When I was making plans for Six Things in 2026, it occurred to me that it might be quite fun to do a podcast version. So once a month, instead of the regular Six Things newsletter, I’ll invite a guest to chat about six things of interest to them – things they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre.
My fourth guest is Isabel Rogers, poet, novelist, cake-baker, occasional cello-practiser, and nearly full-time coal-tit-whisperer.
You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).
The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.
Lev Parikian: Hello and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent or just downright bizarre. This month’s guest is the writer Isabel Rogers. Isabel began her writing career at school, adapting Asterix books as weekly plays for her class. After years of morbid teenage love poetry, she forgot about writing and went to work in the city for 15 years, before seeing sense, moving to the Highlands and writing her first novel and many examples of what I call Proper Poetry, for which she has won what she describes as “a biggish poetry prize”. More of that in a bit, I think. She was also Hampshire Poet Laureate for a few years before swerving into comic fiction, in which genre she’s published four excellent novels in the Stockwell Park Orchestra series, which is a subject – as a conductor of amateur orchestras – that I find close to both my heart and the bone, what with (spoiler alert) her killing off a renowned conductor in chapter one of the first book. Isabel can sing a top C, makes a lot of cake, and doesn’t practice the cello enough. Hello Isabel.
Isabel Rogers: Hello Lev.
Lev: Thanks for coming on.
Isabel: I’m sorry about the killing of the conductor.
Lev: That felt quite personal.
Isabel: Somebody had to do it, Lev.
Lev: We’ve known each other for a few years and you’ve always known what I do for a living, and it just felt a little bit pointed. He didn’t have a very similar name to me, to be fair. So maybe it wasn’t me that you wanted to kill off.
Isabel: It wasn’t. I’ve known lots of conductors before you, Lev.
Lev: …and wanted to kill them all, I suspect. So you’ve brought six excellent things. But first, before we go into the things, I do want to know, because you’re slightly coy about the “biggish poetry prize” – so it’s either extremely big and you’re being coy or it’s extremely small and you’re trying to make people...
Isabel: The poetry world is very small and nobody knows anything about it. There’s the National Poetry Prize which everybody knows about and you win five grand and you get on the news and everything. I won five grand but it’s a prize nobody’s heard of. It was the Cardiff Poetry Prize and it was huge at the time but nobody knows about it apart from people in the poetry world.
Lev: You have brought six wonderful things, and not all of them designed to curry favour with the podcast host.
Isabel: At least two of them were, I admit that.
Thing 1 – Coal Tits
Lev: The first one very much is – and it is, or they are, coal tits.
Isabel: Yes.
Lev: So we should firstly… obviously anybody who’s a regular listener to this podcast will know that I am very keen on birds. And if they’re British, they will probably know what a coal tit is, or they’ll have an idea. It’s the lesser considered member of the tit family. The great tits and blue tits are the ones that people will probably know from their feeders. Coal tits are… they’re underrated birds. There’s a great category of underrated birds and coal tits are among them. If you’re American, you will be listening to this and going, oh, what is a coal tit? It’s the same family as the chickadee. Chickadee is so descriptive of the kind of sounds that they make. And these coal tits are… they presumably make these kinds of sounds when they see you coming…
Isabel: Oh, they love me, Lev. They love me. I have made friends with my coal tits. We may have to explain, I am currently living in my garden room down the end of the garden because I’ve got a massive building project going on and I have no house. And there’s a deck outside the garden and I’ve always fed the birds, but now I’m kind of in the middle of the wildlife. They seem to have been bolder and they were feeding on my hanging feeder. And then I just noticed a whole load of coal tits over the winter, about 20 of them maybe, maybe 30, I don’t know, but getting bolder and bolder. I thought, oh, I wonder if they would take food from my hand. So I started putting my hand out with choice sunflower seeds on. And do you know what? It took about three or four days, maybe, of me just...
Lev: I was going to ask how long. And how long on each session? I mean, not all day…
Isabel: Well, they were used to me anyway, because I do my washing up outside on the deck, right next to the feeders. They’re used to me wandering around and they didn’t fly off much. So the first time I was probably standing half an hour, maybe.
Lev: Right.
Isabel: But I like standing in the garden anyway, which we’ll get onto later. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Lev: But also in a stress position with your hand outstretched.
