SPEAKER_09 0:01

Hello and welcome to Wild Angles.

SPEAKER_10 0:11

A radio show with a collective view.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

An ordinary everyday.

SPEAKER_10 0:16

Objects and subjects.

SPEAKER_15 0:20

One theme per episode.

SPEAKER_16 0:22

With various reflections.

SPEAKER_15 0:24

Opinions and ideas. And of course, music.

SPEAKER_10 0:38

Wild Angles.

SPEAKER_17 0:44

Today's theme is cold.

SPEAKER_14 0:49

Hello, I'm Scott. Captain Robert Falcon Scott was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer, whose name became synonymous with the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Driven by a blend of national pride, scientific ambition, and personal resolve, Scott led two major expeditions to the icy continent. The Discovery Expedition of 1901 to 1904 and the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910 to 1913. His ultimate goal during the Terra Nova voyage was to be the first human to reach the geographic sound hole. On January the 17th, 1912, Scott and his four companions, Edward Wilson, Lawrence Oak, Henry Barrows, and Edgar Evans finally reached their destination. Only to discover that Norwegian explorer Road Amerson had beaten them by thirty-four days. Devastated, exhausted, and facing an unusually harsh and hearted autumn, the men turned back to brave an 800-mile trek across the rough ice shelf. Suffering from severe frostbite disgurvy and extreme starvation, all five men perished during the return journey. Trapped inside their tent by an unrelating blizzard just eleven miles from a vital supply depot. Scott penned his final words into his diary. Friday, March 29th, 1912. Since the 21st, we have had a continuous gale from west to southwest and southwest. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bear food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away. But outside the door of the tent, it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end. But we are getting weaker, of course. And the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. Ah Scott, for God's sake, look after our people.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Where is Mona? She's long gone. Where has Mary? She's taken her alone. But they haven't put their metons on and there's fifteen feet of pure white snow. Where is Mark? Where is Matthew? Now it's getting dunk. They're all out back under fifteen feet up. Where I'm the fifteen feet up. But my neighbor is my enemy. I kept a wave in my arms till I could not see I don't feel there's an anybody out there. I can remember everyone.

SPEAKER_10 6:47

My name's Jan from the mountains of Norway. My name is actually Ian from Bristol. My love of cold began when I started to dislike hot weather. And by hot I mean hot sunny weather. And by cold I mean wind and rain and snow. I fell in love with cold when I started spending time in the Nordic countries of Europe. However, my journey to the north started in all places Italy. We were on holiday with the kids in October, staying in a hostel. In the evenings, the communal space buzzed with young people telling of their travels and places to go. Anne and I brought our young children out to this environment to mix with these inspiring young folk. It didn't take long before we struck up a conversation with a Scottish guy called David, who was a photographer. He told us tales of his adventures backpacking around Europe. But what couldn't be denied was his passion for Iceland and his search for the perfect Northern Lights photograph. Very quickly, I was intoxicated by David's photos and stories of the Aurora and Iceland's otherworldliness. So, I planned my first visit to Iceland. We rented a wooden post office converted to a five-bedroom house in a southwestern town called Borgani's. It's about an hour west of Reykjavik. The house was set in an ancient lava field, desolate and alone. I fell in love immediately with the bleakness of the setting, the close connection to the land and the weather. And on our first night in the house, the winds reached up to 80 miles an hour, tearing through the house, rattling it, shaking it like a spinning top. And I really thought that the house was going to get snatched up into the storm, much like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz. Laying in bed, listening to the moaning and groaning of the house's wooden structure, I leaned over and said to Anna, Oh my goodness, what have I brought us to? Our first night in Iceland was not so much a baptism of fire, but a christening in ice. And of course, there was my first experience with the northern lights, or Arctic lights as they are sometimes referred to. Travelling with friends to a town called Issyafjordor in the western fjords of Iceland, we drove through Arctic snowstorms over mountains with the midday sun so low in the sky with a gentle zenith light I'll never forget. As the bleak white mountains that we passed through to get to the west of Iceland held a heavenly beauty that seemed universal. The town near Isia Fiordor that we were staying in was called Sudovic. It was on the banks of a fjord. There was a wooden church which held memories of sailors lost in the treacherous Arctic Sea. And there were houses dotted on their white hillsides, colourful and bright, in open war with the bleakness. Up here, he felt like he was far removed from everything western, and the northern lights up there on our first nights were amazing. Despite the cold night, we brave the elements and watched the endless stream of green and sometimes red dance above us and reflect in the mirror fjord, Arctic dark waters. And ever since my love for the north has taken me not just to Iceland, but to Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Everything in the north feels clean. And what do I mean by clean? I'm not really sure. But I think it's what the cold weather does to a community, is what I mean by clean. Yeah, it can be hard, but there is a strange beauty to these cold places that makes you appreciate things like sunshine, a warm house and a family, the joy of lighting a fire and putting on a woolly jumper. How on this day in the heat, as I'm sat here in my shorts and t-shirt, do I long to do that? To light a fire and put a jumper on because I'm cold. The song I picked today is by a band called Rogue Valley. It's called Icebox, and it's a song about living in the cold out in far-flung and remote outposts.

