I have been doing a lot of visiting this week. I went to lunch with my friend Caron yesterday, who I haven’t seen for at least 150 years.
I went to elevenses and shopping with my friend Rosalind today, who I have not seen for about 200 years.
Tomorrow I am seeing B for coffee and buns. On Friday I am seeing Kim for the same.
As I roam about the country on my grand tour I have been, and will be listening to the radio. I am feeling reasonably tranquil this week, so have been risking Radio Four. I do not listen to Radio Four when I am agitated because I shout too much, and there is a very real fear that I will crash into a hedge listening to Martha Kearney, and she will have to do the oration at my funeral.
There have been some wonderful things on. I particularly loved Soul Music yesterday, which is a programme about music which has touched your soul, rather than about the style of music. It was all about Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien,’ and how hearing it at the age of 14 changed a young woman’s life forever. It was fascinating, as she was able to chart a truly pivotal moment in her life, and how everything before that point had been one way, and everything after it had been another. It was joyous.
Other things did not work so well for me. I listened to the programme Nature, which is a natural history type programme. The episode I listened to involved a chap called James Aldred getting hideously excited about giant redwoods.
I understand this, as they are a pretty exciting tree. Nonetheless I don’t think it really came across very well on radio. James went to California to climb the world’s highest tree. It is called Hyperion and it’s really bloody tall (nearly 400 feet). All this is brilliant, except that all you could hear was some huffing, some scraping, a bit of clanking, some swishing sounds, a bit more puffing, and James occasionally going: ‘Now that’s a view.’
Not entirely convinced about that.
It may be that he did not have the linguistic dexterity to paint the kind of picture I would have imagined a shunt up a 400 foot tall tree merited. It may be that it would have been much better to send someone like Seamus Heaney up there with a pencil and a sandwich to wait until inspiration struck.
It may be that anyone who is wavering around at the top of a 400 foot tall tree is rendered speechless, whatever their original verbal dexterity. It may be that James was just too shagged out from climbing, and hanging on for grim death, to express himself properly.
That would be my default position if they made me do something like that. There would be an audio undercurrent of snivelling as well. Possibly the sound of warm urine cascading down my North Face climbing trousers.
It may be of course, that James did not go to California at all. Who am I to say whether those sounds of James whooshing and crinkling his way up a tree were not entirely fabricated by the BBC Audiophonic Workshop, or whatever the sound department is called?
I suspect, in these days of supposed complete transparency, and web cams and the like that this is not the case, but it did please me as I listened to him climb, to imagine him kicking back on a squashy bean bag, sipping a mug of hot chocolate, and providing the odd Attenboroughesque breathy commentary, as a man stood next to him, crouching intently in a box of sand with a cheese grater and some bits of old rope, making some interesting ‘tree climbing’ noises.
I’d like that job.
