22-05-08 - Sunday I - Grumpy Old Man

I was driving over to see my Mum this morning and had to switch the car radio away from Radio 2. Not only was it Steve Wright, who was last "a thing" when I was doing my A levels, but the Sunday theme is "Sunday love songs", which to me is an overly-sentimental, cloying programme. The songs are okay, but I cannot stand the inbetween banter and dedications. 

Anyway, that explains why I was listening to Radio 1, at my age. The BBC have something for everyone, I believe, and if Radio 2 is a bit nausea-inducing for a few minutes, Radio 1 is often sufficient. 

But this morning, it wasn't. The DJ had introduced the topic of "funny shop names" and while there are some funny shop names, the ones he was reading out weren't particularly ground-breaking. The conversation was a bit vacuous, but at least it is normally broken up with a decent track or two. On this occasion, unfortunately, the DJ warned: "coming up after [x], Fontaines DC..." Well, that was enough for me, unfortunately. I switched the radio off. Fontaines DC are pretty good, I reckon, but at the moment they are suffering a bit from over-exposure, and it seems that they are being played on every show. 

So I drove to Mum's in relaxed silence, and appreciated the lack of meaningless chat and/or songs that I don't particularly like droning away. It's got to the point these days that silence is a weird unexpected thing, that we don't quite know how to deal with. But as a break from the non-stop stream of verbal nonsense and meaningless pop that pumps out of most radio stations, silence can be a refreshing and invigorating change. 

Anyway, as I turned the radio off, I thought to myself, "ha! You really are turning into a grumpy old man". 

TTFN.

Saturday 16-12-03 Radio

TW and I were lying in bed this morning, listening to a bit of Radio 4. That was my choice, I like to catch up with the day's agenda and news before getting on with it. I announced I was going to get up and TW asked me to turn it over. So I switched it to Radio 6Music. "What did you do that for?", she asked. I did it because she didn't specify which station to tune it to, and she was still lying in bed, while I was halfway downstairs. I know that her preferred station would have been Radio 1, but she didn't ask me to switch it to Radio 1, she simply asked me to turn it over. And besides, she was still in bed and within reach of the radio, so if she didn't like my choice in response to her unspecific request, she could always turn it to R1 herself...

Speaking of 6Music, they had a great piece of programming yesterday, in that they played music from 1989 all day. I wasn't really sure why, I think it linked in with Our Generation, the BBC4 strand of programming that's been going on for a while. They played some great tunes, and the stand-out ones for me were "Lions" by New FADs, "Hallelujah" by Happy Mondays, and "Fascination Street" by The Cure.There were loads of other songs which brought back memories, but I didn't hear any Stuffies or Cud, which would have probably made my week.