SPEAKER_06 10:43

There's no daylight. There's no more. Means that I'm still kicking in this ice box on the northern edge. The vertical spawn star. I can feel my hands. The birds have all moved south. The better it feels, the more it burns in my mouth. I feel grateful. Something else be done. Mother nature straightens you, plays you.

SPEAKER_11 14:03

He was talking about his love for cold countries, a love which I guess has slightly been passed on down to me. So I guess that this is going to be a generational extension of that story. From the time I first went to Iceland when I was about 12, and I completely fell in love with these weird and foreign landscapes. So the first time I went travelling by myself with a friend when I was 18. We went to Norway. We were there in the Arctic Circle for a month working on a farm, and it was fantastic. I absolutely loved it. It was beautiful. Absolutely amazing. And I was very lucky this year to get offered a job working in Norway. I was working as a Northern Lights tour guide. And I think at Save Desay that was probably the coolest job I've ever had. It was absolutely amazing. Seeing the Northern Lights more or less every night is such a gift. When you see a good Northern Lights display where the Northern Lights are strong, they're moving, they're dancing across the sky. It leaves you feeling creative, you're tingling with positive energy, and you're just left completely mesmerized. Everything is dramatic in a good way. But it was also a hard job. Driving down the northern lights on cold Arctic nights was difficult. Sometimes well, being in the Arctic circles, you can imagine the weather is your worst enemy. It's cold, it's raining, and finding spots from which you can see the northern lights through the clouds can be really tricky. Driving icy conditions, having entitled tourists who think that the northern lights are going to be magic up in there. I don't realize that they're a natural phenomenon, but it can be challenging to deal with for sure. But ultimately, all you needed was a good northern light so they could completely outweigh all of those comms. But the northern lights aren't the only thing that are amazing and mesmerizing about that cold Arctic circle. One thing that I particularly love I love the ocean and the marine world. You can see there's a jellyfish and cold water anemones just on the side of the harbour wall. And it would look like a painting, like a mono painting, all these different coloured anemones. Some of them being white plumos, some of them being orange, and then these lion's made jellyfish, which are these giant jellyfish that deliver really, really nasty things, one of the most powerful things you can get from a jellyfish. Just majestically floating through the water. And all these colours you could see in this two-degree water was absolutely amazing. One of the days I even managed to find some sea slugs off the harbour. Now this might not sound very interesting, but I had to get my hands into the cold Arctic water, looking through the fronds of some kelp, trying to find a little sea slug. And sea slugs are tiny, colourful creatures. And I managed to find 20 on a single piece of kelp frond that I was very happy. Anyhow, Norway is an amazing country, and I'm very excited to be working again there next year. So my song of choice is Hadsel by Bay Roots, an album that was written on the island of Hadzall off the coast of Norway in the Arctic Circle. And to me, the song conveys a feeling of cold weather, Arctic winds, and just general cosy bleakness.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Hi, my name's Matt, and this is the first time that I've been on the show. Thinking about the topic of cold brought back some memories, and actually, I guess, like most of us, cold has been in my mind a fair bit over recent weeks. It feels like it's something that's been missing from our lives while we experience all of this hot weather. I do though have a complicated relationship with the cold. I both love it and sometimes I hate it. Um I work from home part of the week, and in a hot, stuffy room, um, I really relish the opportunity to switch off the laptop, get to the beach in around 15 minutes, which is something I often forget how lucky I am to have, and then walk into the cold sea and float around for a bit, which does more than just cool me down, but it releases all those life tensions that build up over the day. The rest of the week, I'm working in London. At the first sign of summer, the air conditioning on the trains is whacked up, and I spend two hours freezing and wishing I had the foresight to travel with a blanket while wondering how every other traveller appears to be so stoic. Sometimes, though, the cold bites. When I was a child, we used to spend Christmas at my nanna's in Birmingham. She was the definition of stoic. This was the late 70s and early eighties, and at the risk of sounding my age, I'm pretty sure the December's were much colder back then. Her house had no central heating, and during the day, my dad, sister, and I would alternate standing in front of the only real source of warmth, which was a small electric fire in the lounge. We'd get so close that we'd risk setting alight those itchy trousers we had to wear back then. In the evenings, we would sit around the dining room table and play cards while the electric blankets warmed up the beds upstairs. We used to play a game called Newmarket, which involved betting on hands, and there was a jar of old pennies and half pennies that would be brought out, distributed, and won or lost. I'd forgotten the rules to the game though. Maybe I'll look them up now. At bedtime, we'd step out of the cold and get under the warm blankets, waiting for Christmas Day to come around. But in the morning, There was ice on inside the windows, and it took a sheer force of will to get out of bed and suffer that first bite of cold. I haven't experienced that for a long time. I can clearly remember the covers being pulled up to my chin and the miserable feeling of wanting to stay warm after having to step into that cold. A couple other things. In that room there was a small door which opened onto a tiny attic in which there was just a desk and a chair. I suppose now that room is non-sweet. But back then it gave me nightmares, and I would lie in bed, not facing the door, afraid of what might be lurking behind it. The second thing is that the cold back in that room, it really had a smell. A bit metallic, maybe a bit engine-y, really hard to describe. But whatever it was, when I occasionally pick up that smell today as an adult, 40 plus years later, all those memories come back along with a little tinge of Christmas anticipation. To be honest, I like the idea of having something in my subconscious that gives me a Proustian rush. I don't mind that it's the smell of coal that gives me that, because like I said, I have a complicated relationship with it. So it felt like it fitted, and the song I've chosen is I Smell Winter by the House Martins.