Isabel: Oh no, I learned fairly early on that if you stand propping your elbow against a hip, it’s quite comfortable. Although it does make your hand closer to your body, so maybe it would have taken them less time if I’d stood with my hand out, but you know.
Lev: More pain for less time, yeah.
Isabel: Yes, but it was great. And they came. And then over the winter, I would regularly have ten flying around and trying to fight for space on my hand. It was extraordinary. And now there’s one that’s just tame as anything and he or she loiters around. And if they’re hungry and I’m not out, it will knock its beak on the glass or land on the outside door handle looking at me. So I go out and get the tin open and it will be on my head or my arm or my shoulder while I’m getting the seed out of the tin before it’s in my hand and then it will go into my hand and…
Lev: This is pet behaviour isn’t it?
Isabel: I love them.
Lev: “Give me food!” Quite marvellous. I’m so jealous of this and I have not tried that hard, I have to say, to have things feed from the hand. My relationship with birds has always been a more... I love watching them and I love watching their behaviour. They have come close… so we can be sitting on our terrace and there’ll be the feeders there and they will come close… you know, they’re quite used to our presence there but…
Isabel: Well if you sit on the terrace you can have your hand out with some seeds on and still carry on your chat and they will eventually come and…
Lev: So this is where it falls down because I just don’t have the patience to do that. This is one of those things where… I’m too restless as a birder. I do tend to just kind of go, right, well, they’re not here, I’m going to move on and go to the next one.
Isabel: But I want to know why the robin hasn’t come because they’re supposed to be really tame. And also I have the guilt of the sparrowhawk who has also learned what I do and quite often screeches around the corner of my garden room. And there have been a couple of piles of feathers on the ground. I think they’re blue tit feathers. I don’t think they’re my friends.
Lev: It’s really interesting as well that people love the garden birds and will demonize anything… there’s a sort of hierarchy of the things we love.
Isabel: Absolutely.
Lev: We love the fluffy ones. We love the blue tits. Magpies are horrible because they predate chicks and eggs. “Disgusting, disgusting birds”.
Isabel: Yes, I try and just accept that sparrowhawks have to eat too. And there were plenty of little birds around.
Lev: Exactly. I’m interested that it’s that specific species that seems to love you. The other ones...
Isabel: I have no idea why they’re so bold. They’re the smallest birds that come into my garden and they’ve been the boldest. I don’t know why.
Lev: And you have others? I mean, I presume you have things like chaffinches and great tits and...
Isabel: Loads of each of those, yes. I’ve got a pair of robins that come. I’ve got blackbirds, various thrushes. The robins come quite close, but they’re supposed to be famously friendly and would have been the first to feed.
Lev: In Britain, at least. I think if you go to Europe, continental Europe, the robin is a more skulking kind of...
Isabel: Oh, maybe I’ve got a European robin then.
Lev: Perhaps it’s flown over. Back to the coal tits. Do you have them identified down to name level, each and every one?
Isabel: No.
Lev: And be honest, have you given the insistent one a name?
Isabel: I have not. Perhaps I should. I know. But I do talk to it quite a lot. And I think I can distinguish... In the winter, I had loads and loads of them. And I think – you’re the expert, you tell me – if they spread out to breed, they’re very... but I think I can tell the difference between a male and a female landing on my hand, and I think I’ve got a pair now that are staying, nesting nearby and the male kind of, it’s the male that’s the really bold one who kind of dollops himself on my hand. “Here I am. I want my seed.” Off he goes. And the female, I think, is smaller. Would I be right in thinking that? Slightly?
Lev: I don’t think so.
Isabel: Maybe it’s just a really slim one.
Lev: Maybe it’s a slim one. I wondered if it was that you knew the male and female because there was a different way of landing on your hand.
Isabel: Well, yes, I think there is.
Lev: It was more delicate and more...
Isabel: Delicate, yes. It’s like a sort of ballerina coming into land after a...
Lev: It’s kinder.
Isabel: Let’s just stereotype everything. But they all look the bloody same, so I don’t know.
Lev: Yeah, exactly.
Isabel: I am going to start running writing courses and retreats up here. And one of my side quests to that will be, would you like to feed my coal tits by hand? Along with willow weaving and all this kind of stuff and seeing the Northern Lights...
