Radio

The pictures are better on the radio. That was the first sentence of a blog I wrote back in November 2021 on the topic of ‘Listening’ and that article more or less covers all that I would want to say on the subject of my preferring radio over television. Here is the link: https://deadgoodpoets.blogspot.com/2021/11/listening.html

But how did it all start? I’m going to stick to the UK as otherwise this article would be as long as the marvellous book ‘The BBC. A People’s History’ by David Hendy. There are other books and articles on this subject and it has been fascinating to read the various ways writers have approached the birth of broadcasting in this country. Most of the following information comes from that book.

However, I should mention that, as far as I can find out, the first voice and music signals heard over radio waves were transmitted in December 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts when Canadian experimenter Reginald Fessenden (below) produced about an hour of talk and music for technical observers and any radio amateurs who might be listening.

One of the world’s first scheduled radio broadcast services (known as PCGG) began in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on November 6, 1919. Other early Dutch stations were operated by the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (to send information to new members) and by a news agency that was seeking a new way to serve newspaper subscribers. Another early station appeared in Montreal transmitting experimentally in September 1919 and on a regular schedule the next year.

Here in the UK radio broadcasting began with hobbyists who even before the First World War had been assembling cables, switches and valves in their sheds or spare rooms to listen to the thousands of messages already on the airwaves. They were called ‘listeners-in’ and many formed wireless clubs. These messages were from such places as the Marconi training schools for ship’s wireless operators.

Towards the end of 1919 a few people began to think that there may be a market for something other than time signals etc so the Marconi’s ‘Publicity and Demonstration Department’ opened a transmitter in Chelmsford and over the course of two days it radiated two daily half hour programmes including ‘news and vocal and instrumental selections’. Reports came flooding back as they were heard thousands of miles away on ships as well as by around four hundred of the ‘listeners in’ here at home.

This caught the attention of the Press and by December 1921 sixty three wireless clubs had petitioned for a new service of speech and even music. I’m going to cut most of what happened over the next year but suffice it say that so many wireless stations had sprung up that it was recognised that due to interference and overlapping of signals something had to be done. I should mention the first advertised live public broadcast, which took place on 15th June 1920 when the famous Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba sang into Chelmsford's microphone.

What was done was that on Wednesday, October 1922, a consortium was formed to be licensed by the GPO and open not just to the six largest firms who provided the initial capital of £100,000 but to each and every radio manufacturer in the country willing to pay £1 for an ordinary share. Operational costs would be met from half of the 10 shilling licence fee that the GPO levied on all owners of domestic receivers plus a small royalty on all owners of domestic receivers. The resultant company was called the British Broadcasting Company.

At 6pm on Tuesday the 14th of November the BBC came onto the airwaves for the very first time. What an exciting time that must have been. Arthur Burrows announced ‘Hello, hello, 2LO calling. 2 LO calling. This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2 LO. Stand by for one minute, please.’ And he then read a short news bulletin and a weather forecast.

Within a couple of years the BBC covered the whole country through its local stations such as Birmingham and Manchester and people couldn’t imagine a time without radio. A historic moment.

Preston fm

For a live broadcast
be on time,
be prepared,
don’t upset the manager,
studio two,
turn down the light,
check the levels,
get the nod,
you’re on your own
and you’re on.

Sixty minutes
where what you are
is what they want,
happy in the dark,
watching needles
flick silently
to the sound of a voice,

my voice
across the table,
children playing,
part of the family.
I’m another mate
in a student flat.
I’m hitching a lift
in a neighbour’s car,

filling the space,
what more do I need,
my black box is a city,
I’m touching people
103.2 million times a second.
It’s enough.
No one, anyone,
can cope with more than that.

First published in Purple Patch in 2008

Terry Q

Read More

Struggle

Epimetheus and Pandora

“The name Epimetheus comes from the Greek god (or titan) Epimetheus (or hindsight) who was the brother of Prometheus (foresight). Together, they represented humanity.”

I read The Iliad and The Odyssey a long time ago but I would struggle to remember much Greek mythology now. Maybe worth a re-read, just to master the challenging names, even though I found lots of it scary.  Stephen Fry’s Mythos is on the shelf, looking more appealing. I’ll see. There is a reason for this.

I’m a reading volunteer at the local primary school. Actually, I’m not doing the reading, I’m listening, encouraging, praising and offering help where needed to Year 4 children, which is the 8 to 9 age group. I’m learning a lot. They don’t mind telling me what they think of reading. It’s a love or hate thing. I do my best to promote a positive love of books, stories developed by imagination and the joy of disappearing into the world created by a good author. It is lovely to meet a child who reads for pleasure. There are some struggles for me to overcome.

