Confined within the walls of a terraced house in the ironically-named Rosemount area of Derry, entertainment became a precious commodity. One form of blessed relief was an old record player that had longwave radio and impressively could pick up radio broadcasts from thousands of miles away. Obsessed with listening in to foreign channels, I’d spend hours listening to the distant mysterious voices speaking and singing in Flemish, Norwegian, Catalan, all the more enthralling because I had no idea what they were talking about. In hindsight, they were probably discussing gardening, ads for pile cream or debates about interest rates but to this listener they were impossibly poetic ciphers, arabesques and hieroglyphs.

@ Dogmatika