SPEAKER_07 23:23

So forget me if I was behind, but I can still see the line. I'm a plant. So far as yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

People who are generally just distant, maybe come across as aloof, um, just got a lack of warmth or empath empathy about them. And I'm thinking in terms of where we live in Europe, um, people from the West and Southeast Europe, they are known for being publicly expressive, very warm, friendly, welcoming. And it's no surprise really that they perceive people from the north and northeast Europe, so that would be Scandinavia, Finland, Russia, as being quite cold and aloof to keep themselves to themselves. But actually when you look into it, you realise that in these countries there are certain values and a lot of emphasis placed on respecting others, which is respecting their privacy, um, each to their own, and so you don't necessarily bombard them with questions, and this obviously comes across as coldness to people from other nationalities. But again, these are all actually quite sweeping generalizations in the same way that you get more thinking about British people. How are we perceived funny enough Germans thinking of another European country? I mean geographically, not politically, we're not going down that one. Germans think that the cold uh British are quite cold and reserved, and that's what the British say about the Germans. So generally studies, social studies have set shown that across culturally there is obviously agreeableness and warmth everywhere, across all nationalities. It's just generally our perceptions that skew this, um and maybe we always like to think of ourselves as just having a bit more decorum than other nationalities and you know more favourable qualities, so maybe we're automatically biased in our approach anyway. Thinking a bit closer to home, um the northern-southern divide in in England. People from the north are considered much more friendly just chatting to a stranger on the bus. Southerners avoid eye contact, northerners don't volunteer information, they wait to be asked, they expect to be asked. There's an underlying belief that it's a bit rude just to talk about yourself, whereas it's a reverse. In the South, um, you offer a bit of information about yourself, you expect the other person to do the same, but you don't want to appear because you don't want to appear nosy that you're asking relationship questions. So if you put a northerner in a group of southerners, they probably won't say much because they're waiting to be asked a question. Instead, they find themselves in a group of people just talking about themselves. So they might think that the southerners might think the northerner is just being unsociable and just plain rude. Um you put the southerner in a group of northerners and they'll be bombarded with questions, they'll try to reply and be polite even if they're a bit uncomfortable with some of the questions. And so therefore the northerner thinks that southerners are a bit full of themselves, not interested in anyone else, or just the game playing mood. On that note, let's hear Morrissey from the Smith's cynical take on cold people.

