Back to Delia Derbyshire

This afternoon, I met Hannah in Manchester for some lunch, and then we walked across to the John Rylands library, where I'd arranged to sign up as a reader so that I could access their Delia Derbyshire audio recordings. Hannah stayed down in the café and read, while I went up to the reading room on the fourth floor. 

Registering as a reader was easy enough but then I had to wait while the two very helpful ladies prepared the special Microsoft Surface that houses the recordings. I resisted the urge to join in with the connecting of power cables, headphones etc by going over to stand by the window, which had a good view over the streets below through the pouring rain. 

And then we were all set. It was explained to me that there was a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and a folder full of recordings. The two documents both made some effort to list the recordings but, to be fair, it's a bit of a botched job; lots of duplication and references that might not mean much if you don't know anything about Derbyshire. Also, the knowledge about some of the recordings is quite vague.

I have to say that there was a lot more material that I was expecting and was stumped at where to start but in the end I picked 'DD041 MacBeth Stratford'. That wasn't much good, just electronic noodling and sound effects. A little disheartened, I moved on to 'MacBeth Belfast', which turned out to be quite engrossing and I spent twenty minutes to that whilst looking out at the rain. 

Next, I ended up with a weird recording a child saying "Mummy... Daddy..." followed by an old woman's voice: "I loathe you". This repeated in different sequences for a couple of minutes. I won't be retuning to that. But then there was 'Delian Mode', 'Doctor Who' (of course), some music from 'The Tomorrow People' and some treated trumpet, which was very enjoyable. 

If I only had the time I'd like to do a better job of cataloguing the archive - not least in describing each recording - but I am definitely going to go back and listen to some more of it. It is like stepping sideways out into a different world.

After that, though, I returned to earth and specifically the café, where Charlie had joined Hannah and we chatted over coffee and cake until the Minx kindly came to pick me up.

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Book 19: 'Vinegar Girl' by Anne Tyler. This came from Big Green Books, last month, and it is, unfortunately, a stinker. Apparently Anne Tyler has written 20 books and the Daily Mail asserts that it’s her funniest to date. *looks to camera* Not sure what I’m reading next but I could do with a page-turner.