Sarah Dunant, in a recent "Point of View" on Radio 4 describes how she came across a set of newspapers from late 1941 lining a chest in a second-hand shop. She remarks that those on the home front in those days had only BBC radio and such newspapers to keep them informed. The tone was striking, she says: sober, factual and does not ratchet up the sensation. She may have been fortunate in the newspapers she found; they were clearly broadsheets of the time. The Daily Mirror was quite capable of stirring emotions, and I guess the Daily Sketch was the same. But the basic point remains that the reporting was factual and the balance of stories was not skewed. She contrasts this with the decline through "if it bleeds, it leads" of print journalism to "the lies it tells, the more it sells" of clickbait in Fleet Street online and the parameters set by Facebook and Twitter.
What struck me most about this particular broadcast was Ms Dunant's coda, which began "I am resigned to dying soon". She is nearly ten years younger than I, so, unless she was thinking of "soon" in geological terms, I guess this must be an intimation of an unwelcome diagnosis. It certainly got me wondering as to how many more Christmases I will see if I survive this one, not to mention the pandemic and those zoonoses which are to come.
That same week, BBC Four broadcast the Sky at Night programme's review of the year. Hitherto, I have taken on board the long time-scales of space explorations but this time it hit me that I may not see the results of the extended Juno mission (Europa fly-by in 2025), BepiColombo (not due to orbit Mercury until 2026) and maybe not even those from the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched soon.
Regrettably, I may not even find time to read one of Sarah Dunant's books, but at least there should be one or two more Points Of View to enjoy and enlighten.
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