Via the Radio 4 blog, what the editor rightly describes as a very lovely thing - Rebecca Dalzell is a New Yorker, writing about going about her life punctuated by the sound of Radio 4.
She perfectly sums us up by saying:
Listen to Radio 4 and the country that emerges is witty and engaging, well-read if parochial, always up for a walk to the pub down the lane. Watch Channel 5 on TV and you see a nation obsessed with home repairs, footballers, and the Botoxed winners of Big Brother. Radio gave me the England I’d gotten to know reading Evelyn Waugh, and that I half-expected to find.
There is no sensible way for me to explain this, so I will say only that if you are in need of some laughter, you must check out Antonia's video.
This is a clear example of not knowing that you wanted something until you get it - how could I have known that a woman and her daughter in hastily improvised beards, yearning for the sea, would be the thing to make me laugh til I cried?
Guardian readers can be a bolshy lot, so it's a brave company that submits to their ethical blog Q&A. Howies dealt with it pretty gracefully when they were turned over, but you'd have thought it would have given Neal's Yard Remedies some idea of what they might be in for. Apparently not...
It's impossible to say at what point they decided this had all been a terrible idea - was it when a reader asked:
Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?
or perhaps:
I was wondering what your policy was on dealing with the situation of one of your stocked alternative medicines actually being proven to work. Would you discontinue it? After all, it wouldn't be alternative any more, just medicine.
or maybe:
I've been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.
We'll never know.
I still haven't given in to the lure of twitter, but stories like this make it ever more appealing - #Radio4minus1letter. After all, who wouldn't want to listen to
The Sipping Forecast. Nice cup of tea. Milk, veering. Sugar, 1 or 2. Biscuits later. Good.
or
Desert Island Diss (a program about insulting people stranded on desert islands)
Life at the moment is busy in way that involves racing from one thing to the next without a chance to settle and look at what just happened, or space to stop and just breathe.
This makes me feel much better.
