Radio listener by Jim Gilchrist

When the poet and author Edwin Muir made and chronicled his famous Scottish Journey in 1934, he described many of the small towns he visited in the Depression-stricken country as “contentedly or morosely lethargic, sunk in a fatalistic dullness broken only by scandal-mongering and such alarums as drinking produces; a dead silence punctuated by whispers and hiccups”.

Crime writer Louise Welsh follows in Muir’s footsteps, and in Welsh’s Scottish journey, in a nation once again beset by economic uncertainty and austerity but now considering independence, she considers questions of identity and survival. Her five-part peregrination starts in Edinburgh’s financial quarter.

A journey of a rather different kind is the subject of Thursday’s afternoon play – erebus, by Jo Shapcott, concerning Sir John Franklin’s ill-starred quest for the fabled North-West Passage in 1845, from which neither he nor any of his expedition members returned. The drama deals with the apparent disaster which unspooled after the expedition’s two vessels, Erebus and Terror, became icebound, and whether their desperate crew members really did resort to cannibalism, as Inuit reports suggested. And just what did the Inuit make of these doomed foreigners who carted a portable organ and a library of books along with them? The cast includes Russell Boulter and Jasmine Hyde.

Meanwhile Radio 4 sees in 2012 with new year, new writers, a trio of short stories by emerging writers from Scotland. The first, on Friday, is Katy McAulay’s Departures, in which a woman finds her life changed by an airport encounter.

Actor and author Meera Syal, on the other hand, opens a new series of reasons to be cheerful this morning by confessing to being a closet “pacifist boxer”, arguing that women should be able to enjoy this male-dominated sport. Co-opting experts including the Open University’s Professor Kath Woodward and ethnomusicologist Rachel Harris, Syal also declares her love of karaoke, as well as trying to lighten up comedienne Helen Lederer.