Speechification

When I was 12 or 13 my dad came home from one of his twice-a-year Territorial Army jaunts to Germany with a lovely Sanyo transistor radio and I fell in love with it (I wish I could find a picture of it). It had shortwave and that was the start of the whole radio thing for me. I huddled in bed, listening to all of those impossibly distant, impossibly exotic foreign voices. The voices I remember best were the two newsreaders on Radio Tirana (one male, one female) who would keep me up to date with the production of oranges and tractors and diesel trains in Albania.

Their English was so perfect, so squeaky-clean ivy league American, and what they read out so prosaic, that I wondered, even then, how they'd been persuaded to read the news for nutty Hoxha.

But it was gripping all the same, I always listened right through, until the station switched to a French transmission. I wrote to Radio Tirana at the address provided ("Radio Tirana, Albania") and my dad, who collected stamps and knew about these things, told me it'd never get there because Albania was the only country on the planet that wasn't a member of the Universal Postal Union. But it did get there and they wrote back: a huge, rough brown envelope full of posters and books of aphorisms by Hoxha and Lenin (and Chairman Mao too, I seem to remember) and a fantastically crudely-printed card with the shortwave frequencies on it and something called a QSL card (like the one shown). Treasure.

And all that was a very self-indulgent way of introducing part one of David Hendy's terrific 5-part series of essays about radio - this one, called The Ethereal Mind, about its pre-history and his own discovery of its joys (also via Albania). Radio 4 nuts will be familiar with Hendy's excellent history, Life On Air: A History of Radio Four. Here's the MP3 - length: 4:16.

Thanks to Jasmund for permission to use the picture (lots more here).

For the Numbers Stations post I uploaded an MP4 instead of an MP3 and I think I broke the podcast. So here's the programme again in the right format: MP3. Sorry!

Elliot Moore, loyal listener, reminds me about the enigmatic and spooky Numbers Stations and this terrific programme (MP3) from 2006 presented by Simon Fanshawe all about them. I've got a four-CD set of meticulously recorded and annotated Numbers Stations somewhere—compiled by short-wave geeks and spook-watchers The Conet Project.

There's something profoundly unsettling about the persistence into the digital age of these cold war holdovers: radio stations that broadcast nothing but impenetrable coded messages which we have to assume (Governments won't even acknowledge they exist) are intended for proper, old-fashioned spies. Elliot says you can get the Conet recordings here and the sleeve notes here, released under an open licence, which is nice.

I recommend that you download them and listen to them back-to-back in a darkened room with nothing but a bottle of Polish Vodka and a cyanide capsule for company. Elliot also provides links to expert Simon Mason's web site on the topic and to another numbers stations web site whose August log shows that the stations are still very much alive. The Lincolnshire Poacher, by the way, is the name given to one of the broadcasts (presumably originating in Great Britain) by the spook watchers because it uses the folk tune of that name as a call sign.