Spring Is In The Air (0r maybe not).

I know it’s only January, and it has been known to snow in May, and beyond, but l I say there is Spring in the air. Mary at Switch Radio says I’m mistaken. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m awaiting the arrival of young and older people for the Sanctuary session in daylight that makes it feel as though things are brightening up.

So what have we been up to so far, on this bright, spring afternoon? (It’s practically warm out there I tell you) We decided to try a new format for our Switch Radio editing sessions today. Very structured. Very guided. Very fun. (I’m throwing grammar out of the window today, in favour of style). Jules (McCarthy), Neil (Hollins) and I split the group of year 5’s from Chivenor Primary School into three. One group spent the session searching through the interviews that they had already done during visits to Chivenor House, identifying small sections and saving them as new files onto Mary’s memory stick.

Neil took a group of three to the radio studio, where he worked with them copying those files from the memory stick into a fledgling master interview file, and I tool a group of four away to interview Down Your Way stalwart, Betty, who has been asked about the war so many times that she is beginning think she was more than a mere four years old when it ended.

The result of the session is the beginnings of the interview master file, and a newly recorded round table discussion. However that doesn’t really describe the full extent of the afternoon’s fun. Neil decided that the art of audio scrubbing was in fact invented as a comedy device with which to entertain 9 year olds. When one has been listening to audio being stretched, squished and reversed for over 20 years one forgets just how hilarious the sound of your best friend talking backwards actually is; who needs a whoopee cushion when we have Adobe Audition.

And talking of bottom noises, there seemed to be a fascination with bodily excretions in the other two groups. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the fact that , when conducting recorded interviews, wayward noises were not desirable. I loosened up my group’s creative muscles with a game of consequences; we now have a vision of what the future residents of Castle Vale may look like, and what their predilections might be; it’s not pretty.

So a highly productive afternoon, and a lot of giggling.

June and George have just arrived prior to our next session with The Sanctuary group. They say it’s very cold out there. It must still be winter.