The battered, dust-filled shoebox with the motley collection of Christmas decorations is once again dragged out of its hideaway above the hot water tank.
The remnants of five decades worth of tarnished tinsel, plastic baubles, one surviving glass bauble, papier maché angels, lights that no longer work. Add to this a 2009 Waitrose Xmas pudding with real cognac, a gift that has yet to be opened, and probably won't be - and you're ready to face the season.
For a decade or two my personal Advent treat was listening to John Peel's Festive 50 countdown. Then Peel died, the 50 was no more, and there was a big gap in that strange collection of repeated experiences that - for me - made Christmas Christmas.
But now that gap has been filled. Yep, I've acquired a new listening habit, the depleted stable of Christmas/New Year traditions has a new, very 21st century member. It's an Advent Calendar, but not the type that offers stale sickly chocolate behind cardboard shutters. It's Daniel Ruiz Tizon's Advent Calendar, a sequence of 24 daily podcasts recalling his past Christmases, and always asking the question: will it ever be possible to love Christmas again as much as we did in those distant times?
These bundles of memories, deeply autobiographical and rooted in a certain area of south London, but also deeply resonant for anyone who has grown up in the UK over the past few decades. Each 12 minute episode arrives like a little gift-wrapped memory bomb. I'm a lot older than Daniel but the references to life in the 80s and 90s are as powerful as any Proustian madeleine.
"When you live in Lambeth, you learn not to pick up the snow". Well, that was true in almost any urban area where dogs roamed the parks and pavements.
If you like your wine extra dry, your lemon very bitter, and your oil extra-virgin, this is the advent calendar for you. Catch it today: we're not even half way there yet. Listen, and like me get hooked. But don't cheat - one day at a time please. As with the chocolate variety, there was always one lirttle piggy who scoffed the whole lot on December 1, and suffered as a result.
Literature has Dickens' A Christmas Carol; TV has The Snowman. Now podcasting has its own Christmas classic. Listen!
Spinning happily at thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, not wanting to stop
Showing posts with label John Peel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Peel. Show all posts
Friday, 9 December 2016
Thursday, 6 March 2014
(Almost) mown down on Landor Road
Cycling home from a strange round trip involving the Barnardo's charity shop in Brixton, the Phtotogrpahers' Gallery off Oxford Street, and then the 99p Shop in brixton - I took the shortcut around the back of the JobCentre, onto Stockwell Road, past the skatepark and the bike shop, then swerve left into what must once have been Stockwell's village green and into Landor Road.
Then a sort of whirlwind hit me, almost sending me over the handlebars. It was followed by a high-pitched howl and the sight of a large black car vitally flying up the street, crashing on brakes, then accelerating away again like a formula 1 racer.
A black kid on one of those little bmx-style bikes almost got hit by this vehicle, but he swerved in time and carried on regardless. I was shaking.
You wonder what. There must have been three to four hundred horsepower under the bonnet of that bastard car.
Where were they going, where had they been? Was it a getaway car from a murder scene? Or just some blunt-nosed podgy yuppie trying to impress someone?
Most days I see these scenes, and these days the image that often floats to the surface is that of Putin, the barrel-chested bully-boy on his hunting steed.
And then the arseholes of the BNP who can still wield enough threat and fear to force Legoland - of all people - to cancel a private event for a Muslim group.
What the hell is going on, in 2014, 100 years after nationalism's worst hour?
Amnd how do I link a souped-up Merc in Brixton with right-wing thugs in England and the president of the Russian Federation?
Dunno. It all seems to have a lot to do with machismo, male swaggering. What a dear friend once called "big swinging dick" syndrome.
Perhaps alongside the 5-a-day campaign, the NHS should introduce a new "dick reduction" programme to temper this rampant and unpleasant outbreak of testosterone-stenching masculinity.
Anyway, to cut to a happy ending, after an unhappy middle-phase looking at macho photos by WIlliam S Burroughs etc, I found a copy of John Peel's Olivetti Chronicles at the Barnados Shop for £2. Now, there was a real man….
Then a sort of whirlwind hit me, almost sending me over the handlebars. It was followed by a high-pitched howl and the sight of a large black car vitally flying up the street, crashing on brakes, then accelerating away again like a formula 1 racer.
A black kid on one of those little bmx-style bikes almost got hit by this vehicle, but he swerved in time and carried on regardless. I was shaking.
You wonder what. There must have been three to four hundred horsepower under the bonnet of that bastard car.
Where were they going, where had they been? Was it a getaway car from a murder scene? Or just some blunt-nosed podgy yuppie trying to impress someone?
Most days I see these scenes, and these days the image that often floats to the surface is that of Putin, the barrel-chested bully-boy on his hunting steed.
And then the arseholes of the BNP who can still wield enough threat and fear to force Legoland - of all people - to cancel a private event for a Muslim group.
What the hell is going on, in 2014, 100 years after nationalism's worst hour?
