Life

Radio review: Today programme on Zika virus, Clive James

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Today Radio 4

My Physics O level was a nightmare – so I’m no scientific boffin, but the expert who came on to the Today programme to talk about combating the Zika virus was enthralling.

He described how genetically modified male mosquitoes are being bred which could be used to stop the virus linked to babies born with damaged brains and abnormally small heads.

It would be easier for these males to target wild females than for the scientists to try and track down them down, he explained.

The offspring of these males are programmed to die before they reach adulthood and do not reproduce.

Of course there are lots of questions – and environmentalists have warned about the possibility of wiping out an entire species.

But this was amazing science made comprehensible for all, including those of us with that rare Bunsen burner allergy and for whom the periodic table was never of the picnic variety.

Writer, critic and wit Clive James thought he would have been dead by now... but he isn’t.

He has terminal cancer and has written beautiful poetry about it.

He wrote a farewell poem about watching the Japanese maple flame for the last time in his garden – but it turned out not to be the last time – and he confessed that, as he didn’t “croak”, it was “slightly awkward”.

“I keep making promises that I will die next Spring and then I don’t...”

Above all, James is a poet - writing every day is what keeps him going.

“It’s the only thing I can do. If I was a tap dancer, I would be through by now,” he said with typical wit in this interview.

He also read from a new poem.

“Soon all that I love will leave me, as I go first into silence, then the fire and then the harbour water in which there will be at last no room to breathe, no time to think...”

The harbour where his ashes might be spread would be in his native Sydney ... and already there could be hitches – those environmentalists for one. But in his dying, his poetry is beautiful and special.