I was kindly invited onto Radio 4’s Midweek programme this week - kept on the Listen Again feature on the BBC website for some months.

 

The host, Peggy Reynolds, kindly agreed to duet one of my double column poems with me, no 14 from Trancelated (see links). I asked her to flick/surf through Trancelated and pick any she liked.

 

Peggy had done a lot of homework, and gave me a wonderful and detailed introduction - and even stopped me wandering off too far into maths, so that I had to find a different way of explaining my visual and conceptual ideas to listeners who don’t have images in front of them.

 

For example, I hadn’t planned to compare my work not just to a “language stew”, a description of it by Brian Kim Stefans at UBUweb, but to “bubble and squeak”. This is a fry-up of every scrap from well-concocted meals, like having two roasts in one sitting.

 

Using picture analogies not number explanations also helped to explain the postcards I handed out at Spennymoor as like letter-shaped crosswords, where you fill in the blanks.

 

Afterwards, Ray Mears, another guest, very generously pointed me towards flower and herb pressings still extant in the Natural History Museum from four hundred years ago. I was looking for a visual image to convey the fact a herb was discovered in the Northumberland National Park (which I’m researching) in 1580.

 

More on the Park, in later blogs.