Women, women everywhere

We had a long drive back from the north-east last weekend. Six hours or so, including a stop halfway, just past Britain’s most crepuscular town, Grantham. My wife does the driving because she thinks I’ll kill us all. My job is to feed album after album into the car’s admirably old-fashioned CD player. I rarely play more than three or four songs from the same album because my wife gets tetchy and says something like ‘This is too noisy’ or ‘This is boring, change it.’ So I’m kept pretty busy. Every time I remove a CD, the car’s ‘entertainment centre’ reverts to its default position of playing Radio 4.

And here’s the point. We set out at midday. It was five hours before I heard a male voice on Radio 4, when Saturday PM came on. Five hours. We must have heard snatches (an appropriate term, I think) of Radio 4 40 or 50 times and on each occasion it was a woman moaning about something.