“I read in my head, Miss,” says the child with an open book half under the table.

“I’m sure you do, and that’s excellent, but you need to read aloud to me just for a couple of minutes while I check your progress. Pop it up on the table so I can see the words.”

Seeing the words would be good. The better the reader, the smaller the print, it seems. My glasses are the correct prescription but I struggle to see some pages and it’s hard to follow the text with a child who has a tiny voice. Then there was the stumbling over an unfamiliar name.

“Epi, Epi, Epim,” a pleading look for help. We sound it out together.

“Epimetheus. Well done!” I hoped I’d confirmed the correct pronunciation. The story was an age appropriate  Pandora’s Box. Other children also had Greek mythology stories. I’d better brush up before next time. Personally, I prefer the Amelia Fang stories by Laura Ellen Anderson.

One of my favourite poets, although he’s so much more, including writer, broadcaster and until recently, Chancellor of the University of Manchester, is Lemn Sissay, OBE, FRSL. Reading his autobiography was heart-breaking, tears on every page, a childhood full of struggle and adversity with situations which made me furious. I am in awe of him, the life he has made for himself and everything he does for the benefit of others. Out of many, I chose this poem,

 Let There Be Peace

By Lemn Sissay

 

Let there be peace
So frowns fly away like albatross
And skeletons foxtrot from cupboards,
So war correspondants become travel show presenters
And magpies bring back lost property,
Children, engagement rings, broken things.

Let there be peace
So storms can go out to sea to be
Angry and return to me calm,
So the broken can rise up and dance in the hospitals.
Let the aged Ethiopian man in the grey block of flats
Peer through his window and see Addis before him,
So his thrilled outstretched arms become frames
For his dreams.

Let there be peace
Let tears evaporate to form clouds, cleanse themselves
And fall into reservoirs of drinking water.
Let harsh memories burst into fireworks that melt
In the dark pupils of a child’s eyes
And disappear like shoals of silver darting fish,
And let the waves reach the shore with a
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Listening Skin

I found myself with two perfectly familiar strangers in the attic room of a three-storey house somewhere in the North West of England. Candles were lit ahead of our arrival, trailing wisps of burning incense wrinkled and fogged the snug room, the musk of patchouli and sandalwood licked our nostrils, and crammed into every available alcove or set upon petite side-tables were crystals of every colour and family, playing sidekick to proudly displayed statuettes of the Buddha, of Shiva the Destroyer, odes to the Divine Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Warmed and bathed in the firelight of a chimney stove, bejewelled and exotic seat cushions were laid in a circle on the floor. In the centre of these cushions, drums, cymbals and singing bowls were arranged for us as though they were instruments of war, and we were the warriors steadily piling into the room to take up our weapons of choice before entering into battle. And though we would not leave the room again for a while, it was true that we were preparing for a foray of sorts, an advance towards an undisclosed and as yet unconquered territory.

This was the rendezvous point of our shadow circle, where we would meet to continue our shamanic drumming practice; the practice of chanting, drumming and creating music together in order to release unnecessary weight and trapped emotions, to free ourselves from the burden of mental constructs and the strangleholds of egos, and if we were lucky, possibly even slip into trance-like states, where we might catch a glimpse at another face of reality, a face rarely looked upon, the counterpart to our known domains: our respective shadow dimensions.

Jameson, one of the two strangers, and a lifelong drummer who now wore hearing aids, sat down on a cushion and prepared himself for that evening’s circle. Jameson held a gibbon-stare and possessed a pair of pointy ears. He focused intently on nothing, humming a strange tune as he ran his fingers across the head of his drum, a single-headed hand drum, whom he referred to as Gruff.

He said he had named all of his drums. This one was called Gruff because the head was made of goatskin. Gruff was one of his first drums, and he spoke of it only in the present-tense and only in affectionate terms, like anyone would of one of their oldest living friends. The fact that this friend wasn’t a living one at all but an inanimate object wearing the dead skin of a goat that had long since passed out of existence didn’t seem to trouble him.

‘Skin never dies.’ Jameson barely blinked as he spoke, nor did he break eye contact. ‘It never loses its ability to absorb and respond to sound. Don’t be too hasty to label the drum as some mere lifeless thing. Gruff responds to any touch I lay upon him. Simply listen, and you’ll hear how alive he is.’

