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From James Naughtie:
An enticing pot of bramble jam arrived in the office the other day. Its appearance was the consequence of an item on the disappearance of hedgerows, the resulting difficulty for yellowhammers and their friends in finding berries for their dinner, and the problem for blackberry-pickers, or in Scotland bramble-pickers, in exploiting the fine harvest this year for jam.
You know that the moment you touch on a subject like this – when did you last see a corncrake?; is there more meadowsweet around this year?; are stag beetles getting bigger?; does the appearance of Mars on the southern horizon make you more frisky? – the postbag will start bulging. Among all the usual letters accusing you of being a left-leaning toady, a cynic determined to do down Tony Blair or the Labour Party, an anti-Semite, an Arab-hater, a Scots git and so on (there’s a happy predictability about the subjects that cause most foaming at the mouth) you will be sure to find the interesting items.
So this week it was a pot of jam, from berries picked in a part of the world I know well on Deeside, just west of Aberdeen, by way of proving that the hedges and copses are in fine fettle. A lovely gesture. We certainly can’t complain in this office about the generosity of some listeners. Like the cakes which still find their way to the Test Match Special Box, to feed the furnace that is Henry Blofeld’s appetite, we do get some benefits for arriving here sometime before dawn.
Exotic tea bags, funny rubber plants, apples on Eat An Apple Day, occasional surgical appliances, badges of all sorts, cups and mugs with every design you can imagine, knobbly tomatoes to prove that the supermarket varieties haven’t triumphed yet, and once a supply of clips for putting on the corner of a duvet (this after an item exploring the difficulty of getting a duck-down quilt into a cover while holding the corners out at arm’s length). And books, of course. Along with the new releases (carefully tended by the mistress of the book cupboard to make sure that they aren’t snaffled by anyone and taken home) there are the autobiographical manuscripts, the vanity-published memoirs, and sometimes – the trickiest of all – the outline of a plot or a fragment of an opening chapter with a request for advice of whether or not there’s a best-seller in there somewhere. There never is, at least not yet.
This is part of our rich life here. Our milk may turn in the fridge, the air conditioning may cause our bosses to issue memoranda advising people not to sit under a vent unless they want a stiff neck, and we may be warned (as we are, daily) that building work across the road is expected to turn up some unexploded World War II bombs (UXBs in the jargon) – but the generosity of our listeners rolls on. I exclude the person who once sent me a hideous tie, as a result of a rude remark of John’s about something I was wearing, and of course the people who bombard us with pages of closely-typed argument to prove that the EU is a Satanic conspiracy, or that we are controlled by a Zionist conspiracy/a neo-communist plan for world domination or The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I have been accused of nearly everything, I think – though the moment I write that sentence I realise that I am encouraging some correspondents to fashion accusations that even I have not dreamt up yet. My promise is this. They are all filed away neatly, and some day all will be revealed….
Most of our polite letter-writers, and the vast number of you who now send us emails, are of course measured in your criticism and always open to a reasonable explanation as to why something has been done on air in the way that it has, though it’s sometimes wearying to have to point out the obvious. How dare you do an item on – let’s say – greenhouse gas emissions without talking to John Prescott? Because he wouldn’t agree to be interviewed. Given the choice, we’d have a dream team of interviewees every day, led by the Prime Minister, the President of the United States, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Saddam Hussein. Sadly, we end up more often with…..No, decency compels me not to appear sniffy about any of our valued guests. It’s an obvious point, but worth remembering. When you spoke to Yasser Arafat, why didn’t you speak to Ariel Sharon? Because he refused. And should we decline to report a story just because we can’t get the ideal cast of interviewees? If we adopted that policy, any government (or opposition party) could close down discussion of any embarrassing topic simply by refusing to go on the air. You must remember one of the golden rules of journalism: the better the story, the more unlikely it is that those responsible for it will want to be interviewed. Have you heard Donald Rumsfeld answer a tough question lately? We wish you had, and we’ll keep trying.
Meanwhile, keep the bramble jam coming. It’s lovely. We did once invite into the studio the people who created seafood ice-cream for that otter somewhere in Sussex during the hot weather. That wasn’t so nice, though the Finnish ambassador’s pickled salmon, which he brought in himself, was excellent – better than the squirrel roasted in extraordinarily pungent garlic which my children were horrified to learn that I ate, though tentatively. It was only in the interests of journalism, just like the stress test which I took with John to see how our bodies were affected by three hours in the studio. The answer was: not very much, which was cheery news for us. I put it down to the jam and the knobbly tomatoes. Keep them coming, but if you’re thinking of writing your autobiography, try to get beyond the first chapter before you decide to share it. Who knows, you may grow out of it.
Jim
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