Thursday 29 November 2012

Radio column: Learning to let go

"This is my life, I can't just throw it away," said an elderly woman in Radio 3's Between the Ears, the panic rising in her voice. She was in process of moving into sheltered housing, and the prospect of reducing her worldly goods was making her ill. She had, she explained, just spent three days in hospital.
It's just stuff, of course, this clutter that spills from our shelves and our cupboards and piles up on furniture and the floor. The day will come to us all when everything we have amassed in the course of our existence will be loaded into a skip, crushed to the size of a shoebox and become worm food in a landfill. I sincerely hope, when that day comes, to be worm food myself.

Thursday 15 November 2012

Radio column: Where's the party?

In another universe, this would have been the mother of all office parties. Senior editors would have been caught on smart-phones dancing Gangnam style on their desks, a bottle of bubbly in one hand and a hunk of birthday cake in the other. Arses would have been hoisted on to photocopiers, with the choicest images used to add a layer of soundproofing to the Loose Ends studio. 
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Thursday 8 November 2012

Radio column: Is classical music for everyone?

Is classical music really for everyone? This was the question posed by the writer and presenter Tom Service, chair of a live debate at the Sage in Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival, to which the answer is: if only. 
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