Lev: I don’t think there’s any writing retreat that could offer that level of personalized service.
Isabel: Exactly.
Lev: So I am very envious of your coal tits…
Thing 2 – Victoria Wood
Lev: So thing number two is not a thing. Quite often… it’s quite difficult because I have this… it’s called Six Things, which means it can encompass everything, and occasionally somebody comes up with a person and you just feel really terrible saying “and Thing number two is Victoria Wood”, because she wasn’t a thing, she was a person, and she was a wonderful person, and you’ve described her as “not a thing but a person who did things that become things in our heads” which I think is…
Isabel: Well I think that gets around your rules – your silly rules. Victoria Wood, we were all reminded last week, died ten years ago, so people have been remembering her and talking about her, and I thought I have to include her because she’s been such a huge part of my writing life, and just grown up life, because she was a genius for years and years and I can’t remember not having her lines running in my head most of the time. Before she came along British comedy was… it wasn’t boring but I mean goodness she just made it more Northern, more diverse, and just funnier.
Lev: We always see these finished products. Dinner Ladies is a great example. And you think, well, obviously that came out so easily and that just is so fluent. But you can imagine the writing process to have reached that level of perfect rhythm, perfect nuances, perfect observations of people saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. And then having done the writing bit, getting the ensemble to work…
Isabel: When she wrote Dinner Ladies, I don’t think she’d done much for a few years. So she’d been working on it for ages. And famously, the work system that she did for Dinner Ladies, her acting troupe absolutely hated. It was performed in front of a studio audience, recorded in front of the studio audience, and they did it twice in a week. They did the first performance in front of the studio audience on a Friday evening, got laughs, didn’t get laughs, whatever. Victoria went away and practically stayed up all night on the Friday night, rewriting the bits that she thought could go better because she heard what didn’t quite work on stage or something. So in the morning, Saturday, everybody turned up, bricking it because they knew what she’d been doing and she’d be handing out all these new scripts, and they had to relearn different lines and then perform them again hours later to another studio audience, and everyone was exhausted and everyone got bad-tempered with her. But they… interviewed later on, they said, of course, she was a genius and that’s how it worked so well. But at the time, they found it really hard.
Lev: But that’s… I mean obviously the rewrites is one thing, that might have come partly from her doing stand-up, where you’re – presumably, I gather, I’ve never done stand-up – but you’re noticing what goes wrong and changing, changing, changing until, you know, finally ideally it gets better and better and better… but that’s the vagaries of different audiences, so you’ll get something that hits one night…
Isabel: Exactly. It doesn’t land at all the next.
Lev: If you’re doing that for yourself as a stand-up, then that’s one thing. But if you’re doing it and then demanding that the cast do it, having already done that work…
Isabel: It paid off.
Lev: In her prolific, fairly prolific output – Dinner Ladies is one thing – what’s your favourite if you had to pick one bit of Victoria Wood?
Isabel: She could do everything though. It’s really hard. No, I refuse that question. I can’t possibly choose. I mean, Dinner Ladies is classic sitcom and tightly plotted and all the things that you said it was. She could do stand-up. She’d been doing stand-up and selling out the Albert Hall, for years. She started off as a pianist because she was so shy. She used to hide behind a piano and some of her song lyrics are absolutely inspired. I mean, the most famous is the Ballad of Barry and Frieda. I mean, let me just give you two little extracts from that. There was the famous “beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly” of course, which was fantastic. But also in the same rhythm, “roll with gay abandon on the tufted Wilton”… I mean she’s so specific. She once Got into a conversation about why a custard cream specifically was the funniest biscuit to use in a script, she really got into which words were funnier than others, and tufted Wilton is just brilliant.
Lev: It occupies the same area as Alan Bennett, that specific thing of very English, a specific kind of Britishness, Englishness.
Isabel: Yes.
Lev: You recognize that alternatives, you know, chocolate bourbons, are not as funny as custard creams. It’s not.
Isabel: I was going to give you another extract from her song Reincarnation, which actually I had never heard until these 10-year reminiscings came past on Bluesky and somebody shared Reincarnation. And it’s a brilliant song about how she’d wanted all these other lives and one wasn’t enough. And one of her characters said, “I’d prefer to stick to Mrs. Beeton, have a hob I can then reheat on, use my toaster with the ears of wheat on”.
