Pick of the Week, Radio 4
Imagine you’re in a lighthouse in a place so remote it feels like the end of the world... no TV, no Wi-Fi, practically no phone signal, all you have is a radio. So began Freya McClements – writer and journalist – taking us on an audio journey for Radio 4’s Pick of the Week.
It’s a familiar voice – we’re listening to one of our own – but it’s also her talent as a storyteller and her love of radio that draw you in.
We’re with her in that journey back through time… tuning the radio dial old-school style; navigating the crackling, hearing the shipping forecast in her remote cottage as the waves batter outside.
She chose intriguing stories for her Pick of the Week. Take the podcast that asked if the yeti actually exists.
She took us with her deep into a Vietnamese cave and a woman who painted a picture of her country that was so much more than the war.
And she selected a beautiful interview from Radio Ulster’s Your Place and Mine.
In the clip we heard Ann Ward taking presenter Ann Marie McAleese to visit Saint Monnina’s Well in Killeavey, south Armagh.
The mountain of Slieve Gullion is Ann’s spiritual home. She talked about her ancestors – grandparents and parents – and how this was the very route that her mother would have taken as she travelled down to school each day on a donkey.
The well would have been open… she painted a picture of Saint Monnina kneeling waist-deep chanting the psalms.
And it was the refuge where her mother took her 10 children in the days of the Troubles in Belfast.
They turned back to this holy mountain – a world of water from the well, no electricity, no telephone, no television.
This was about the power of the natural world to soothe and to heal.
Freya’s radio adventure included a meditation on fire – how it can lift you or you can lose yourself in the blaze of crackling flames and a fire that you built yourself.
She also chose an interview with a woman who has fire in her belly – Dolly Parton.
Warm, vibrant and bubbling joy, Dolly thought back on her hit 9 to 5 and that great line about pouring yourself “a cup of ambition”.
It was a lovely journey in good company.
