Judith Johnson
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BBC Radio - Constant Companion

30/9/2014

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PictureDad recording Time To Laugh, BBC Radio, 1939
If televisions stopped working and we had to go back to only seeing films at the cinema, I wouldn’t get too aerated about it (I don’t watch films or TV programmes on computer screens), but I would be lost without BBC Radio.  It has been a constant companion throughout my life, and I don’t begrudge the BBC a single penny of my licence fee - it’s worth it!

I’ve stopped buying the Radio Times, as the happy half hour or so ticking everything in the radio listings I fancied listening to just became too frustrating, as there is never enough time to listen to all the good stuff that’s broadcasted weekly - an embarrassment of riches if ever there was one!

My alarm clock is set to Radio 3, and on Sunday morning I leapt up from bed to increase the volume on Gavin Bryars’ marvellous Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me. I first heard this a few years back when I was ironing on a Sunday evening and my son was doing some homework. We looked at each other after a few minutes and said “What is this?”, as the theme endlessly looped, going on for over 25 minutes (the original goes on for 74 minutes). But we were captivated, and still share a love of it. Bryars based the piece on a recording he made of an old tramp, living rough, who sang the hymn for him.

Another long-time Sunday evening ironing-time favourite which featured in Tom’s childhood was Alan Keith’s 100 Best Tunes. Tom would listen from his bedroom upstairs to "that man with the nice voice". Alan Keith carried on until he retired, at 94 years old, and died a couple of weeks after that. I have just discovered, to my amazement, thanks to the internet, that he was the brother of David Kossoff, one of my own childhood favourites. You learn something every day!

One of the things I love about BBC Radio 2 is the way that many presenters carry on into old age, their output still pleasing their listeners - currently including Desmond Carrington’s groovy Friday night The Music Goes Round and Brian Matthews’ Sounds of the Sixties. When I was heavily pregnant in the early 1980s and suffering sleepless nights on the sofa (not wanting to interrupt my husband’s beauty sleep with my endless trips to the loo!) it was the friendly comforting voice of Radio 2 that helped me through, reassuring me I was not alone in the night with the unknown prospect of labour looming.

There’s not enough room here to go into all the glories of Radio 3 and 4, but I particularly value all the documentary content, eg the wonderful From Our Own Correspondent, and am really looking forward to Neil MacGregor’s new series Germany: Memories of a Nation. It’s typical of the kind of programming that American friends envy, and which we should never take for granted. The only station I have never been a fan of is Radio 1, which launched on this day in 1967. Even then I found it too much of a vexation to the spirit, and they didn’t play the kind of cool hippy tunes (think Incredible String Band) we favoured at Hayter Towers!

Harold Nicolson, the husband of Vita Sackville-West, once said that "one of the minor pleasures of life is to be slightly ill". I would add "and to lie in bed all day with cups of tea listening to Radio 4"! 


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Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

15/9/2014

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The changing of the seasons is one of life’s many quiet joys. I love the signs of autumn: spiders spinning webs in the hedges, blue-black scarab beetles on Southborough Common, skeins of wild geese flying high, toadstools in the forest.

My primary school was a converted oast-house in Rolvenden, where John Wesley had once preached under a nearby oak. In September, the beams were always hung with hops, and at home there were apples drying in the attic. I loved the harvest hymns, and often whistle “We plough the fields and scatter” now as I walk along the lanes through Bough Beech’s fields and woods.

I treasure my copy of Ladybird Books’ What to Look for in Autumn, published in 1960. The page pictured here shows women picking up potatoes in the field. When we lived in the Sussex village of Robertsbridge, I met a lovely old lady in her nineties, who had farmed there since 1947. She recalled that when she and her husband first moved there, they employed almost everyone in our lane of about thirty houses to pick the potato crop. By the 1990s, none of the residents worked on the land.

Some things change, and some things stay the same, thank goodness. There are still hops, apples, blackberries and conkers to be found in the hedgerows of the High Weald.

Another perennial pleasure is the annual scarecrow competition in Speldhurst. I drive through the village on my way to work, so it’s always fun, in the first week of September, to come upon this year’s entries. I don’t know which one won the prize at the Village Flower Show last weekend, but Bertie Bassett, sitting on the bench by St Mary’s Church lych-gate, was probably my personal favourite, made with great attention to detail from biscuit tins. Fantastic!


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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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