Monocle's editor provided a marvellous insight into Country Life and Fi Glover's interview with women who have left their children was heartbreaking
*The Stack* (Monocle Radio)
*Inside the Mind of a Hypomanic – A Bipolar Journey Through Sound** *(soundcloud.com)
*The Shared Experience* (Radio 4) | iPlayer
*The Sound of Music* (bernieworld.info)
New Year, new attitudes, new habits, new resoluti… sssh. New stuff. Let's branch out, shall we? Move away from the cosy enclaves of Radios 4 and 5 and take a look around. Nothing too outré, nothing to scare the hamster. Something clever and considered and quietly spoken…
I must admit that I wasn't aware that snooty lifestyle magazine Monocle had an entire selection of radio shows as part of its "portfolio", but there you are, it has. A great variety of programmes, actually, including ones on design, entrepreneurship, music. I chose *The Stack*, which is about media and is hosted by Monocle creator and editor-in-chief, Tyler Brûlé. Checking on the opposition? Perhaps – or maybe working out where print media, especially glossy, aspirational, what-IS-that-and-when-would-you-use-it? magazines, will be in the future.
This week's show was a round-up of last year's best stories. Good: no time to get bored, and there were some nice facts in each extract. My favourite was the piece about Country Life, which, we discovered, has the richest readership in the UK, apart from the Economist. And it comes out every week, one of the few glossies to do so. Also: the Queen bought Prince Philip's Christmas present from the back pages of Country Life – can I really have heard that right? What did she get him? A new Barbour? A new joke book? A real-fur Furby?
Like Monocle itself, The Stack* *is international, contemporary, clever, but ever so slightly dry. I'm not fond of people laughing at their own jokes, but it might be nice to include some wit, to see if anyone involved makes a sudden barking noise, in shock.
An email trail led me to Robin Blamires, a young producer, and his short audio piece *Inside the Mind of a Hypomanic**,* which illustrated, in words and sound, what having a hypomanic episode is like. A lovely piece that suffered a teeny-tiny bit from us not knowing who Robin is – we needed to care slightly more before joining him on his rocket to the mental moon – but this was funny, surprising, inventive audio. Someone snap that man up and give him a job.
Aaaaaand, we're back to the BBC, to listen to a show that I've somehow managed to miss up until now: *The Shared Experience* with Fi Glover. This week – the final part of a four-part series – was about mothers who leave their children. Heartbreaking stuff, told straight and true. Four women, who didn't know each other previously, sat together with Glover and told their stories. Stories that, like every tragic tale, were so close to your own that they made you shiver, so far from your own that you couldn't believe your luck. The moral seemed to be: if you want to keep in touch with your children, don't move out of the house. "Had I seen what would happen," said one woman, in her light, well-spoken tones, "I would never have left. The price is too high." What an awful lesson to have to learn, that it's better to stay in a dead-end relationship, lonely and appalling as it is, than it is to leave – because if you do, you lose your kids.
That last, of course, applies to both fathers and mothers. But the fact remains that, if you're a mother who doesn't live with her kids, people make what one speaker called "horses' eyes" at you – meaning, they shy away. We judge, in a way that we don't when a father says the same thing. "You feel you have to explain to people," said one. "It's exhausted me, just standing my own corner." Another explained that, in a divorce, you're told by solicitors to be conciliatory to your ex-partner; but that in real life if one party is more adversarial than the other – "if they change the locks, chuck the man out, get the solicitor… if they dig their heels in about the children"– then they win.
Oh dear. Time for something cheering. Try Bernie Connor's monthly music podcast, *The Sound of Music*, why don'cha? Not too much chat, lots of proper tunes, Connor's consistency and gleeful delight in music is his selling point. His last, Christmassy offering, opens with Oh Come All Ye Faithful bashed out on cash machines and segues into warming Lou Rawls soul. Lovely new-old stuff. Oh, you want a resolution? Keep on keeping on. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
*The Stack* (Monocle Radio)
*Inside the Mind of a Hypomanic – A Bipolar Journey Through Sound** *(soundcloud.com)
*The Shared Experience* (Radio 4) | iPlayer
*The Sound of Music* (bernieworld.info)
New Year, new attitudes, new habits, new resoluti… sssh. New stuff. Let's branch out, shall we? Move away from the cosy enclaves of Radios 4 and 5 and take a look around. Nothing too outré, nothing to scare the hamster. Something clever and considered and quietly spoken…
I must admit that I wasn't aware that snooty lifestyle magazine Monocle had an entire selection of radio shows as part of its "portfolio", but there you are, it has. A great variety of programmes, actually, including ones on design, entrepreneurship, music. I chose *The Stack*, which is about media and is hosted by Monocle creator and editor-in-chief, Tyler Brûlé. Checking on the opposition? Perhaps – or maybe working out where print media, especially glossy, aspirational, what-IS-that-and-when-would-you-use-it? magazines, will be in the future.
This week's show was a round-up of last year's best stories. Good: no time to get bored, and there were some nice facts in each extract. My favourite was the piece about Country Life, which, we discovered, has the richest readership in the UK, apart from the Economist. And it comes out every week, one of the few glossies to do so. Also: the Queen bought Prince Philip's Christmas present from the back pages of Country Life – can I really have heard that right? What did she get him? A new Barbour? A new joke book? A real-fur Furby?
Like Monocle itself, The Stack* *is international, contemporary, clever, but ever so slightly dry. I'm not fond of people laughing at their own jokes, but it might be nice to include some wit, to see if anyone involved makes a sudden barking noise, in shock.
An email trail led me to Robin Blamires, a young producer, and his short audio piece *Inside the Mind of a Hypomanic**,* which illustrated, in words and sound, what having a hypomanic episode is like. A lovely piece that suffered a teeny-tiny bit from us not knowing who Robin is – we needed to care slightly more before joining him on his rocket to the mental moon – but this was funny, surprising, inventive audio. Someone snap that man up and give him a job.
Aaaaaand, we're back to the BBC, to listen to a show that I've somehow managed to miss up until now: *The Shared Experience* with Fi Glover. This week – the final part of a four-part series – was about mothers who leave their children. Heartbreaking stuff, told straight and true. Four women, who didn't know each other previously, sat together with Glover and told their stories. Stories that, like every tragic tale, were so close to your own that they made you shiver, so far from your own that you couldn't believe your luck. The moral seemed to be: if you want to keep in touch with your children, don't move out of the house. "Had I seen what would happen," said one woman, in her light, well-spoken tones, "I would never have left. The price is too high." What an awful lesson to have to learn, that it's better to stay in a dead-end relationship, lonely and appalling as it is, than it is to leave – because if you do, you lose your kids.
That last, of course, applies to both fathers and mothers. But the fact remains that, if you're a mother who doesn't live with her kids, people make what one speaker called "horses' eyes" at you – meaning, they shy away. We judge, in a way that we don't when a father says the same thing. "You feel you have to explain to people," said one. "It's exhausted me, just standing my own corner." Another explained that, in a divorce, you're told by solicitors to be conciliatory to your ex-partner; but that in real life if one party is more adversarial than the other – "if they change the locks, chuck the man out, get the solicitor… if they dig their heels in about the children"– then they win.
Oh dear. Time for something cheering. Try Bernie Connor's monthly music podcast, *The Sound of Music*, why don'cha? Not too much chat, lots of proper tunes, Connor's consistency and gleeful delight in music is his selling point. His last, Christmassy offering, opens with Oh Come All Ye Faithful bashed out on cash machines and segues into warming Lou Rawls soul. Lovely new-old stuff. Oh, you want a resolution? Keep on keeping on. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.