ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

I’m prone to sentimentalising institutions, but will admit to feeling oddly comforted when channel-flicking on a hotel bed alights at last on ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ World News – you know, the one you only get abroad, with the interminable drumming countdown that gives way to a voice that sounds like home. I grew up in a house where the TV was always on to save us, I suppose, from having to be alone with each other. Or later the nocturnal tones of the World Service – all the other options gone – would accompany the washing up my mum liked to do in the small hours, with the fridge’s drone and the beat-up Sony radio her sole companions – her sunflower gloves circling in the gloom, bowls clinking to beats from Mali, or the latest from Kosovo or Sierra Leone. Places no less far flung from our English kitchen than her native Hong Kong where she taught herself this equivocal tongue by intoning its unfamiliar vowels – The quick brown… – from scrounged textbooks stamped with a Crown that wasn’t exactly foreign. And where do I belong? From my teens, well-meaning adults would exclaim You have a lovely voice! Not picking up my flush of shame, they’d keep going. When you grow up, you should be on the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½! Well, here I am. Those Saturday afternoons in Mrs Thorpe’s front room learning to recite Browning (Oh, to be in England!) along with the other offspring of suburban Asian parents, driven by anxiety or aspiration that we shouldn’t sound like them. Well, here I am, still the abashed colonial. Your voice is so beautiful. So calm. In my mind’s ear, the night-time radio’s comforting hum. Well, here we are. Look how far we’ve come.