about how swimming saved her after the loss of her 8 week old baby daughter in the midst of the pandemic last year. Her positivity and infectious enthusiasm despite everything she's encountered made me just want to be her friend and move to Kent immediately to join her gang of swimmers. As a trigger warning, we do discuss grief and loss in this podcast, but listen in if you can for warmth, energy and lots of great advice from Imogen.

Useful links:

Bangers and Balls website: https://bangersandballs.co

Bangers and Balls Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bangersandballs/

Imogen's Girls Gone Wild swimming page: https://www.instagram.com/girlsgonewildswimming/

The Government's Kickstart Scheme that Imogen mentioned: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/kickstart-scheme