Lev: laughs
Isabel: Along with all that she could she could really write serious drama as well, I mean one of her brilliant brilliant plays was called Housewife 49. She used diary entries in the World War II mass observation project that they ran. And Nella Last was a northern housewife and wrote in pencil and she wrote all these diaries. And Victoria Wood made a whole play out of her wartime experience. And it was very touching and moving, and not a comedy line in sight. And she acted in it as well and I think she won awards for it. But she could really write.
Lev: I didn’t see that. I presume it exists somewhere…
Isabel: And Pat and Margaret, have you seen her play Pat and Margaret with Julie Walters? They were two sisters. Victoria plays the northern chip-serving dinner lady type person and Judy Walters was the one separated very early on who went off to be a famous actress, I think in America, and came back very very glamorous, and it was their reunion and what happened with that, it’s very very good.
Lev: I think there’s something, when you’re talking about doing the stand-up and hiding behind the piano, is it also possible that there was the character Victoria Wood, who she played when she was on stage playing the stand-up?
Isabel: Oh, definitely.
Lev: And the actual person was completely different, so there was the mask that she wore, yeah.
Isabel: Yes, yes. I think Vic Reeves tells about when he acted with her when she wrote the script for the Morecambe and Wise play. I think when they were filming, they went out for dinner and she was very, very shy and they had a very stilted conversation and then he started observing their fellow diners and she was then taking the piss out of them and doing impressions, and they then completely opened up to each other through the medium of laughing at other people. So she just had to relax.
Lev: Excellent. Well, that’s a superb thing too. And thank you for shedding a little bit of light on one of the nation’s favourite comedians and writers.
Thing 3 – Gardening
Lev: Thing Three. This is a large subject, Thing Three. But it’s not a person.
Isabel: Do I get points for that?
Lev: Well you always get points for doing… all six things get points, and it’s not a competition… but yeah you’re winning at the moment. Thing Three is gardening.
Isabel: Yes.
Lev: It’s a big thing but you’re more specific about it.
Isabel: I am and I’m very aware that you probably vicariously know much more about it than I do because you happen to live with a garden designer, I believe.
Lev: Yes, and an extremely intrepid gardener and allotmenteer.
Isabel: Exactly. I don’t pretend. I come to this with the hugely enthusiastic amateur vibe. I know about three Latin names and don’t ask me to say them now. I can’t remember them. I don’t do that kind of gardening. I do the kind of gardening specifically where you do lots of hard work, and it is hard work, but then you get to loll about in the space that you’ve created from your hard work, and that is the point of gardening. We mentioned it before, but recently-ish – it’s been a few years now – I now live in the middle of the Cairngorms National Park in a plot that used to be used as a holiday home. And it basically needs a bit of TLC, a lot of TLC to make it into a garden instead of just a bit of a hill. I’ve got great plans, but the end plan, the end vision is to create some sort of circularish path that goes all the way around my plot. It makes it sound like a great estate. It’s not. It’s quite small, really. And it’s all up and down. You know, you’ve seen it.
Lev: It can be made to seem bigger with skillful skills.
Isabel: Well, yes, I have no skill, but lots of enthusiasm. But the idea, I mean, maybe it’s because I’m a writer, specifically a poet. I don’t know. We like dreaming and chewing the end of our pencil and staring up and stuff like that. But I want a path that goes all the way around and it’ll have to be sort of raised boardwalk through the boggy bits and they will be winding. You can wander around with a cuppa or a glass in hand and you can go by the pond and look at the tadpoles or you can look at the burn as it twinkles through the sunlit evenings. I don’t know. And you can stop and look at the view and look at the birds. And that is the point of the garden, I think.
Lev: Excellent.
Isabel: Does that make any sense? It’s not really getting any closer to being a thing. Sorry.
Lev: Well, it’s still a thing. It’s something that gives you joy. And I think what my description is, you’ve got to find it joyful or inspiring or interesting or magnificent or downright bizarre. It could be any of those.
