There used to be the wireless, in the corner, a substantial piece of furniture, though I’m not sure my memory of it is very clear. It seems I can scroll through a number of possibilities and cannot pick one with anything like certainty. On Offer was the Light Programme and the Home Service, Journey into Space and the Goon Show, Take it from Here, Round the Horn, Uncle Mac and Children’s Hour, and Two Way Family Favourites and much else besides. But what word did we use, radio or wireless? Again, memory is uncertain. May I turn the wireless on? May I turn the radio on? Or I might well have said, can I. Is there a class bias in the use of the two words? Like lavatory or . . . any of the other possible alternatives. Where are we in relation to class consciousness these days; even toffs listen to grungy urban music. There is no end to our attempts to forge an identity. Did, I wonder, Lady Gaga, I mean Aunty Maggie, in a quite unconscious way usher in a new sort of classless society? The only rule in the UK now is, Make Money. Making money is good, and making more money is better. There is no other arbiter to leading a good life. And if you are a banker you can get the state (which to be honest we don’t really believe in) to bail you out when you have gloriously f****ed up with impunity – okay there was a bit of grumbling – but we are much happier kicking the poor benefit recipients who we can loosely regard as a bunch of lazy undeserving fraudsters. And, besides, we are terrified that the bankers might all go off-shore.
Wireless, nowadays, is just part of the democracy of computers and internet; we are all connected, but wirelessly. By this point there are probably only three people over the age of four, on this planet, who haven’t got mobile phones, with a rapidly increasing proportion of them being smartphones. Does life get any better, I hear you asking? And you are probably right. Even Mackay up there in the hills of the East Midlands is about to unwrap his iphone and the only possible response is, me too please. How else is he to tune in to the variety of waves emanating from east of the Ukraine.
I think the problem started when a few years ago he received some unsolicited e-mails from those eastern provinces. Yes, he took it personally, and at a bit of a loose end and wondering where the next project was going to emerge from, his imagination fired up. In the way that history repeats itself or as Freud put it, in the grip of the compulsion to repeat the old patterns, and having spent his formative years with his ears tuned to Radio Free Moscow, hell bent on revolution providing it’s under the control of the Politbureau. All this in the context of the Cold War battle between Uncle Joe Stalin and Uncle Joe McCarthy. what have the Joes got against each other? One hesitates to say, may the best man win.
But all in all, in the midst of our political uncertainties, let us remember that this is Christmas and I have just received from aunty and uncle amazon, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Seamus Heaney’s The Human Chain. Both wonderful offerings in their different ways. Franzen seems like a good enough mind to spend some time with over the holiday period and Heaney, as usual, gives us his moving and sublime language. Added to which, I have to check to see if BBC iplayer has the Pope’s message to the British people on offer, because I forgot it at 07.45 this morning.
Happy Christmas!