Tum tee tum tee tum tee tum tum tee diddly tum…..

I don’t think it is in any sense an exaggeration to say that I have been listening to The Archers all my life. It was a staple of my mothers radio diet back in the days of the home service and the light program and I grew up with Barwick Green once a week when Two Way Family Favourites, The Clitheroe Kid, punctuated Sunday along with Tom Forrest’s introductory monologue leading in to a weekly reprise of episodes from the past seven days. I have no idea if my mother listened at 6:45 p.m. back in those days. I suspect I was in bed at that time before my school years. I don’t really remember the stories of the early sixties of course, more the voices and the comfort of friends. Sounds I grew up with and found familiarity in. A touchstone. Through six of my seven ages I have continued to listen, mostly on my own account and I hope to do so for some years to come.
Through the miracle of manufactured memory I can sometimes get mixed up among the fiction and the facts that I choose of my own as well.
My school years were spent in a small village at the foot of the Southern Cotswolds. As the four siblings of the principle family grew I often found a mirror to their progress in my own. Indeed in years since then as well.
A fictional soap based in a radio studio somewhere in the Midlands has a very real landscape set out in my minds eye and I have a memory and an encyclopedic album full of mental images.
And I continue to enjoy ‘The Archers’ today.

Like others I have talked to I have often felt challenged when real life has presented me with actors who cannot possibly be the people in my minds eye, and indeed landscapes that don’t remotely match the maps I hold.
Thus it was with both trepidation and eager anticipation that I attended an academic conference yesterday.

I needn’t have worried though. I was firmly among friends.