Visible from Space

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “Just walking through Borough Market, much busier than I thought it was going to be, much noisier than I thought it was going to be.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “I’m sitting at my desk today, it’s just too windy outside to record the introduction on the move like I usually do. You may hear the wind howling a little in the background, and also the croak of a cold in my voice. When I was 17 , whilst riding my motor cycle, I was hit by a car, and thrown through the air to be broken upon landing. As I lay by the roadside I slipped into shock.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “I’m standing behind a Silver Birch tree out of the wind. It’s trying to be Spring, but the wind keeps shifting and occasionally blowing out of the North, which has quite a lot of Winter still on it. You might be able to hear the water in the background, just running over the old mill, its an old paper mill… Who’s that? Magpie.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “I’m speaking in a bit of a hushed tone as I’m tucked away in my seat on a very slow moving train into London. We’re crawling along. There’s been low cloud for days. It’s funny how the half-light can act as an invitation to the shadow in me.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “Good morning, from a chilly England. You will have noticed the postings have slowed down a little from every week to approximately every two weeks, just because of the demands of work and life’s happenings. That’s frost you can hear, crunching under foot, it’s a really cold morning. Sunrise was a glorious pink, with a base layer of orange shining through.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s a full moon on Thursday, and I hope to be fully over Covid by then. It wasn’t the Yuletide I was expecting, and brought to mind the line “the best laid plans of mice and men”, which is the anglicised version of the line from ‘To a Mouse’ by Robert Burns, a poem that serves to reminds us we have control over very little. It’s Burns night at the end of the month, just to give a tip of the hat to our Scottish brothers and sisters .

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Dearly Beloved, I’m having to take a short break as I’ve been nailed by Covid, no doubt caught whilst cramming onto trains heading into metropolis. However, this week I’ve embedded a short audio recording from an interview I did with astronaut Story Musgrave some years ago. Story is the only astronaut to have flown on all five Space Shuttles, and was involved in the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “That’s the general hubbub of a Covent Garden Cafe in the background, people coming and going. I’ve closed my eyes to connect to the sound more fully. I long thought that adulthood was a point of arrival, not a series of little deaths and rebirths, of rites of passage for which we receive no schooling. We all seem to be winging it, in amongst the other birds, trying to attune to each others movement — hoping to create a murmuration.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “Just popped by my friends record store in Soho, but he’s not there. I’m walking through Chinatown now. There are five Chinatowns in the UK and twelve major Chinatowns in Europe. There’ve been a great many surveys done on how many languages are spoken in this city, some estimate around a hundred, other say there are closer to three hundred. To my ear they’re all musical incantations, notes rather than words.

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. “The river’s up, after the constant rain we’ve been having lately, and the flood gates beneath the bridge here are open. I’m just going to step away as I’ve no idea of monitoring how loud the background is and if it’s drowning out my voice. That’ll be the express train heading to Charing Cross in the background. It’s quieter here, the water’s still fast flowing but it’s smooth.