Inking Bitterns on BBC Radio Bristol with Steve Yabsley

Deborah Harvey, John Terry and I were on Steve Yabsley's afternoon show on BBC Radio Bristol, talking about our book Inking Bitterns - poems and pictures for wild places. We talked for half an hour, and each read two of our poems. We also managed to discuss Morris Minors, skip-diving, seafaring, gender transitioning, and poetry in general. It was quite a wide-ranging discussion!

Radio has been described as a very visual medium, but even so, you would not have been able to see the pictures that went with the poems, just by listening to the interview - which you can hear as a podcast HERE (We are on about 30 minutes into the programme, just after the Beatles track!)

So here are the pictures and the poems that we read, together as they are in the book. Click on the images to see them larger. By the way, as I said on the programme, we are not selling through Amazon; but you can get it at Gert Macky, and all (well, some. Not many yet TBH) good book shops.

 

Snog, Marry, Avoid

Here's something jolly from the BBC. The programme is about correcting people's fashion mistakes, apparently. In this excerpt, this dialogue takes place

P: Who are you?
R; I'm Rachel
P: Are you sure it's not Richard?
R: (laughs in surprise) Why?
P: Pod computes that with those eyebrows, eyelashes and ridiculously big hair you look like a transsexual.
R: (looks mortified)

Thanks, BBC, for adding to the constant drip, drip, drip of casual prejudice.

I was looking at some photos yesterday, on Facebook. There in the pictures were the people I once called my family, celebrating my brother's wedding. I hadn't been invited, of course. You wouldn't want someone like me at a wedding, would you?

Over on Twitter, Paris Lees started a hashtag directed to @SnogMarryAvoid, called #WhatTranssexualsLookLike. I contributed this photo. Loads of other people joined in too. Mostly to say "Here we are, just getting on with things. Get over it."

nightingale and bombers

I was looking for this recording online, and had some difficulty finding it. So when I did, I recorded it, and here it is.

Recorded on the night of 19 May 1942, when BBC engineers visited a wood in Surrey to record nightingales singing. The microphones also picked up the approach of the Bomber Command force heading for Mannheim, a raid by 197 aircraft including Wellingtons, Stirlings, Halifaxes, Hampdens, Lancasters and Manchesters, of which 11 failed to return