Life

Radio review: Ramblings fun with Clare Balding

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

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

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Ramblings Radio 4

A friend once took the evening train from Dublin to Belfast and ended up sitting opposite a courting couple who necked from Kilbarrack to Kilnasaggart Bridge and everywhere else in between.

The woman sitting beside my friend who had been equally forced into the role of captive audience, leaned over and whispered: “It’s all very well when you’re doing it, but it isn’t as much fun looking on.”

And this is apropos of Ramblings where Clare Balding invites us to walk the highways and byways with her. Walking is all very well when you are doing it... but not so much fun just listening in.

But reader, pause, perhaps I was wrong.

In Hampshire, at the home of Jane Austen, which is now a museum, Clare was joined by Sue Dell and her husband Martyn – both volunteers at the museum in Chawton and Gill Stanton, the museum administrator.

The little nuggets of information sparked the imagination.

In Austen’s time, ladies did not wear knickers. Only prostitutes wore them. So, falling into a ditch could be a little, ahem, indelicate.

Sue, a retired teacher, fell in love with Pride and Prejudice as a teenager and has always fancied herself as Elizabeth Bennet.

Nobody fancies themselves as that ogre Lady Catherine de Burgh. But Sue said that one of her pupils once said that she imagined herself as Elizabeth.

“You can’t be,” said Sue, “I’m Elizabeth Bennet.”

“Miss, you could be Mrs Bennet,” came the reply – a subtle reference to how long in the tooth she appeared... huh, Es for that pupil’s assignments from then on.

The chat was fun, up hills and down dales, just as Austen would have walked them, summer and winter, year round.

Truth is, it was enchanting – the chat was sparkling, in the true spirit of the Austen novels.