I am going to try an experiment in a couple of minutes, and type today's blog post while listening to the Radio 2 Folk Show. Normally I never have the radio on when I'm writing anything, even a shopping list, and I'm amazed by all the people who put in requests on Classic FM 'to help them with their revision', or who are slaving over their final year Dissertation, or working on a marketing report. How anyone could revise for an exam with music on is a puzzle, let alone the excitement of waiting to hear whether your name is going to be read out. Driving from Newcastle to Plymouth, fair enough, or tiling the bathroom, or weeding, but not revising for exams. I even have to put the radio off if I'm setting out pots in new areas of planting.
I'm banking on the fact that I probably won't really like everything in the show. If and when Mark Radcliffe plays something I think is wonderful, I can stop typing and listen. The tracks I don't like so much I can filter out. It's just as well that I don't love everything he chooses, otherwise I would be left yearning for more CDs than I could afford to buy, or have time to listen to.
Hmn. He's started with Cara Dillon. I haven't actually stopped writing, but I have half an ear cocked. She is back on the folk scene after a slight hiatus while her children were small, with a new album. I confidently predict now that it will be a hot contender for the 2015 BBC Folk Awards album of the year. The method by which the short list for the awards is drawn up is slightly opaque, but the folk powers that be like Cara Dillon. So do I, and she is quite astonishingly pretty. I saw her at the Colchester Arts Centre with my dad, who was equally of the opinion that she was the most beautiful guest he'd seen for years, but he still prefers the gutsier singing style of Julie Murphy.
Now we're on to a track from a Manchester group whose name I didn't catch, because I was talking. The effect is rather funky, as if the Talking Heads had been crossed with a banjo. That's the great thing about the interweb (that the young people use), you can always look up what something was after you've discovered whether you like it. As long as you remember roughly when you heard it. This week's folk programme is straightforward, but tracking down a piece of harpsichord music I know I heard at some point on Radio 3, except that I can't remember if it was yesterday, the day before, or if in fact it was one of the guest's choices on Private Passions as long ago as last Sunday can be harder.
OK, waiting for the next track. So I can type a paragraph in the time taken by a folk track. On the other hand typing the first draft of anything is the fast part. It's the proof reading that takes the time. Not so much spelling, in the days of spell checker, but trying to make sure you haven't used the same word four times in two sentences. Lexical facilitation, they used to call it when I did my psychology degree a long time ago, the idea being that once you've used a word, it is activated, live and hopping in your brain, ready to go again. The third track turned out to be an A Capella American civil rights song, quite good, but not enough to send me scuttling to bookmark it on Amazon.
OK, that's enough of that. It is possible to write, while listening with half an ear if not whole hearted attention, but how anyone could revise meaningfully for exams, let alone finish their Dissertation, is beyond me.
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