Speechification

I think there was a bit too much sharing in yesterday’s Berlin post. So no teenage reminiscences today.

At St-Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square they’ve got a charity called the Vicar’s Relief Fund which, apart from sounding a bit Dickensian, does lots of important work with poor and homeless people in London.

I like the fund because it’s built on a human scale and helps people directly, giving them money to solve day-to-day problems. Unlike the Big Picture, macro concerns of the proper charities, all of whom have ten-year strategies and TV advertising budgets and ‘Directors of Delivery’ and so on.

Anyway, the fund gets all of its money from the annual Radio 4 Christmas appeal (ever since 1927, in fact). You can read about the fund here, about the appeal here and (this is the important bit) you can give money here.(you can also phone this freephone number if you live in the UK: 0800 082 82 84) You can hear the radio appeal again here.

I think of you all as vigorous early risers so there’s a strong chance you’ll have heard this yesterday morning at 05:43. Bells on Sunday is another of those Radio 4 institutions that’s probably impossible to abolish, no matter how far out to the fringes of the schedule it’s pushed.

Someone (I visualise an elderly sound-recordist in a Morris Oxford with a huge valve-operated tape recorder) travels to a different parish church each week and records its bells. That’s it (there’s an archive of the last three years’ bells too. Sounds like material for a mash-up to me).

I particularly liked this one because I used to live not far from St Anne’s (a gorgeous white stone Hawskmoor job that’s got the full magical/alchemical/allegorical treatment from both Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair in recent years) and often heard the bells on a quietish Sunday morning (MP3).