Cherry blossom, Hyde Park, Spring 2004
Originally uploaded by John Barnabas.

I thought a picture of blossom in Hyde Park would remind us of Spring. I have to admit, thought, this was taken last Spring.

20 March 2005

Ooh, it’s definitely colder today. There was quite a chill wind in Hyde Park and the sky is overcast. The forecast is for sunny intervals and even good old sun later in the afternoon. But the temperature will only reach 11?C.

Walking our dog in the park is always a challenge. Border collies are intelligent dogs, but can be rather obsessional. Emma, who is now an elderly dog, is typical of the breed. Her vocabulary is too darned big - you can’t have much a conversation in her hearing without her thinking there’s something in it for her; she’s great with people, especially with children (she adores our grandchildren); but she’s a menace with other dogs.

Yesterday in the park two dogs that were accompanying a jogger came up from behind and rounded on Emma. They looked like they wanted to play, but Emma - as always - bared her teeth and snarled. One of the other two dogs responded in kind and before I knew it I was in the middle of a whirling mass of snarling, snapping dogs. I had grabbed Emma’s harness and lifted her front paws of the ground in an effort to stop her going for the other dogs, but she span round. As she did so, the clip that holds the harness gave way, she lurched and her teeth closed on the inside of my thigh, giving me a nasty nip.

When I got back to the flat I found that she’d flayed a bit of skin off my leg. But the fabric of my trousers was completely undamaged. Emma was definitely not attacking me, but it hurt for a while.

We need 360? vision taking the dog for a walk. We’re always alert for other dogs appearing over the horizon, but sometimes, as yesterday, they take one by surprise.

20 March 2005

A 7 minute interview this morning at 7.10am - yes, I was already up and breakfasted to be ready to fast for the day - about Naw-Ruz and the Bah?’?? Faith on BBC Radio London’s In Spirit programme with Jumok? Fashola. I always enjoy talking to Jumok? - she’s one of those interviewers who treats the interview as a friendly conversation rather than as a debate or a battle of wits. We tend to laugh our way through the interview and it’s much easier to do a good interview when you’re relaxed - at least, I find it so. I can be much more down-to-earth, demotic, than when I’m doing an interview on the World Service or Radio 4, for example.

Radio is a wonderful medium, much more personal and intimate than TV. Anyway, I hate having to watch what my face is doing, to be sure that I’m not picking my nose or making silly gestures. On radio you can do interviews in your pyjamas if you want to and you can do what you like with your face and hands - although it is important to smile because the voice sounds much warmer through a smile. Curious that, but I’ve learned that over the years from experienced producers. It’s the same even if recording a Pause for Thought script. Smile, imagine your speaking to a good friend, and you sound more natural. Just think Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America: they were the gold standard of radio talks.

The first time I did radio talks was on the BBC World Service many years ago. I was working as a staff member at the Bah?’?? Centre in London when we were visited by a man who was working to establish a peace museum in Verdun, the French town around which some of the worst battles on the Western Front had taken place during the First World War. Anyway, this man, whose name I now forget, had come to London to try to raise funds and we were looking after him. I was given the job of taking him to Bush House to be interviewed for the BBC World Service. We got into the studio for the interview (by Trevor Barnes) and David Craig, the producer, sat me in front of one of the microphones and said, ‘You can give the Bah?’?? view on the peace museum’. Well, I had no idea what the Bah?’?? view was on this particular issue - I was only there to act as an escort for the main man - but I fielded some questions from Trevor Barnes and we finished the interview. As I got up to leave, David Craig took me on one side and said, ‘You have a good radio voice. We must have some material from you.’

Well, I needed no second bidding. I dropped him a reminder and before I knew where I was I’d been commissioned to write and record some scripts for Words of Faith, then the World Service’s equivalent of Pause for Thought. I was filling in for another contributor who couldn’t fulfil his contract. I was as nervous as hell, but David Craig gave me my first lessons in radio delivery. ‘We can’t have you sounding like a Church of England vicar,’ he said, and proceeded to show me how to make a written script sound like an informal chat.

Since then I’ve worked with many different producers. Each one has his or her own particular ways of doing things, but the lessons I learned from David Craig back in the early 90s are still the foundation of what I do when I record a script.

The real gift that first time, however, wasn’t the lesson in reading scripts or even the cheque from the BBC. It was the letter I received some time later from a friend. Now, this was no ordinary letter. For a start off it was written on what looked suspiciously like toilet paper. Secondly, it came from Mongolia. Not from the Ulan Baatar, the capital, but from the remote Altai Mountains, where my friend, a musicology student, was living in a ger (the traditional felt tent) with a nomadic Mongolian family while studying the traditional music of Mongolia.

The Mongolians are not great on personal space. When your family or tribe all live together in a few gers there’s not a lot of room for personal space. In any case, survival depends on the close support of the family. But Sean isn’t a Mongolian nomad; he needed a bit of space to himself, so he’d gone into his own ger for a little privacy. The family were worried that perhaps he was ill and they followed him into his tent. To distract them he turned on his radio and began to twirl the dial. Suddenly, through the crackle and hiss, he heard a voice speaking with what he described as a Home Counties accent. He lost the voice and then there it was again. Hang on, he thought, I know that voice. It’s Barney Leith. And he’s talking about the Bah?’?? Faith.

As Sean said in his letter, two of his worlds immediately collided. The immediate world of the Mongolian nomadic family and his background world of the Bah?’?? Faith. He wrote, ‘It is late August and the first snow of the winter is beginning to fall in the remote Altai Mountains.’ And then he described how he’d come to hear me.

That was a most precious letter for me. It had made its way via the British Embassy in Ulan Baatar to London and eventually to me. It gave me an almost vertiginous feel of the shear reach of the BBC World Service. The voice of London reaches even the remotest parts of the world. David Craig had told me that some 20 million people would listen to my talks on the World Service and that, for most of them, English was a second language at best. To be honest, I found that rather intimidating. An audience of 20 million. I mean, that’s really scary! But then he gave me the wisest advice: when you speak on radio you’re speaking to just one person.

Sean was the first Bah?’?? in Mongolia and there’s now a thriving Bah?’?? community in that sparsely populated country. Sean himself is currently Managing Director of Ealing Studios.