Isabel: When I was tiny, I got given an edge of my dad’s vegetable patch and I could do what I wanted with it. So of course, I grew carrots. I was once a redhead, bright redhead. It’s gone a bit now. So for about three years constantly – I didn’t know anything about crop rotation then, I just grew carrots and I got really good at growing carrots and there’s a picture of me and, apparently, in a PVC Bugs Bunny apron which was quite apt, holding triumphantly this enormous carrot which was almost as tall as me – we have very sandy soil so yeah I’ve always been doing that…
Thing 4 – Theorbos
Lev: Thing number four, again, slightly in my wheelhouse, although I’ve never played or worked with anybody who plays them – slightly earlier than my period – is the theorbo.
Isabel: Isn’t that a great word?
Lev: It’s a great word and it’s a great thing, but we might have to explain to non-musicians, especially non-early musicians, exactly what a theorbo is. So, yeah, that’s your job. You can do that. You chose.
Isabel: Oh, God. I thought I’d get an easy round.
Lev: Why?
Isabel: Because this is in your wheelhouse and I knew you’d like it. Okay. Do you know what a lute looks like? Most people know what a lute looks like. Now you’ve got to imagine that you’re in one of those party games where you draw a little bit of somebody and then you fold it over and then somebody else draws the next bit and then somebody else draws the legs and then you open it up and it doesn’t look like anything or it looks weird. Anyway, somebody’s drawn a lute, and then the next bit, it’s a really long fold, so they’ve got to fill it up. And they just decided to draw a ridiculously long second neck, second fingerboard, shooting out about three miles, and stuck to the top. And you know when you take a pano shot with your phone and the thing you’re trying to take moves along the frame? So you end up with a cat that looks like a really, really long sausage or something. It’s like that. Have I got anywhere close to describing what it looks like?
Lev: That’s the perfect description. I always think of it as if it was an animal, you’d look at it and go, well, how did that evolve? Well, that’s evolved...
Isabel: The Friday afternoon design job.
Lev: Either the Friday afternoon design job or it’s that thing that has evolved specifically to get the fruit from the top of that tree, that weird tree that has co-evolved it because they...
Isabel: It’s the giraffe of lutes.
Lev: It is the giraffe of lutes. But what, Isabel, does it sound like?
Isabel: It’s the same, I think it’s the same, roughly the same register as a cello-ish. So you’ve got the kind of bass lute, I think, in the main guitar-y, lute-y area. And then you’ve got the bass section of the grand piano strings going up three miles past your left ear. And I don’t think you can change the notes on those. They’re just drones, open strings, and you can... the bass octave, basically a whole octave below what you then play on your little lute that’s in your lap. And also the strings aren’t… the high one at the far end and the low one at your end – they’ve stuck the high one in the middle. I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I love it. It looks amazing. It sounds absolutely extraordinary. It sounds like you’ve got a whole orchestra there.
Lev: Perhaps we should also explain under what circumstances a theorbo is played, and with other instruments. It’s not part of a regular orchestra. It’s an older instrument than that and it’s predominantly in early music.
Isabel: Well, apparently it got invented sometime in the late 16th century because Florence invented opera. I think that’s the story. Opera suddenly evolved and you had a little kind of lutey thing that used to accompany one sad poet singing his little heart out. And it was all very soft and intricate and, oh, poor me.
Lev: Yes.
Isabel: But that didn’t cut it when opera suddenly started being bigger and brashier and on stage and things. So they needed a bit, a bit more oomph, apparently. So they started inventing stuff. There’s a brilliant Elizabeth Kenney, who’s a lutenist, I think at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She has this fantastic 10-minute YouTube video, which she kind of explains the origins of it, which I could recommend it and I’m sure you can put it in the links afterwards.
Lev: Put that in the show notes, as the saying goes…
Isabel: And she did a really good explanation of it, and there’s Piccini who invented… he called it the arch lute which was a fantastic word, basically a lute with an extra neck, and then the other inventors worked on something else and they were trying to be all intellectual and Greek called it the chitarrone I think…
Lev: Yup.
Isabel: …but then because it looked a bit daft it got called the theorbo…
Lev: Big guitar. “-one” – that suffix in Italian, means “big”
Isabel: I’ll take your word for it
Lev: Violone…
Isabel: I don’t know, I didn’t do Italian.
Lev: Well I’m just… this is your first lesson.