Amnd how do I link a souped-up Merc in Brixton with right-wing thugs in England and the president of the Russian Federation?
Dunno. It all seems to have a lot to do with machismo, male swaggering. What a dear friend once called "big swinging dick" syndrome.
Perhaps alongside the 5-a-day campaign, the NHS should introduce a new "dick reduction" programme to temper this rampant and unpleasant outbreak of testosterone-stenching masculinity.
Anyway, to cut to a happy ending, after an unhappy middle-phase looking at macho photos by WIlliam S Burroughs etc, I found a copy of John Peel's Olivetti Chronicles at the Barnados Shop for £2. Now, there was a real man….
Thursday, 2 January 2014
An Ambridge too far: will Radio 4 be the death of me?
I suffer from what I believe is quite a rare long-term ailment.
I am addicted to BBC Radio 4, but I am allergic to its most popular show, The Archers.
The addiction goes back to the early 1970s, when, as a trainee house-painter with a Grundig transistor radio, I became hooked on the afternoon classic serial. That summer, it was War and Peace in 13 one-hour instalments.
Even now I feel distinctly unready to face the day without at least half an hour os so of the Today programme. Best of all are the wonderfully eclectic current affairs programmes such as From Our Own Correspondent, which can range from the quality of espresso in central Roman cafés to attempts to abolish female genital mutilation in Sudan within the 45-minute span of one programme.
Nearly all the book adaptations are worth a listen - Book of the Week etc. it is such a good way of keeping up with new publications. I find the news programmes increasingly annoying and rtepeptive yet I still listen. Woman's Hour is a love-hate thing for me, all those splendid Oxbridge feminists and their very right-on guests, the earnest yet "ballsy" jazz chanteuses. It's a wonderful programme, including the cookery and the obligatory items on penis size, etc.
And then, twice a day, comes that dread sound - the most annoying theme music ever written. The Archer's tune must be solely responsible for the famous British glom. ANy nation exposed to that hideously jolly little shanty four times a day (at the beginning and end of each 15-minute episode and its repeat) for nearly three quarters of a century would be bound to be packed with seething depressives.
But if you really want to kill us all dead, play the Sunday Omnibus version, the bucolic accordion is even jollier and bouncier and would have me leaping off Beachy Head if it was within skipping distance.
The actual programme with its cast of ghastly well-off upper-middle home counties farming types and the chirpy, stinking stereotypes of every other socioeconomic group - well, that just makes one vomit, it is not truly dangerous.
SO, Radio 4, you're a heady drug all right. I got hooked when you were in a purer form, when you had true genius of the likes of the sadly missed, tragically late Ray Gosling, when it was Ned Sherrin doing Stop The Week, Robert Robinson on the quiz shows, and well before the rot set-in with poor John Peel (who i loved on Radio London) droning on Saturday morning live.
And yet I'm still hooked.
I am addicted to BBC Radio 4, but I am allergic to its most popular show, The Archers.
The addiction goes back to the early 1970s, when, as a trainee house-painter with a Grundig transistor radio, I became hooked on the afternoon classic serial. That summer, it was War and Peace in 13 one-hour instalments.
Even now I feel distinctly unready to face the day without at least half an hour os so of the Today programme. Best of all are the wonderfully eclectic current affairs programmes such as From Our Own Correspondent, which can range from the quality of espresso in central Roman cafés to attempts to abolish female genital mutilation in Sudan within the 45-minute span of one programme.
Nearly all the book adaptations are worth a listen - Book of the Week etc. it is such a good way of keeping up with new publications. I find the news programmes increasingly annoying and rtepeptive yet I still listen. Woman's Hour is a love-hate thing for me, all those splendid Oxbridge feminists and their very right-on guests, the earnest yet "ballsy" jazz chanteuses. It's a wonderful programme, including the cookery and the obligatory items on penis size, etc.
And then, twice a day, comes that dread sound - the most annoying theme music ever written. The Archer's tune must be solely responsible for the famous British glom. ANy nation exposed to that hideously jolly little shanty four times a day (at the beginning and end of each 15-minute episode and its repeat) for nearly three quarters of a century would be bound to be packed with seething depressives.
But if you really want to kill us all dead, play the Sunday Omnibus version, the bucolic accordion is even jollier and bouncier and would have me leaping off Beachy Head if it was within skipping distance.
The actual programme with its cast of ghastly well-off upper-middle home counties farming types and the chirpy, stinking stereotypes of every other socioeconomic group - well, that just makes one vomit, it is not truly dangerous.
SO, Radio 4, you're a heady drug all right. I got hooked when you were in a purer form, when you had true genius of the likes of the sadly missed, tragically late Ray Gosling, when it was Ned Sherrin doing Stop The Week, Robert Robinson on the quiz shows, and well before the rot set-in with poor John Peel (who i loved on Radio London) droning on Saturday morning live.
And yet I'm still hooked.
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