gwen raverat by katharine eastman

luddite ambient

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When I wake in the middle of the night I listen to Darren Adam on LBC though I find his constipated efforts to speak in perfect sentences a bit weird. At 4am I might stick with Steve Allen, though a little goes a long way, and I'll usually go over to Times Radio to hear their podcast and then a rehash of something from the previous day's Matt Chorley show, and at 5am I'll be with Calum Macdonald and probably stick with him till 6am, and stay with Times Radio for the first bit of their proper news show, and sometime into it I'll switch to Talkradio and Julia Hartley-Brewer -

and possibly at 7am I'll go over to Nick Ferrari at LBC but mostly I stay with Julia, and I definitely can't bear James O'Brien on LBC, so it'll be Mike Graham or possibly Matt C, then at 1pm it'll almost certainly be Sheilagh Fogarty cos I can't bear Ian Collins, then at 4 it really is a toss-up between Eddie Mair on LBC (trying to sound balanced but reassuringly chippy) or Jeremy Kyle on Talkradio (unashamedly chippy and much better than expected) or John Pienaar on Times Radio (dull but sane), and I suppose at 7 it has to be Ian Dale on LBC even though he is nearly as insufferably smug as James O'Brien -

and usually at 10pm I'm asleep but if not then Tom Swarbrick on LBC or possibly James Whale on Talkradio blah blah blah but what this is all about is that I get news all of my waking hours and I get no music - and if you add all the "free" newspapers I get (and actually read) then I must be the world's expert on current affairs - and wonderfully this has all built up inside me to a point where I can't take any more and so today in British Heart Foundation I bought a load of good-looking novels and from now on I shall listen only to music and read only fiction.

I've had phases of music/fiction before in my life, they account for the minority of my adult years - but I seem to remember that they've also been the happiest. I just don't care any more. I'm just not worried any more - though to be fair, I was never that worried anyway - and no that's not phoney bravado - it's just being too old to think that anything is new in the world and too stupid to think of all the horrifying possibilities. It's great that there are others out there doing my worrying for me.

I've just had a brief lunch with friend who is a nurse and we got talking about the inevitables and it turned out that I knew more about Boris's new rules and who she should be jabbing than she did - she got her phone out to see which of us was talking bollocks - and discovered that she was. And I tell you this not to boast or as a bit of oneupmanship - because it didn't get me worried that here's an intelligent nurse who doesn't know about the new rules - what worried me about the lunch was that here's a non-nurse (yes, me) who knows too much about other people's job and business etc. Why the fuck was I trying to know it all ? From now on, for me, it'll be the bliss of ignorance - something I know is seriously underrated

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recorded today, photo on the walk from Southampton to Salisbury weekend before last