Back in Studio 50E with Gareth

A radio programme and a photo memory, and the usefulness of synchronicity

I listen to the radio. A lot. It has helped..

It’s a hot day in Cambridge, so I headed to a cool dark room

For today’s contribution, I’m talking about how we make radio in a pandemic

I went to the pub.

I came home

Sitting here, just wondering what to talk about

So here we go again… attempting a month of audioblogging.

It’s Bob Dylan’s  birthday, and I wanted to listen to some of his music but my music collection is a mess and I don’t even know where the external CD drive is, so  I headed online and found Love and Theft and went straight to my favourite song from the album, Sugar Baby, which is a song of loss and lack of redemption and sorrow and sadness and just keeping going.

One day you'll open up your eyes and you'll see where we are

Some of those memories /  you can learn to live with / and some of them you can't

It’s Idiot Wind, from an old man

I remember hearing it for the first time and feeling so strongly that it was a song from someone at or near the end.  Every day for months after I expected to hear the news that Dylan had died.

He hasn’t (at the time of writing).  I even saw him play Hyde Park in summer 2019, and today he is eighty and it feels like the whole internet and most of the BBC 6 Music is reflecting on his life in song.

Continue reading

My maternal grandfather Thomas Clubbs, known to me as  Granda, died forty years ago today, at the age of 81. Born in July 1899 he was always just unimaginably old, though I’m now the age he was when I was born in 1960.

I saw him a few weeks before he died.  I was in my second year at university and he was ill, so  sometime in March or April I took the train from Cambridge to Newcastle,   found my way to his nursing home and spent my last time with my last grandparent. 

He was in a nursing home because, after the death of his second wife Beattie, he had been unable to look after himself properly, as a man of a generation that did not cook or do domestic things. When I visited him he had developed severe ulcers and gone blind – I didn’t know at the the time what had caused them, but  I now suspect untreated cellulitis.  I remember sitting with him in the day room, and being shocked that a man I’d always seen as vigorous and energetic was so ill and frail. 

He had lived all his life in Hebburn, on the south bank of the Tyne, but  the nursing home, if my memory is correct, was  off Hadrian Road in Jarrow and is now demolished.  Although that’s based on a forty year old memory of walking from either a bus or a very new Metro station up a side road, and knowing that it was near where my cousin Elsie lives, and visiting Elsie years later  when my mum had moved to Calf Close Lane, south of the A194 that runs beside Hadrian Road… and all this is supposition prompted by clues from high-resolution satellite imagery and a desire for some other kind of resolution.

Continue reading