Speechification

You won't believe this: in 1981 I was sent to West Berlin to write (and photograph!) a feature about the City's music and fashion scene for then very new and underground iD Magazine (I don't get asked to write about fashion so much these days). I had a most amazing time in what was then still a City in a sort of dream, suspended like a decadent bubble above the miserable East.

Tourists had privileges not extended to residents in those awful days so I flitted back-and-forth East-to-West, visited an artist who worked in a huge steel drum in no-man's land, all the trendiest record and clothes shops, terrifying punk clubs in snowy Kreutzberg and workers' cafeterias in the East. I remember a band called Deutsch-Polnische Aggression (named in parody of DAF: Deutsch-Americanische Freundschaft). I can still feel the chilly thrill of crossing the border on the U-Bahn and the bleak glamour of Friedrichstrasse Station. Anyway, that's enough Cold War nostalgia for now...

You'll have to suspend your prejudices about a) Ann Leslie and b) The Daily Mail (assuming you own some) to listen to this very moving half hour in which Leslie returns to Berlin to meet the people she knew when she was writing a series of articles about the fall of Honecker's regime eight years after my (obviously pivotal) visit. This is really good radio, part of a series about reporters returning to the scene of historic stories MP3.

I've often thought that a lot of Radio 4's output is essentially obsessive compulsive. You get a lot of slightly unhinged programming. Themes that are just a little bit too narrow, people who are ever-so-slightly too immersed in their subject. Don't get me wrong: this is a good thing.

I think Radio 4 preserves a slightly out-of-date (almost Victorian) curiosity about the world: collecting and cataloguing, preserving and promoting. Radio 4's a bit like a Victorian Museum: an essentially indiscriminate collection of curiosities. The stuffed Ox next to the Persian rug next to the bronze age funerary goods...

If you were up at 5:45 this morning you'd have heard a good example. Part three of Susan Marling's Five Gardens of Germany, in which she walks us around the picturesque grounds of the Rococo palace built by the Bavarian king everyone called Mad Ludwig. The show ends, entirely appropriately, in the world's largest artificial cave to the sound of Wagner (MP3).

The pic of King Ludwig II just after his accession to the throne is from the Wikimedia Commons.