Dial Me Up

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Radio and, well it's a bit meta...

 

We went into town today to get the little Citroen it's MOT for the year - a clean bill of health, by the way - and while we were waiting, we had a wander about the increasingly bleak Bangor High Street. There are more shops closed than open these days and with Covid it's just going to get worse. There were a couple of glimmers in the darkness of it all, though. Some brave souls are just outfitting a shop at the Cathedral end of the street, obviously intending to open up soon; we can only wish them well and hope that things pan out for them. The other was further down, not far from the garage that looks after my car. It is the only old-style electrical goods store left in Bangor and has been there longer than we've lived here, so well over forty years and counting. What their fate will be is anyone's guess, but when the current owner retires, it probably will too.

Jane had seen a little portable radio in the window some time ago and wanted something small and light to travel with, so today she went and bought one. Aside from the fact that standalone radios hark back to that pre-smartphone and streaming past I posted about this morning, there is one thing about this particular throwback device which gave me great pleasure. The station indicator is of the old-fashioned, string-driven, linear type. The thing that made me smile though was the preset marking for Test Match Special amongst others. Priceless, and invaluable for cricket lovers like me.

This made me think back to radio dials as they always used to be, back in the strictly AM days of whistles, crackles and Radio Luxembourg fading in and out as you listened under the bedclothes late at night; American Forces Network ghost stories and all those exotic names on the dial; wondering exactly where the hell half these places were. I particularly remember pondering about Athlone, not knowing it was a town in Ireland. As far as I knew it was next door to Hilversum, which it most definitely was and still is not. Fast forward from childhood and the radio days to 1980 and a trip across Ireland in a bus from Dublin to Galway and blow me, where do we make the halfway stop? Athlone. I still consider that one a tick, but I've yet to get to Hilversum. Maybe one day a trip around the radio dials of yore might be possible, who knows.

Erratum: I previously had the Irish trip as 1970 - one digit mistyped: 1980

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