SPEAKER_07 29:35

I was happy in the hose of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I'm miserable now. I was looking for a job and then I found a job.

SPEAKER_09 31:56

Hi, Kev the Poet here. Now, those that listen regularly to this show know that I love music, and regularly will turn the week's theme around to incorporate me talking about music in some way or another. Well, surprise, surprise, I'll be doing exactly that again this week. And so the theme is cold. I think without too much thinking, we can all come up with a song or two connected to the cold. Well, I'm going to take cold to the limit today. I'm going full-on freezing. James Taylor is an American folk singer whom I've always enjoyed. He started out in the 1960s and would regularly be seen hanging out in the troubadour, a famous old music venue in Los Angeles, alongside the likes of Neil Young, as well as his good friends Carol King and Jody Mitchell. In 1968, he was the first ever artist signed to the Beatles' Apple record label. And his hits Fire and Rain, You've Got a Friend, and Carolina in my mind will forever be played. Well, they will be at my house anyway. Anyway, his song, The Frozen Man, was released in 1991, and which brings me round to this week's theme. The Frozen Man is a fictional ballad about a 19th-century sailor who is lost at sea amid thick ice and never found. Then he is found about a hundred years later, his body preserved in the ice all that time, and miraculously revived in more modern times. What I like most about the song, other than James's beautiful, effortless vocals, coupled with his melodic guitar playing, is that when listening to it, you are living the story as he tells it. You get emotionally involved with his tale, and ultimately start imagining what it would be like to actually be brought back to life a hundred years later. Great music does that, doesn't it? It teleports you into a song and it chucks you back onto your sofa as the song fades out. James Taylor is a wonderful storyteller, and this song does just that. So it is a bit of a loose link to cold, but it does give me the opportunity to play this wonderful song. So here it is, The Frozen Man by James Taylor. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_05 34:40

What are we doing up just to swallow me home? Ice in a rigging and howl in the wind chalk to my body as we tumbled in my brothers and the others are lost at sea. I alone and return to tell thee. Get in the nice forest tends to read to off the world again. Thought I'm a stay on the frozen land. She was all in white at the foot of my bed. I said, Angel the mercy, I'm alive from I did My name is William James McVee.

SPEAKER_15 35:51

I was born in 1843, within a little pool by the sea That ain't who I am saying I'm a total man took a lot of money to start my heart, my leg by my eye lose papers comes to the art and the children TV cry I thought it be nice just to visit my grave See what kind of tombstone I might have saw my wife and my daughter and it seems so strange Both of them that I'm gone from extreme old age Be here when I die, make sure I'm gone Don't leave a button or a thumb You can raise your arm, you can wiggle your hand, unlike myself And you can wade with light of the frozen man Adore Freeze to death lose a little life with every breath Say goodbye and life on her come around again Lord have mercy on the frozen man You're listening to Wild Angles to me at all I see two things on the world. They changed things around the bone needle. Archaeologists around old bone needles uh you know tens of thousands of years old that allowed you know humans at the time to make tiny fitting animal furs so no heat would escape. And they would seal them up with animal grease or any exposed parts of skin, like the face, would have a coated layering of animal grease. And humans at the time ate 4,000 to 6,000 calories. Imagine that. Like massive, you constantly having to put up with the cold. Anyway, those are the two points I found interesting, just how different it all looked, and you know, the lengths to which humans had to do what they had to do to survive. So I've chosen the song uh Holocene by Bonnie Vera. So for warmer times.

