The Radio Club

Dear all,

I really enjoyed hearing from those of you who put on Arvo Pärt's Fratres or Clark's Lambent Rag last week; thank you.

For this week's MindLetter, I was still thinking about the radio...

The Radio Club

When Radio 3 Unwind launched on BBC Sounds last autumn, I immediately started hearing recommendations of its comforting ear-balms from insomniac students and flu-ridden aunts. In the months since, I have decided that the station has been possibly the greatest gift to the nation’s wellbeing since the late Queen had tea with Paddington for her Platinum Jubilee. Last week, to cap it all, R3U launched on DAB digital radio, and something in my life I hadn’t known needed fixing immediately was.

You see, I am surgically attached to my microscopic sunshine-yellow Philips digital radio (other brands are available). When I was ill last year, staying with family in the south, the household had a tiny ancient blue analogue radio that you tuned with a wriggle of the thumb each time you turned it on. It came with me from room to room like a small electronic Hope. For a period of time it was my main entertainment, and I drank from its analogue waves like a parched woman in a desert. Everything on Radio 4 was fair game (including, I admit, The Archers): Inside Science, The Moral Maze, the weekday afternoon radio drama, and of course the regular news with its medley of disasters.

Other favourites quickly formed, a radio raft to carry me along the river. Desert Island Discs was the best reason to be up and in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, and I’d listen to it again the following Friday. I caught an episode of Sideways by Matthew Syed; its curiosity for the magical and the bizarre made me think of anthropology, and so I tuned in for all the rest. The Reith Lectures on violence by the simultaneously gentle and formidable forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead kept me company over breakfast for a month; my family may have raised the odd eyebrow, but, bless them, never questioned whether I really needed to listen to such things when I was ill. I needed to occupy my mind; to think about science and people and ethics and the world we’re in. And, because illness is a lonely place, I needed the human voice close at hand.  

If I couldn’t take Radio 4 – one villain or vexation too far – I turned on Radio 3. When had I last listened to classical music, really listened, without doing something else at the same time? It had been more than twenty years since I’d taken music GCSE, sitting in the music classroom while snatches of strings or piano played, writing down names and impressions. Listening now, to the weekday morning Playlister and Sean Rafferty later on In Tune, reminded me of listening then, to Debussy and Delius and Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Now I listened for quiet hours, morning, noon and night, drifting in and out of rest or reverie. My brain felt oddly and pleasantly exercised after such hours, as if the music had softly tested my mental muscles. I could rest more deeply, take more energy into the next day.

As I got better, and other things became possible again, the radio stayed close by. Talking to friends, it turned out that most people had a radio story to tell, from childhood or adolescence, the car or the airport. One woman who’d spent a year off work with illness a couple of years back had listened to Radio 4 every day, alone in the house, until her husband got home from work. It was the fact that it was live, we agreed. So much of our tastes are fed on-demand; a million podcasts and Spotify playlists await at the press of a button. But when you are wandering life’s most hidden and solitary halls, you don’t want another echo in the darkness. You want to know that someone is really there. You want the sense of all the radio-listening souls, right in the moment with you.

When I was better, my aunt got me a small sunshine-yellow radio for my birthday. These days Broadcasting House rings out on a Sunday in my Edinburgh kitchen. I listen to Paddy O’Connell or Ólafur Arnalds, Georgia Mann or Edith Bowman. As of last week, I can switch to Radio 3 Unwind without first connecting the radio to my phone. The little blue radio sits in the Cotswolds, ready for the next soul journeying along the cavernous halls. What will you listen to, when you are next in need?

Warm wishes for this autumnal weekend,

Kitty