Isabel: But then you’ve got these two words…
Lev: The chitarrone, the big guitar, yup.
Isabel: Thanks. So she’s got a hifalutin Greek music of the spheres guitar, refined thing. But also she says, explained that it looks so daft, it got called the theorbo, which is the sort of man in the corner of the farm yard, churning the hurdy gurdy. And she loves the fact that it’s got these two personalities coexisting in the same...
Lev: The rough and the refined.
Isabel: Yes, in the same stupid looking instrument.
Lev: And that people still play. I always find it fascinating as well… as I say, conducting is my thing, so orchestras are my thing.
Isabel: Have you ever conducted a theorbo?
Lev: I’ve never conducted a theorbo, but I have conducted instruments that sort of occasionally visit the orchestra but didn’t get a toehold in it. But you think about all these things that have been... invented and that are still played, and then think about how the other ones just got lost and aren’t played anymore. I mean, ridiculous. Bartók wrote in his opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, for a keyboard xylophone. So this is not a xylophone played with two sticks, but like a piano. And this is an instrument that happens to, well, I think there’s one of them in the world. And it never gets played because it’s a ridiculous thing. But because there is one piece of music that is actually quite well known and reasonably regularly done, every time Bluebeard’s Castle is done, they have to find a way of concocting this ridiculous xylophone part.
Isabel: Like Scriabin’s colour organ…
Lev: The colour organ, yes. So these magnificent things that just fell by the wayside, but occasionally people have to go, what do you think it was? How would you make that? But also there’s the other link with the theorbo and percussion, with my personal experience of lugging big things around on public transport or even in a van. My favourite personal experience, a regular one as a timpanist, was at the end of a concert, taking a large kettledrum out of a small… you know, a 32-inch drum, trying to get it out through a 30-inch...
Isabel: 28-inch…
Lev: Yeah, and somebody in the audience was passing by, watching you going, ah, bet you wish you played the piccolo. And thinking that...
Isabel: That is the line that people go to.
Lev: But they always think they’re the first person to have thought of it.
Isabel: They do. I’ve travelled on London tubes carrying a cello case.
Lev: “That’s a large violin.”
Isabel: “Is there a machine gun in there?”
Lev: We’re coming across as very embittered.
Isabel: Can I also just point out that you don’t do that anymore? You’ve swapped it for a teeny tiny little conductor’s baton that you can put in a back pocket.
Lev: But I still need the van for my massive ego. Right, I think we’ve beaten the theorbo to a slow, lingering, painful death. Have you anything else to say about the theorbo, Isabel Rogers?
Isabel: No.
Lev: No, thank you very much.
Thing 5 – Loos In Space
Lev: Thing number five, I inevitably, seeing this on the page, I have to do the voice because you can’t see the words “loos in space” without thinking of the Muppets and going (*silly voice*) “looooooos iiiiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaaace”
Isabel: Which is exactly how I wrote it. So well done for that.
Lev: Perfect. Thank you for that. And this actually links quite neatly with a thing that previous pod guest brought on – Matt Brown. He brought on the International Space Station.
Isabel: Yes. I hope I wasn’t treading on his toes too much with this.
Lev: Not at all. I think it’s a complementary one because it’s more specific.
Isabel: Absolutely more specific.
Lev: So I ask you, is there a website devoted to the question, how many loos are there in space? Because there is one devoted to how many people there are in space.
Isabel: Do you know, I don’t know that. That wasn’t part of my research for this, but I bet there is.
Lev: There must be.
Isabel: I bet there is.
Lev: But do you know...
Isabel: But I do... Well, up until last week or two weeks ago, it was ten. It made double figures, which is why I suddenly thought of this, because when Artemis II launched to do its little jaunt around the moon, it brought the number of loos in space to ten.
Lev: Now it’s back to nine.
Isabel: It’s back down to nine, but I think reaching double digits seems a milestone for any intergalactic civilization, frankly. So we ought to celebrate that. There are various ones. I think there are four on the International Space Station all the time. And then you’ve got bits docked onto that. You’ve got the Soyuz docked, which has one, and then the Dragon docked, which also has one. And then there’s a Chinese space station, which has two, and then something docked onto that, which has one. So anyway, there are nine, going around at the moment. And then Artemis took it to 10. It’s important.