SPEAKER_13 44:00

Because I'm afraid it's gonna get a wee bit toilety. A little bit sciencey, but definitely toilety. Okay. So let's go. About fifteen years ago, I remember a colleague telling me about when she'd spent a year volunteering at one of the anthardic research stations. Now I know she told me some interesting things about climate change and penguins, but the way that stuck in my mind was this. Facilities were very rudimentary, including a bucket. Just a bucket. With a small team to use as a toilet. If I recall correctly, today my colleague told me it was fine because it was so cold. Good old cold diaresis. Aren't the bodies amazing? God just thought of everything.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

But to the bust, you bust in love, in touch in the birds of snowy gray. You best have a bad life. Everybody feels your shoes to sway. You better say that.

SPEAKER_12 48:33

When I think of cold, I think of the first house I rented with two of my best mates, Ad and Griff. Now, nobody in their right mind would dream of renting a house to three young men, but we had a cunning plan. Ad and his girlfriend at the time pretended they wanted to rent the three-bedroom house, and once the contracts were signed and keys handed over, Sarah didn't move in and me and Griff did. Now this plan worked brilliantly for about ten days until there was a knock at the door. I looked out the bedroom window down at a woman who looked up at me and said, Who the bloody hell are you? And I cheekly responded with, Who the bloody hell are you? She said, I'm the landlady and you can pack your bags. After some begging and pleading and promising to pay the rent, she made the huge mistake of allowing us to stay. Now it was the summer and we marvelled at how cool the house would stay no matter how hot it was outside, never thinking for a second to query why the single pane windows and the front and back door would rattle so much on a windy day. That was of course until the winter. There was no central heating and I doubt very much there was any insulation, and it was often warmer out on the street than it was actually inside this house. It was so cold that we would wake up every single morning and we could quite clearly see our breath, and on extreme evenings there would even be frost on the inside of the bedroom window. Me, Ad and Griff would get up sometimes, we would wrap blankets around us from head to toe and walk down wearily uh to the kitchen, looking like three cheap Obi-Wan Kenobi lookalikes, desperate for a cup of tea to warm up our hands and bodies, happy to actually go to work, knowing that even if we were working outside, it would be ha it would be warmer than being inside this house. T Now there was an open fire, but we very rarely had any wood. Occasionally we'd pinch wood from next door or or find a pallet or something to burn on the way home from a club or from work. T There were things sometimes sacrificed. Ad at the time was a trainee carpenter and he would proudly bring home stools and chairs and tables he'd made. But if we were cold and drunk, uh often these things would get smashed up and sacrificed. We would burn anything, anything from the bin, uh ads would work, like I said, uh and anything else we could put our hands hands to, including clothes occasionally. No more so than on one infamous night. This did we didn't know that this was the beginning of the end. I'm not sure what happened. I think just drunkardly one of the chairs of the living room got broken by by accident. We were thinking it's already broke and decided to smash it up and throw it on the fire. One thing led to another and other things were then smashed up. And while we had a nice, lovely warm evening, uh we were certainly going to pay a price. The neighbour burst in the back door that night, maybe alerted to the noise by our other neighbour. Sorry, the landlord burst in. He came in, saw the mess in the living room, saw a leg from the table sticking out half burnt, sticking out of the fire, and threatened to take us to the police for vandalism. This is when one of our best friends, Kempi, turned to him with a nice cold look on his face face and said, Sir, this was not vandalism, this was survival. We all burst into laughter but were soon um evicted from the house. I'm not condoning what we did, it was absolutely disgraceful, but it's a story we still talk about now. It was actually Kempi that chose the song for this week, and it was Sunshine on a Rainy Day by Zoe, a wonderful song from that period in our lives. Enjoy the song, get up and dance, it will keep you warm, and whatever you do, never ever rent your house to three guys from Tamworth. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_07 53:02

Oh the Lord, the tell us, Wild Angles was presented by Scott, Maeve, Anna, Johnny, Ian, Gary, Jasmine, Kevin, Joe, and Poppy.

SPEAKER_16 55:51

Music was by Johnny Rose. This has been a go beyond production. A special thanks to Matt. Wasn't he great?