Vox Meditantis

What podcasts are you listening to?

Saturday, 8th November 2025

This evening the flat sounded like itself again – tap running to a steady tempo, saucepan ticking as it cooled, harbour traffic low enough to be more weather than event – and the small chorus of voices I invite in when the day wants company but not conversation found their places without fuss.

There’s a question tucked inside that ritual – what voices earn the run of your rooms, and why – and tonight the answer arrived by habit: a short poetry reading while I washed up, the kind that paces breath without insisting on meaning; a local piece about river dredging and ferry delays for the walk to the bin; an old interview with an archivist whose careful delight for paper repairs felt like someone explaining tenderness in another dialect.

I did, as threatened, stop by Elena’s for ground ginger – she slipped it into the bag with a practised grace, the bell on her door making its dignified announcement – and the card in my mother’s hand remained where I left it last night, not as a shrine but as a marker in the text of the kitchen, a promise I’m not rushing.

Marcus saved me a late coffee because he always does, and we traded the sort of maritime gossip that believes in tides more than outrage; New Corinth thrives on these small, neighbourly bulletins, and the harbour rewarded us by performing competence – no drama, just boats doing their honest work.

I’m wary of filling silence with cleverness, so the programmes I keep are more gentle ballast than distraction: poems read like letters, long walks with an interviewer who listens as if the table were a confidante, the occasional sea report whose bureaucracy accidentally becomes haiku.

There are exclusions I honour – no true crime, nothing that turns suffering into entertainment, nothing that would feel like bringing the consulting room home by another door – and the older I get, the more I admire editors who know when to leave a breath in.

Between errands, Dan at Riverfront Books pressed an audio essay into my week with the sort of conspiratorial kindness only a bookseller can pull off; “for your evening washing-up,” he said, as if he’d inspected my sink personally, and I granted the voice provisional residency.

Jenny texted me a bossy list – buy ginger, write the sentence, eat something green – and though she will deny it, there’s love in the nag; librarians understand that order is just care with paperwork.

David sent a link to a conversation with a conservator who spoke about mending as “visible kindness” rather than trickery; I listened whilst folding towels and thought of how often we hide repair as if the act of fixing needs disguise, when in truth the seam is sometimes the holiest line.

At lunch I tried a news round‑up with the sound low; it lasted four minutes before I admitted I was measuring my pulse instead of the headlines, and I went back to the archivist speaking softly about wheat paste and patience.

The day wanted smallness and got it: groceries, a saunter along the river path where the wind kept its shoulders down, a note to my brother acknowledging the photograph he sent of a lopsided bowl with the caption “proof of life,” a kindness disguised as comedy.

And then – because the world sometimes refuses to stay politely outside – the message light on the landline, Maggie’s voice steady and brisk: a newly accessioned envelope at the Historical Society, letters with my mother’s name in a hand Maggie didn’t recognise, dated from the early seventies when the shipyard unions and the council were not on speaking terms; could we meet Monday at nine to look, decide, and sign the form that lets the public see or not.

This is not the kind of decision one can upholster with thought and put off indefinitely; a paper becomes public, or it doesn’t, and either choice says something about what I believe a life belongs to once the hands that wrote it are gone.

I have said yes to Monday, which is a sentence with consequences, and felt the subtle rearrangement that follows: the knowledge that whatever I decide will touch not just a narrative I carry, but a town that remembers itself in displays and plaques and the murmurs people trade over coffee.

It is odd, the company we permit when preparing for such days; tonight I wanted voices that modelled care taken slowly – no verdicts, no crescendos – so I let a historian think her way aloud through a narrow problem and a poet walk me around a single image until the image learned to breathe.

On the way back from the bin, Tom lifted his hand without making me stop; it was the kind of greeting that counts as blessing in a harbour town, a reminder that being seen isn’t the same as being examined.

What I listen to, then: people who refuse to shout; craftsmen of thought; small dispatches from this river’s workaday life; a little music if the day has earned it; and, when the house is finally clean of its own racket, the necessary silence that lets the rest of it land.

Across the evening, the behaviour is humble – washing up, walking bins, matching socks – and the feeling is steadier for it: a nervous system that doesn’t need taming so much as good company.

Beneath that, a need announces itself without fuss: to be accompanied by voices that keep faith with attention without demanding performance in return.

And under that, a value I keep rediscovering like an object misplaced in plain sight: neighbourliness, which in practice is simply the agreement to show up for one another at human volume, whether over counters or letters or the quiet work of deciding what to bring into the light.

Monday, I’ll sit at the long table with Maggie and read what the past expects of the present, one page at a time, and whatever I choose will be an imperfect kindness – visible, I hope, and honest.

For tonight, the house has done enough just by remembering how to hold voices that earn their keep and letting the rest go out with the washing water.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.