Radio 4 at its best

Warm, damp and dripping. It's official! The first day of spring. 


A discovery. Yes, yes, I know. I feel suspiciously like a woman whose husband has been having an affair with the babe across the street for the last 10 years and she's finally found out what everybody else has known since day one. But I don't care if the whole world has known about this for the last millennium. I still want to shout it from the rooftops.

I clicked onto Radio 4 the other day looking for ... something. A spot of impenetrable English comedy, perhaps, or an update on the comings and goings in Ambridge. Anything to make the mountain of washing-up more palatable. And what I found was a mountain of pure gold.

A History of the World in 100 Objects. One hundred 15-minute programmes, each dedicated to a single item in the British Museum, each enabling a piece in the jigsaw of world history to be fitted into place. In the time it takes to make and drink a small pot of PG Tips, I you will hear the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, tell the story of an object, along with the story that object tells. An Egyptian shoe-label, a panel from the city of Ur, a jade spearhead, a tablet telling the story of the Flood. Each is fascinating not only in itself, but also for what it tells us about the times in which it was made and, in some cases, for the way in which its discovery changed our perception of history.

It's everything Radio 4 does best. Perfect descriptions, excellent history in digestible gobbits, memorable anecdotes (Victorian amateur historians taking their clothes off...), affection for a great British institution, fabulous soundtrack (Jan Garbarek?), and relevance, always, to the present day world. Plus a female announcer with an uncanny resemblance to the Voice of the Guide...?

Fifteen minutes well spent. And I heartily recommend it. All we expats need now is a reliable supply of PG.

Quote of the Week No. 28 : On things presidential

Sixteen degrees at 9am. An overcast start has been blasted into a bright, bright sunshiney day.

Here in the house on The Rock we don't read the newspapers. First, what with the children, the chickens, the garden, the logging operations, the huntin' (of which more soon), the job and the still unfinished house, we don't have time. And second, having done my internship as a cub photojournalist at The Sunday Times, I believe I have a privileged view of what sells newspapers, and it isn't always the whole, unmitigated truth. So why bother?

Instead, we get our news and commentary either from BBC Radio 4, The Economist or from Chairman Bill.

This week, Chairman Bill tells me that Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain, and ex-leader of New Labour, is addicted to pole position and has his eyes on the top spot in Europe, President of the European Union. Instead of lending his grand socialist statesman's experience and expertise to a beleaguered nation perhaps hit hardest of all its European partners by The Crisis - i.e. the UK - Tony wants to have his Hugh-Grant-little-boy face engraved on coins from here to the borders of Turkey, to whizz about the place in the European equivalent of Airforce One and perhaps be invited to parties at Silvio Berlusconi's mansion (where he might find himself one of those Italian secretaries Silvio mentioned recently). He might even try rebranding the European Union as 'New Europe' and we may soon be thinking of ourselves as 'The Continent of Cool'...

Chairman Bill has noted the strange absence of democratic process in all of this, and I really just wanted to add the words of Douglas Adams, always an astute political commentator, even from beyond the grave : "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

Ye have been warned!

Deadline, what deadline?

Temperature yesterday above 30°, and looks like the same today. Let's hope there will also be another cracking thunderstorm to amuse the kids and water the garden.

Oh my God, whaddya mean 30th June was last Tuesday? Crikey, now we're for it! Quick, dash off an email...

"Dear Overworked Commissioning Editor Somewhere in England's Green and Leafy Intellectual Heartland, I do hope you are well, and that you are on holiday at your retreat in Normandy, your copy-ed is on emergency maternity leave and/or the typesetters are on strike (delete as appropriate)... rewriting, blah, blah, blah... improvements... new ideas, blah, blah... bestseller... extension... grovelling... grateful... relieved..."

As Douglas Adams wrote, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." And now come to think of it there has been a strange noise, like the beating of angel's wings, every time I walk past the study with an armful of plastic robots/craft materials/ironing/cats/buckshee nappies/empty ice lolly makers...

Better get on and finish The Book.

And while I'm doing that...why don't you check out The Raisin Chronicles. All I can say is "Sweden's Got Talent"...

Us and them No. 1

Sunny at breakfast time, overcast by aperitivo time, chucking it down by supper.

In the last four years or so of being a mother (read under-glorified cleaner, cook, personal hygeine supervisor, language and motor skills tutor, and chauffeuse), I've come to believe that the difference between adults and children is not just a matter of quantity - number of years, shoe size, number of brain cells irrevocably damaged by caffeine, alcohol, Celebrity Big Brother... (strike through as appropriate) - but also of quality. If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, children are from the Planet Zarquon, or somewhere thereabouts.

And yes, they come from Planet Zarquon trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth so beautifully put it. The glory is in the way they see things differently from we adults. The way they see the magic in everything, the magic and the potential. Us and Them is a series of quotes from the little Zarquonites in our midst that help us as adults see another side to the story.

