radio

The Fairy Fella’s Master-Stroke

This week, on a couple of occasions, I found myself locked in a bathroom, crying like a girl who had just seen her favourite dolly viciously decapitated by the razor-sharp jaws of the family dog. I make no apologies for that, just as I make none for the fact that I shall again be talking a little about myself in this post (it is after all, the subject I know best). What prompted these highly-emotional sabbaticals to the nearest toilet was the fact that, on Thursday, it had been twenty years since Freddie Mercury, one of my all-time heroes, had been lost to AIDS. So, in honour of this anniversary, and its patron, this week’s post will have a bit of everything; some ranting, some religion, a little bit of love and joy, obviously some music, drama, and celebration of life, and perhaps a tiny hint of self-analysis. Oh, and I’m afraid to say there’ll be a bit of Ben Elton as well … sorry. Read more “The Fairy Fella’s Master-Stroke”

Radio 4 Radicals

One of the bizarre things I’ve discovered about getting older, at least for me, is not that I find myself worrying about nature’s great, big, ticking, death-shaped clock of impending mortality cessation; nor is it that I’m concerned with checking off the list of things one is supposed to be in possession of at this point (wife, kids, mortgage, dog, massive sense of futile despair at one’s interminable existence etc.) – it’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’ve sort of always been this “age”, as if my personality were a suit that was at least 14 sizes too large and was just waiting for me to grow in to it. The suit might have had one or two minor alterations over the years, nothing drastic, but it otherwise remains pretty much exactly the same as when I first got it. As your tastes, opinions, and beliefs begin to coalesce in your twenties and thirties, you develop a far clearer understanding of who you are, what kind of suit you’re wearing, and what radio station you should be listening to. Read more “Radio 4 Radicals”