Lev: It is important. I have to ask you what exactly piqued your interest? Was it Artemis that piqued your interest in this? Because they were quite specific about it. And there were many things about that mission that I found terrific and really wonderful. Not least the views, but also the way they went about it, how the crew went about it and how they were and sharing so much stuff.
Isabel: Yes, and let’s face it, on Bluesky, we spent about two days absolutely riveted about their faulty loo, which was all anybody could talk about on the way.
Lev: And of course, the fact that it was fixed by the only woman.
Isabel: Of course. When Artemis went up, they got the new loo. It’s all terribly, terribly exciting because they’ve got a whole bathroom. And it’s a tiny space. Was it nine cubic meters or something for four people for ten days? Just ridiculous. But they actually had a door in the floor with a separate bathroom and they could close the door and do their business with the universal waste management system, which was fantastically named because nobody can say toilet. And did you know it was only 2020 that NASA spent 23 million quid inventing this new loo, the universal one. 2020! And it was the first time that they’d ever made it available for a female astronaut to use it as well. So before then, they would have to... I’m not going to get all technical. I’m sure we can all imagine that. But it wasn’t really quite right. And there have been female astronauts before that. And people have been zooming around in space for 60 years. And it took them 60 years to invent one that women could quite comfortably use as well. I mean, that’s quite something.
Lev: I think it also brings home the reality of it. I mean, it’s all such a lovely idea, isn’t it? “Oh, no, it’s okay. We can all go into space. You know, we can all live in space. We can all garden in space. We can live in it.
Isabel: But the point is, we’re animals. And if we’re going to go into space, we need air to breathe where there isn’t any and we need to be protected and we need food to eat and water to drink and you need to recycle your wee to drink the water on the ISS and all that kind of stuff. And you need somewhere to go to the loo. If you want to send poets up and be fantastic describing the dark side of the moon, which we all loved and NASA got loads out and we invented a whole new vocab for moon love or whatever it is they called it and everyone was getting really excited about all these new descriptions of sending real people there. You need to send loos up there because we are glorious and alive and messy and it’s important. And it’s the first thing kids ask if an astronaut goes and does a school talk or something. They say, how do you go to the...
Lev: What happens when you need to do a poo!
Isabel: You know, life is messy and wonderful and we should embrace that and all the invention that allows us to go out and be poets in space.
Lev: Absolutely. Thank you for the excellent Thing 5.
Isabel: You’re welcome.
Thing 6 – ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)
Lev: It’s another musical thing and I know music is a huge part of your life, and always has been and still is, always will be, and this is the biggest musical project in a certain way that I’ve ever come across, and it is something I have featured in Six Things but that was a couple of years ago and it’s good to be able to talk about it, because it is a wonderful idea that has been realised, and it is a piece called As SLow aS Possible. Written inevitably by John Cage, and is being played at this very moment and will be for a very, very long time. Tell me about Organ 2 slash ASLSP brackets as slow as possible by John Cage.
Isabel: It’s just ridiculous. And before we go on any further, I mean, what is with the capitalization of that title? This obviously doesn’t come across. It says as slow as possible. And the A is a capital A. And then the “SL” of the slow is capital, and then the S of the “as” is capital. It doesn’t make any sense. If anyone knows please write in. Anyway there you go it’s just brilliant, absolutely fantastic. John Cage of course famous for writing a completely silent – or not, it’s controversial – piece wrote this…
Lev: 4 minutes 33 seconds, or 4’33”, which is… it’s not silence it is ambient, it is the ambient noise of what happens to be in the room at the time, anyway…
Isabel: Thank you Mr Conductor…
Lev: That could be another thing…
Isabel: Do you conduct 4’33”? Do you have to stand there?
Lev: I did once do it as an experiment, with an orchestra, in the nature of silence in a rehearsal, and the nature of it… it didn’t go down well at all, it’s like “why, what the fuck are we doing?” I have performed it. The trouble, if we’re going to do this, the trouble with doing 4’33” is it has become such a thing and it’s… It’s almost it’s not long enough, because the first two minutes at least…
Isabel: I think it’s just buttock-clenchingly awkward, especially in this country…
Lev: …and then there’s giggling and then there’s… people… it takes at least as long as the piece lasts for people to settle into actually getting what it’s about
Isabel: You should hand out Leonard and Hungry Paul before you start and then the people can just get into being silent. Anyway, we digress.
