A piece that I made for the Chelmsford Calling World Service http://www.chelmsfordcalling.com/world-service/4585453999, broadcast in February 2015. It was a pleasure to make a piece for this programme – I used to listen to an earlier form of it as a teenager, on shortwave, in the 90s. It's about my relationship with shortwave in the intervening years. 
Essentially this would be Doc on One sort of fare but for people who know what a QSL card is. 
Thanks to Sunny Jim for asking me to make the piece!

Chelmsford Calling – Me!

The keeper opened their house, they responded, then they spotted the food. Recorded on an iPhone hence mono. 

GET ORF MY LAND in red ruffed lemur

A Picture

Did I ever share my recording of a penguin sneezing? No? Tsssh. Here you are. 

It's a macaroni penguin at Living Coasts in Torquay, UK. 

Sneezing Penguin

About eight years ago I recorded this, in the Clemenceau weekend market in Brussels. There was a carousel but with live animals—I can't remember whether they were ponies or donkeys.
I'm sure it was only for kids. But even if it hadn't been I would have been too shy to do anything but stand by and record the sound!

Carousel In Clemenceau

Sir Roger Moore passed away today. He was the fifth person I interviewed, when I was 24, in 2004. I had just started producing and presenting Voices from Other Lands on China Radio International. Sir Roger was in Beijing as Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef. He (figuratively) charmed the pants off me! And I ended up as a supporter of Unicef for many years to come. 

Today I tried to dig out the original programme. I couldn't find it. Perhaps I never even took a copy for myself—lessons learned long ago! But I did find the original minidisc with the interview itself. I got the working MD player out, transferred it in real time without listening much, and then struggled through it, hearing some fool who really must be me, and then an utterly familiar voice taking charge. Here are some excerpts.

When Roger Moore charmed me silly

Digging into old cassettes, I've found this travel programme called Itchy Feet, probably from sometime between 1995 and 2000. I can't find anything about it online… any ideas?

The pieces: 
Living to Ride, about motorcycling. 
Lyn Webster Wilde visits whirling Dervishes in Anatolia. 
Fons Epinick, Corinne Zander, Penny Lawrence–but this is incomplete. 
The presenter's story about Ely. 
Peter Shinglewood in China (I remember reading about this, I guess in the Observer).

UPDATE! I found one of the contributors, Lyn Webster Wilde, on Twitter. She told me it was actually a BBC programme, not RTE as I has thought. That sent me off to the Genome and eventually http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/84b31f7a99f34ede819331ef52c78674 which tells us it went out on 3 May 1998. 

I had assumed it was an RTE programme, since I had it in FM quality and I wasn't in the UK until September 1998–at least four months after transmission. Who knows, maybe there was a repeat?

Itchy Feet 1990s travel show

Found on the old cassettes, an interrupted and incomplete caller to Gerry Ryan–date unknown, probably the 80s. Including some adverts from the era to help you identify the year/have nightmares/laugh at how we were.

Gerry Ryan Show Excerpt

I want to do something with this recording (there is more). But it's too easy to make an utterly distant travelogue.

The salt of the earth, and the sea, and keen photographers

I think I first had this idea in 2008; when I finally got round to trying it, it ended up entirely of its time–last Wednesday. I intend to make more of these, develop this idea by trying it, maybe getting it more right with each go.

VRTBF

See. People who make good speech-based radio, they know how to do something that bamboozles me. The put clips in the right order. 

So let's start by putting the tracks in the right order: Atmos, Movement, People talk, I talk. Within that I can move bits horizontally but not vertically. I can't seem to find my first attempt at that, so here's my second. 
Probably doesn't qualify as ugly radio, more like one of those rules-based art movements. You know the ones (coz I don't but I heard about them on the radio).

Lacb

Magpies, a bee, assorted songbirds, wood pigeon, a clucking male pheasant, a blackbird, and hints of suburban life.  
Unattended recording with Niant binaurals into an Olympus LS-10, with bass roll-off because of all the traffic. 

Suburban garden at 7:30 on a Saturday evening

Radio fan, volunteers at In The Dark, occasional podcaster. But round these parts I'm representing myself, no one else!

Coffeeflavouredtea

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