Jameson insisted that any self-respecting drum owner ought to purchase animal-skin drums exclusively as a matter of principle, they’d be robbing themselves otherwise. Manmade artificial skins were devoid of a special quality, poor substitutes for the real thing, pale imitations that fell short of delivering anything close to the sound that lived-in skin could provide.

‘Have you ever listened to a song and had it place your hairs on end?’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘That’s your skin, listening and responding. The French call it frisson. The largest organ you own is reacting to soundwaves. Tingling with the vibrations of waves breaking upon it and entering it. And this organ completely envelopes you, from top to bottom, stretched tightly over your entire body, exactly like that of a drum.’

‘There is intercourse between my skin and the drum’s skin. A communion of sorts. We are two musical objects having a conversation with one another, creating and transferring energy.’

He wiggled his ears, pursing and flexing the pointed tips of them. They reminded me of satellite dishes swivelling to catch out wandering transmissions.

‘Don’t be fooled in thinking we hear through our ears alone.’ He said. ‘Sure, when I strike the drum, the sound of the initial impact travels through the ears, but the resonance of that sound carries throughout the body. Our bodies are magnificent resonance chambers, they don’t get the credit they deserve – they are the greatest devices of listening we own.’

‘We think of sound as something we hear, but in terms of physics, sound is just vibration travelling through matter. The ability of sound to affect matter cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes to our own physiologies and psychologies.’

‘Music has the power to play acupuncture with our emotions, sudden and loud sounds demand our attention, activating our animal instincts irrespective of our consent, rushing floods of hormones are released in mothers the instant they hear the pitch of their babies’ cries, the shock waves of bombs can level whole buildings, and it is a well-accepted fact of reality that a single sound carries different meanings between individuals based on their own lived experience. We inhabit environments housed in an ocean of relentless sound, and we are forever moulded by them, whether we are conscious of that or not.’

Jameson plucked out one of his hearing aids and presented it in his hand.

‘The hearing aid helps those of us who are so-called hard of hearing by amplifying the world of sound that can be detected by the human ear. But the world of sound heard by the human being is an incomplete picture of the total universe of sound that exists.’

Jameson went on to explain that we human beings had an upper and lower limit to the range of frequencies we could hear. Any soundwave outside of these limits would fail to register an audible impression whatsoever.

‘Take the dog whistle. A dog hears when it is blown where we cannot. To some extent, you could say we were all deaf.’ He argued. ‘At least, that’s the case when you pass the boundaries of our known parameters. But I assure you, we might be deaf to certain zones of this world, hard-of-hearing to the total universe of sound, but we are still its recipients, daily bombarded by it, and our bodies are always listening.’*

‘But we already know this of course.’ It was at this moment that Hare, the other member of the circle, jumped in. ‘We’ve been acting as our own barometers since birth.’

Hare was a shamanic teacher, and the owner of the attic we occupied, a bespectacled woman whose hair was a beehive of endless possibilities.

‘You can feel it when you enter a room, the energy that resides there.’ She elaborated. ‘You can detect it in your insides, or as a certain air pressure, whether heavy or light, whether you can cut the tension with a knife, it’s as though you can sense the very shifting of molecules, know intuitively whether they are tightly compacted or free to roam – sometimes, there is no logical reason that some spaces feel oppressive whilst others feel liberating, but our bodies never lie.’

‘Energies fluctuate on a spectrum according to the experience as it unfolds. Both people and places are great storehouses of energy. You are magnetised to some, repelled by others. Some are more settled and consistent, whilst others are scattered, erratic and fraught between two conflicting energies at once.’

Hare leant forward and whispered, almost conspiratorially. ‘It is surmised that railway stations fall into states of disrepair so rapidly because they are constantly in a tug of war between intensely polarised fields of energy. Caught between joy and sorrow. After all, a train station must play host to joyous homecomings and hard goodbyes, partings and reunions.’

‘There is much more to reality than meets the eye or reaches the ear.’ Jameson returned, a wide smile creasing his face. ‘That’s why when I conversate with my drum, I am aware that I am committing an alchemical act, the moving parts of which might not be perceptible to me or even logically understood, but I’m safe in the knowledge that I’m working with the universe to manipulate energy to my benefit. Perhaps there are limits to what my ears will pick up, but regardless, the sound I conjure becomes my medicine. You see, hard-of-hearing does not have to equate to hard of listening.’

Jameson tucked his hearing aid back behind his ear and winked at me.

