Radio listener by Jim Gilchrist

Published on 20/05/2012 18:31

JIM GILCHRIST

Whether the stuff of mortal life or the body of Christ, bread, now taken for granted, was so central to the development of civilisation that it became both a sacred object and a political totem, underpinning the evolution of humans from hunter-gatherers to 21st-century cybersurfers.

It was old Khayyám, too – at least via Fitzgerald’s translation – who evoked the caravan starting “for the dawn of nothing”. Not too many of them starting for anywhere these days, certainly not in Oman, where field biologist Tessa McGregor crosses the desert with one of the last frankincense caravans in Camel Country. Camels once meant the difference between life and death to nomadic desert communities, but even in an age of oil-fuelled riches, four-wheel drives and air conditioning, they remain at the heart of Arabic culture, as McGregor discovers.

There ain’t too many hedges in the desert, although there are rather a lot of them in the UK, as Hugh Barker explains in Book of the Week: Hedge Britannia. Barker’s travels across the UK introduce him to hedge-laying champions and topiary fanatics, as he learns about the age-old association between hedges and Paradise, and the bitter legacy of land enclosures in England.

Back in Scotland, over decades of concert-going, the noisiest I can recall was nothing to do with amps turned to 11, it was a performance by the Singing Kettle to a Portobello Town Hall full of enthusiastically shrieking bairns. As founder folk singers Cilla Fisher and Artie Trezise explain to Edi Stark in What’s Inside the Singing Kettle, the band is still on the boil, finding itself performing to the children of those children they entertained some three decades back.

OUR DAILY BREAD

Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 1:45pm

CAMEL country

Monday, Radio 4, 11am

HEDGE BRITANNIA

Mon-Fri, Radio 4, 9:45am

WHAT’S INSIDE THE SINGING KETTLE?

Monday, Radio Scotland, 2:05pm