Radio

I have come out to work for a bit of peace and quiet and to listen to the radio and get on with my book, and tiresome people keep getting in my taxi and interrupting my cup of tea.

I have just had a completely thoughtless customer who thought I might be interested in his witterings about his evening guitar jamming with his friends and some beer even though I pointed out that The Archers was on.

I have had a very busy sort of day, and although of course I am well aware that I am supposed to come to work to make money, actually I always feel about work as being a bit of a shirk, especially when it is not very busy. It is at work that I can sit quietly in the dark, and knit and drink cups of steaming Earl Grey tea, and listen to the voices of the outside world on my radio.

I like the BBC at nights, because it is familiar, and outdated, and safe. I like the announcer wishing the nation a peaceful night, because scary things just might still happen in the dark times.

At the end of the night, before the Shipping Forecast, they play a tune called Sailing By, which is as neutral as a picture in an hotel bedroom, but which in my head is the music of a thousand solitary taxi nights, imagining lonely lights dotted all over Britain being extinguished ready for sleep.

I don’t really understand the shipping forecast, but I like it anyway. I lived on the Orkney Islands for a while, where lots of people went fishing for a living. Now, safe in my taxi, the measured, even tones of the announcer telling us of warnings of gales in Viking and Fisher is excitingly chilling, conjuring dreadful pictures of bearded fishermen in soaked oilskins battling vast icy waves and howling darkness. I was once trapped overnight on the wrong island by terrible weather, and was rescued by some people I knew only vaguely, but whose bright-lit kitchen and warm fire were among the most welcome sights of my life.

At the end comes the splendid, crashing cymbals of the National Anthem, the Queen still safely on her throne, bless her, and everything reassuringly all right with the world; it will be a heavy weight for Charles to carry when his day comes.

Then comes the World Service: the History Hour, and Business Matters: time for the night owls to feel themselves part of the exciting wider world out there, listening to the far-away voices from Delhi and Johannesburg and Tokyo. Just the names in themselves are magical, with their conjuring of elephants and baking heat and geisha: a world of differences in the mellifluous tones.

I love it, I really love it. I love feeling like a tiny light in the immense world, awake whilst the world sleeps, out in the darkness whilst everybody sensible is behind safe walls, wrapped in duvets and sleep.

I listened to the World Service on my perilous way home through the awful floods last year, through the rain beating on the roof of the car and the dreadful moaning of the wind in the trees. Any one of the massive, bending trees might have come crashing on top of me, there were fallen trees everywhere: but I dared not speed up because of causing a wave which might drench the air-intake and bring me to a helpless standstill.

The steady voice of the World News made it all right, obviously I was not going to die alone in the darkness whilst somebody was talking to me about Guatemalan trade figures: and indeed I didn’t, which was a glorious relief.

By now the night is coming to an end, I have written this in bits and pieces in between customers as I always do. The last notes of the National Anthem have just died away.

I am sitting beneath a streetlight, in the pool of its orange glow, waiting for the Stag’s Head to eject its clientele. They might want taxis tonight, because it is raining hard.

I hope so.

Goodnight.