It’s an occupational hazard. I listen to the Today Programme.

I often muse that it would be better for me to revert to my teens, and start the day with Radio 3. (Although even as a teenager, I listened to Thought for the Day. Nerd that I must have been.) But if I do that for any length of time, some junior researcher will inevitably ring me and ask what I think about the latest whatever it is, and I will find myself saying, What war? Or even (joy of joys), What Brexit? (Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all so relieved there was no wall-to-wall Brexit any more? Honest to goodness, if I’d known that would happen I wouldn’t have voted for it.)

And then I’ll have to ring Serena, our eldest, and ask her the news. And what my opinion on it is, which is always quicker – and more to the point, surer – than asking myself what my opinion is. (As she thinks I should have done before voting Brexit.) Which is all very well, but by the time I’ve done that they’ve found someone else for the programme and besides, they might as well pay Serena instead of me, for her to tell the nation instead of telling me. Which would be a jolly good idea in the first place. Except that she doesn’t want to do the silly work she’s watched her mother do.

Pointless someone checking me for dementia, in my late teens: I spent three happy years at Oxford with no idea who the Prime Minister was. I think I still don’t know. Who it was then, I mean. Though it would be a lot more useful not to know who it is now.

(And Shaun can name them all, in order, with dates, from Walpole to the present day. I know because he once performed this embarrassing feat in a houseparty after-dinner quiz. Which is surely worse.)

Often I have to turn it off. I can’t bear any more Cost of Living Crisis, for instance. More often, I probably should turn it off. I know it’s not good for me.

Often too, I listen to the programme on my telephone, slightly time-lagged, so I can skip backwards or forwards and particularly skip the sport and business news.

(I didn’t know anyone listened to either of these until a friend of Shaun’s came to stay, shortly after we were married, and when the sports news came on at breakfast I naturally turned the radio off to spare us both, and he asked if he could listen to it. With remarkable sang froid and exquisite manners I turned it back on instead of staring at him as if he’d asked me to throw a bucket of iced water over him. And then blow me down if a few years ago another friend didn’t go and tell me he listens to the business news. But he has made a few billion so fair enough, I suppose: must come at a cost.)

And this morning, near the end of the programme (I didn’t know how near because it was a bit time-lagged, but I knew there wasn’t long to go) instead of telling us yet again the trains are about to stop running and the sun is about to stop shining and we’ll soon have to sleep in overcoats as we won’t be able to heat our bedrooms (eh? I’ve never heated my bedroom in my life) they suddenly stopped making us miserable and decided to revisit genius. 

On account of its being Sir Paul Father-to-the-Vegan-Sausages’s eightieth birthday.

And, as I so often do these days at the most trivial and inconsequential of prompts, I started weeping. 

Was it because my mind went back to being thirteen and staying in Anna’s house in St John’s Wood, when we had just discovered the Beatles and played She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah over and over again on her gramophone, while we danced, just the two of us, in our tiny mini-skirts and kingfisher eye-shadow and innocence as wide as the sea?

Was it because Shaun is away and I long to be kissing, for lips that I’m missing, and love that is sent every day?

But why should either of these make me cry?

(Or was it because, underneath it all, every memory goes back to my mother eventually?)

They never play clips for more than a few seconds on the Today Programme. Even when it’s beautiful ’cello music at the end of the programme and you wish they’d played that for three hours instead of any news. 

But it went on. And on. And I longed for it to continue because… well… obviously. And I longed for it to end so I could stop weeping. It didn’t. Not for minutes.

And I wept more and more.

(As I often do these days…)