Podcasts

I bloody love podcasts.  I only started listening a few months ago, when a friend suggested something I’d missed, and now I love them.  I’m not very good at just sitting still and concentrating on one thing.  Well, no, that’s a lie – I’m perfectly capable of sitting still and concentrating on one thing, and that very intensely, otherwise I doubt there’d be this many books in the backlist or that I’d ever be able to cope with working in theatre.  But it seems I have only two modes of being – utterly intense concentration on just one thing to the utter reach of my abilities – or wanting to concentrate on at least three things at once.  So when I watch the TV, for example, I like to have stuff to fiddle with and fix by me at the same time; when I cook I enjoy having the radio on; when playing games, I listen to podcasts and so on.

It’s not just the luxury of being able to hear things that I’ve missed.  It’s not simply the entertainment of having a continual supply of sounds at my beck and call which I can dip in and out of at whim – it’s a whole world of stuff, selected and chosen by me for the most interesting and unusual content, which I can access at whim.  It’s knowledge and information about things which I would never have known about before, at my fingertips as if the local library had been beamed up and dumped in a pair of speakers.  Yesterday I cooked supper to a BBC Documentary about marathon running in the Gaza Strip; this morning I got up to a play about the Kennedy family; last night I went to sleep to soothing explanations about the influenza virus and when I put away my clothes from the washing pile, I do so to the (unintelligible) sound of the news in Mandarin, a language I still can’t speak and still don’t understand but which, I hope, but immersion in the same I might vaguely one day come to terms with.  Thinking of which!  I must go online and see if there’s any news reports in German I can download, on the same basic principal.  (My lord, I’ve just been online to look and discovered not only German news, but comedy and language courses too.)

My knowledge, such as it is, has always been rather broad and thin, with a few areas of unlikely expertise.  Should you want to know anything about the second siege of Vienna, for example, I’m probably your girl; ask me about the politics of Indonesia at the moment and I’d be able to manage two sentences of moderately well-informed waffle, followed by an immediate silence as the full depths of my ignorance become apparent.  Podcasts are not, as far as I’m concerned, going to give me a great depth of knowledge on any particular subject, nor would I expect them too.  But what they do, is broaden the mind.  I love to be surprised by the things I don’t know, to discover that there’s a Jamiacan bobsled team, to learn about industrial migration in China, hear folk tales from Ghana or learn about the relationship between yeast and hair.  Knowledge is a gift, we’re often told, and it’s one of the few educational platitudes I actually agree with, and if the internet is good for one thing above all else, it is for giving us a small sense of just how big the world is, and how exciting it can be.