THE REST IS SILENCE

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic, I grant you. No one is silencing me exactly and if I want to make a noise I can always shout at my computer. I do, though, feel much lighter and inconsequential than I’ve been feeling of late - a mere breath of swan’s feather in an empty universe - as a result of having just recorded my last ever - the last ever - Point of View.

A Point of View - should there be a person on the planet who doesn’t know let alone listen to it - is (soon to be was) a BBC Radio 4 series in which people with clear voices, keen intelligences and independent minds, talk for ten minutes about a subject of their choice that isn’t quite what current affairs pundits and podcasters talk about, or historical novelists write about, or op-ed writers opinionate about, or social media bigots complain about, or fantasists fantasise about, but is, the rather, uncommitted, non-dogmatic, sometimes acerbic, usually witty, unexpected, frolicsome, fiery, free and, in the best traditions of the English Essay (as written, say, byDr Johnson, Sydney Smith, Hazlitt, Orwell), not quite a novel and not quite a poem, but poetic in invention, and finely tuned to the cadences of the human voice.

The best writing will always read aloud well and you can hear the best essayists in your head, whether or not you only have their written words to go on. But oh, what would I have given to hear Dr Johnson set about a blockhead on a Point of View. Or Coleridge put Wordsworth right on the Imagination. Or DH Lawrence explain why art is always greater than the artist. (In fact, Lawrence had a squeaky voice which would have disqualified him from delivering a Point of View.)

It is the delivering of my words I have enjoyed most. The thought that they are out there in space, blown hither and thither like dandelion spores, now catching the ear of Putin fiddling with the knobs of his Roberts Radio in the basement of the Kremlin, or JD Shvantz freeloading European ideas to prove he’s the only intellectual in the cabinet. I’ve read somewhere that the King and Queen sit up in bed on Sunday mornings to listen. Am I the accompaniment to their home-baked crumpets and Royal Collection honey, I wonder. ‘Hush,’ I imagine Her saying to Him when He crunches the toasted crumpet too vigorously. ‘Clumsy!’ I imagine Him replying when She drops crumbs on the duvet. Do I release the spirit of play throughout the Kingdom?

And now, the last the world will hear of a Point of View will be my voice. I worry how Putin will take the news. Will it be my fault if he fills the void by invading another country? Will JDF Shvantz get his boss to impose a vengeful, retrospective tariff on the BBC?

It is a melancholy honour, anyway, to have been asked to deliver the Last Rites on this indispensable series, in which the reflective imagination was granted a primacy it enjoyed almost nowhere else, not to escape the world but to confront it - though of course it’s always possible the BBC wanted to make sure it was well and truly over and saw me as just the speaker to kill it stone dead.

You can hear me on BBC Radio 4 and decide for yourself on Friday March 28 at 20.50, and the repeat on Sunday March 30 at 08.48