Lev: We digress.
Isabel: So, as slow as possible. It’s a brilliant concept. I mean, Cage wrote it. I can’t remember how long the premiere was, but it was quite a sensible 40 minutes or something. I’ve no idea. It’s just a piece with various chords on an organ written down. And the only instruction he put is to play it as slow as possible. So, people have started... joking around with that and I think somebody did it over 24 hours or something and it broke records or something. Anyway, there’s a village in Germany called Halberstadt and they have a Cage Organ Society or something like that and they decided to do something with it. They’ve decided to make it last more than 600 years, which is ridiculous.
Lev: It’s also, it feels slightly arbitrary that, you know… “How long can it be? “Well, let’s say 600 years.” I wonder how this came about.
Isabel: Well, I can tell you.
Lev: I’m so glad you have an answer to that because I didn’t know.
Isabel: They interviewed the guy in charge, Rainer Neugebauer, I believe is his name, in charge of this. And apparently the 639 years is to mark the time between the construction of the world’s first 12-tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt in 1361 and the New Millennium. So that’s why they did it. And then Halberstadt conveniently had some abandoned 11th-Century convent that they donated. So they’ve got an organ in there and they do use an organ because they’ve made little teeny tiny sandbags that they put on the notes to hold them down so it can basically play as long as you want.
Lev: Yes, I think the listener might have been thinking, who is playing this?
Isabel: Ah, yes.
Lev: I’ll do two days and then you can come in and change over.
Isabel: Apparently the committee that was discussing this at the beginning, one of them suggested that the organist should just play there until he died on the seat. Which was vetoed, rather alarmingly. Yeah, so they built this organ and they’re still building it around the notes because they only change every few years. They did some terribly complicated maths apparently to work out how they could stretch it.
Lev: Exactly.
Isabel: And the first 17 months was just the bellows inflating. Because Cage had put a pause at the beginning before you start playing. So to stretch it out over these years, the pause should have been 17 months. And then they realized later that it should have been 28 months, but it was too late. They’ve started that and they’re not going to do it again.
Lev: You can’t go back to the beginning.
Isabel: So they started playing and every few years or so they change the chord and people troop off to this church and they stand around. I think a thousand people went for the last chord change and then they change the sandbags or something and then they think, oh, this is a new note.
Lev: Imagine if you screw it up.
Isabel: Well, apparently they’ve had people resign from this committee because they have had screw-ups. Apparently they had delayed one chord change because some local dignitary was off doing something else. So they delayed it for two weeks and the person swanned off in a huff because it was all wrong.
Lev: Right.
Isabel: Exactly.
Lev: “The rhythm is all wrong!”
Isabel: Oh dear. And it’s just hilarious. I think we’re all very grateful that it’s happening somewhere else that we can’t hear it. But knowing that it’s going on is the whole thing about it. And it’s brilliant. I think it was 2011, the organ had to be encased in acrylic glass because I think there were noise complaints for people living nearby.
Lev: Actually, I mean, genuinely, it must feel like the worst kind of tinnitus if you’re near it.
Isabel: Exactly, exactly.
Lev: I’m almost tempted to go for the note change, like a solar eclipse, it feels like something one should…
Isabel: Well, it’s coming up soon. I think the next one is on August the 5th. They always change it on the 5th of the month. We don’t know why. It’ll probably be explained somewhere. But the next one’s August this year. So we could all troop off to Halberstadt and watch the sandbags. I mean, there’s a very fine line between the philosophy of all this and being just plain daft. I’m not quite sure where it falls here, but I’m glad it exists.
Lev: Yes, that kind of hinterland, as you say, it’s good to know that it’s there, even if we don’t have to experience it.
Isabel: Especially if we don’t have to experience, I would say, but yes.
Lev: Definitely. Isabel, thank you. What a pleasure, as always, to chat to you. Thank you so much for your six extremely fine and worthy and worthwhile things.
Isabel: I was honoured to be invited. Thank you very much.
Lev: They are a great addition to the Museum of Six Things. And thank you, the listener, for listening to us talking about these six things. And I hope we’ll meet again very soon. Bye.