So here is Us and Them No. 1 :

On a walk along Cannobio's lakeside marina in the Sunday afternoon sunshine, Mama spots a couple of plastic bottles bobbing about in the water, and she says in a pedagogical kind of way, "Ugh, trash!".

AJ replies, "But, Mama, maybe there's a message in one of them"...

Quote of the week No. 20 : On being in Carmine

Early this promisingly beautiful Wednesday morning, as I took a quiet, child-free moment to stand on the churchyard looking out across Lago Maggiore, with the sun rising golden behind the mountains, the cockerel crowing, and the surfer's sail snapping in the wind, Douglas Adams' words came to mind :

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."

The city, from whence I came seven years ago, can trundle along without me.

I'm here to stay.

Reported conversations No. 13 : abstinence and family life

A bright, clear dawn, with rosy fingers over the snow-capped mountains. Another gardening day! Lent without alcohol is going, well, okay...

M : Aperitivo time! Shall I get you sparkling apple juice?

L (mumbled under breath) : Zarking fardwarks!

M : I'm opening a bottle of Michel Lafarge Volnay to complement supper tonight - grape juice for you?

L (louder) : Zarking fardwarks!

M : And maybe a Sauterne to go with the apple crumble? I guess you'll pass, eh?

L (losing it, shouts) : Didn't you hear me? Zarking bloody fardwarks!

M (thinks) : My mother always warned me against marrying a Douglas Adams fan ...

For more on giving up swearing for Lent, connect here.

Quote of the week No. 14 : International man of mystery

Three degrees at eight o'clock and blow-you-away windy. Sunshine.

Ivern Ball is an international man of mystery. I can't tell you who he is, when he was born, or if he's already dead. I have no information on his profession, religion or gender. The supposed 'he' may, indeed, be a 'she', or even (with a name like that) a racehorse. Or, perhaps, he is part of an elaborate hoax planted in cyberspace by Douglas Adams just before he died.

If you have any reliable information on this supposed person, about half a million people would like to hear from you.

The reason I mention it is that I was quite taken by the following smartass, but thought-provoking, quotation, which is ascribed to him in at least one spot in cyberspace.

"Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else."

Now doesn't that sound to you like something Zaphod Beeblebrox would say?

Quote of the week No. 11 : On reality

Minus two degrees at 8am. Dry, with a hard frost.

As a sometime writer of guides for travellers, I found this quote from Islington genius Douglas Adams (1952-2001) gloriously ironic :

"The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."

I miss Douglas Adams.

Click this link to buy this book.



Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Book Notes No. 20: Runemarks, Joanne Harris

Four degrees at 9am. And although it's still gloomy overhead and wet underfoot, it's no longer raining. The path down is less treacherous now that some kind soul has swept away the worst of the leaf litter from the autumn. I wonder who that could have been?

Have you ever found a book that you want so much to read, to continue reading, that you carry it around everywhere you go, hoping for a quiet child-free, chores-free, pet-free, shopping-free moment in which to savour another few pages? It's been a long time since I had that wicked addicted feeling, but in the last week I've been guiltily sneaking reads of Joanne Harris's Runemarks all around the house, the province and beyond.

It's pretty good.

Actually, it's a fabulously well-crafted literary fantasy (come on publishers, pay me, and I'll create book categories for you that you only ever dreamed of).

And it's unputdownable. At times this week, I've wished I was back in the commuter belt, with all that lovely train-time on my hands.

Maddy Smith is an outsider. The rusty-coloured runemark on her hand scars her with a symbol of the old gods. It's a sign of magic, and everybody knows that magic is dangerous...Except for Maddy, who actually thinks it's all rather fun. The trouble starts, however, when Maddy's one friend, an itinerant pedlar, wants her to open Red Horse Hill and descend into World Below - a world filled with goblins and perhaps something even worse - to retrieve a mysterious relic of the old gods. Based around characters from the Norse myths, the story weaves its way underground for an earth-shattering adventure.

In its review, The Times uses the terms "rollocks along" and "spunky" in the same column. The Times has gone downhill a bit lately, but you get the point. The book is full of energy, excitement and laughs, and owes a lot, I think, to Douglas Adams. Harris's real success here (in me 'umble opinion), is her conception of the appearance and powers of the gods, and her extraordinary vision of the Norse-inspired worlds of Hel, Dream and Netherworld.

A virtuoso piece.

PS By lunchtime it was drizzling, and by the time Mama and the dotties stood at the foot of the hill looking up, it was chucking it down.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Twilight zone...

I found a stray entry lurking on my blog account today. It read :

"t677777777777777777777777777777777777i i21ivmiiwq"

I tried Google Translate but with no success (as usual). My only futher clue as to the author and his message was that it was coincidental with a search on the term "mouse", and an Internet Explorer history entry showing an extreme interest in an online contest for a year's supply of Fufi paté. So perhaps it means "so long and thanks for all the fish"...

Or perhaps it's just that the computer keyboard is the warmest place in the house.

(His name's Trouble, by the way, and he's a Carmine Cat of 2008.)

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.