Thursday, April 28, 2011

I fought the wife and…

Poor Twisted has been promoted to Horny Handed Son of Toil. His holiday last week coincided miraculously with a week of glorious weather. After a fallow year, the ancestral allotment was waiting for a keen volunteer to unleash its inner Eden. Time to break some sods in the hot sun.

And time for a semi relevant musical interlude.

I get assigned the digging, clearing and moving heavy weights: simple, healthful and manly work. But not intellectually stimulating. So I plug in my podcasts. And now the bean patch carries memories of a discussion of Medieval Universities with Melvyn Bragg (the BBC's weekly history and science magazine, In Our Time). All washed down with liberal light, fizzy draughts of CNET's Buzz Out Loud.

But the real discovery was in the rhubarb and strawberry patch, which will forever taste of Laurie Taylor's Thinking Aloud. A new addition to the podlist - why was I not told that so much Good Stuff would be broadcast under the banner of Sociology? So the rhubarb is delicately flavoured with an analysis of the uprising in Egypt (I hadn't realised the role played by Wael Ghonim), while the redcurrant netting carries a comparative study of successful and unsuccessful attempts by mafias to occupy new territories and the patch by the compost bin has a study of Facebook compared to village life in Trinidad.

Where "friend" has long been a verb. Though it carries a rather earthier and more authentic meaning than the anaemic imposture currently infecting the dubdubdub.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ta

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