‘The problem this world has faced is that it has been so hard-of-listening as of late.’ Hare spoke, sat with her legs crossed and her eyes closed. ‘People have a habit of clinging religiously to the parameters of their known worlds, they live according to their explored boundaries and mistake their contracted perspectives for the totality of reality.’

‘The expanse of a person’s consciousness is defined by their limiting beliefs. Listening, that often overlooked and underappreciated art, is the active process of placing the constraints of our preconceptions to the side, and of focusing one’s attention on both the noise and the silence, in order to find out what is actually being told.’

 And on that note, Hare began to bang her drum, softly at first, inviting us to join. Jameson and I bowed our heads and paid gratitude for the occasion. Then, we picked up our instruments, focused our attentions and played.

The beauty of the drumming circle is that it invites strangers to come together and recognise a shared humanity. The music created is not written down or rehearsed, it wells up out of pure improvisation, played once and never repeated again, for play’s sake and not profit. Just as the cells in our bodies wire and collaborate together without instruction, the drummers respond intuitively to one another, each adapting to support and elaborate upon the other’s beat and rhythm. The only necessary requirement is the will and openness to listen.

Josh Lonsdale

Read More

Listening - Pounds, Shillings and Pence

 “You were not listening!”  Mrs S raged, dark eyes blazing with hatred. I shook, whimpered and cried as she smacked me hard, many times, across the back of my legs with her wooden ruler. I was only seven and a half, fairly new to this school and Mrs S terrified me. I felt the eyes of a class full of seven and eight year olds upon me, staring at my distress. Tears streamed my face, my legs were stinging and I didn’t dare to move until Mrs S dismissed me.

My crime? The inability to do the ‘money’ sums. Pounds, shillings and pence sums were beyond me. I hadn’t done this at my old school. I tried to tell Mrs S. She never listened to me. She wasn’t going to help me. Did she believe that if she smacked me hard enough, I would magically be able to do this work?

My young life had completely changed. I had been a happy, confident little girl, doing well at  school with teachers I adored and a group of friends. I was uprooted, due to our family being in the licenced trade, and moved from all that was familiar to a different pub in a different town, this new school where I felt like an outsider, even at such a young age. I loved my new baby sister.  I was completely lost in all this new stuff.  Looking at life through my adult eyes, that’s a great deal for a seven and a half year old child to cope with. I don’t remember any intervention, apart from my Nanna Hetty suggesting to my mother that she ought to speak to Mrs S or have me change schools. I’d been having nightmares about Mrs S while I was staying with my grandparents during a school holiday, and told Nanna Hetty about my miseries. Nanna Hetty was my paternal grandmother. I adored her, just as I did my maternal one. Grown-ups can have their differences and my mother would have taken Nanna Hetty’s  views as interference. I was stuck. Dad was getting the pub sorted, under new management, and Mum had to get into a routine with the new baby and me, but I didn’t know where I fitted in. They told me just to do my best at school, but I already was. I did listen to Mrs S, but I didn’t understand and was too scared to say so.

Family friends came to visit one day and brought with them a girl a bit older than me. I don’t know who she was and I can’t even remember her name, but that day, she was my guardian angel. We were playing together. I overcame my shyness and asked if she could do pounds, shillings and pence sums. Yes, she could, and would she teach me? Yes, she would, and she did. Slowly, explaining everything, she taught me so well, I was bursting with confidence at my new ability and for once, I wasn’t dreading school.

Two things happened in my favour, though years apart. Twelve months after this move, we were off again to pastures new and I was leaving this dreadful school and Mrs S and the teacher I had after her.  A feeling of belonging never occurred there for me. The other big thing was Decimalisation. Hooray! It might have been just for me.

Perhaps it was fate, perhaps it was setting my demons to rest, but many years later, I found myself working in the same school I had hated, sometimes in the same classroom that used to be mine, where Mrs S smacked my legs. Mrs S had passed away long since, or she’d be about a hundred and thirty years old. My favourite job in my entire working life is the years I spent there. It is a happy school with confident children and teachers who go the extra mile to care for them. Corporal punishment is a thing of the past, thank goodness.

My poem, in Haiku,

I was listening
But I failed to understand
And ended up scared.

She filled me with fear.
She was a witch with dark eyes
And a darker heart.

Hard, wooden ruler
Across the back of my legs.
I still didn’t learn

But I had nightmares
Caused by my raging teacher
Who would not help me

When I was seven,
A shy, new girl, feeling lost
And so unhappy.

Pounds, shillings and pence,
I just couldn’t calculate
And sobbed in distress.

PMW 2021


Thank for reading, Pam x

Read More