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Crawford, who works on the Epstein-Barr virus, chose that medieval classic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as newly translated by Simon Armitage. Once again, Professor Oxford came up with a wonderfully simple but acute reason for why he so enjoyed the book. ‘I think it’s because Armitage’s a poet. He’s not a stuffy history professor. He’s a natural poet, and you can feel that as you read it.’
Professor Oxford was, though, less enamoured of Sue’s choice, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which he found ‘too harrowing’. He recognised that it was ‘a good read’ but was too appalled by Ken Kesey’s descriptions of life in a mental institution in America in the 1950s to enjoy the book. ‘I’ve got images of people being burnt on metal cages — horrible images — and I wish they were not in my mind.’ Just like Dr Johnson, who, having read Hamlet as an impressionable teenager, vowed never to read it again so terrified was he by the appearances of the ghost.
The return of Between Ourselves (Tuesday, Radio 4), in which Olivia O’Leary brings together two people who have experienced the same or similar trauma, was a reminder of how it is possible to talk to people about terrible things without provoking tears from either the participant or the listener. In this first programme (produced by Karen Gregor) her two guests had both woken up one morning to discover they were blind, cast into a world of total and utter darkness.
Julie Coakley, in her early forties, had been suffering from what she thought was a bad case of flu when she suddenly got worse and had to be rushed into hospital. She collapsed and 12 days later woke up from her coma to realise she could not see anything (or hear, either). Jill Daley at just 19 had been experiencing strange symptoms in her eye, a black dot which, as she blinked, ‘became spider-like and sprawled over all my eye’. She was being treated for this but then one morning when her mother came in with a cup of tea she realised she could not see anything. ‘And we panicked. We absolutely panicked.’
This was harrowing to listen to. Yet neither Julie nor Jill ever sounded even slightly self-pitying. Partly this was, I’m sure, because of their stubborn determination not to let their lives be blighted by such misfortune. But it’s also because of O’Leary’s ability to ask those ‘rough questions’, as she puts it (‘What about stunted ambitions?’), in such a direct but sympathetic way that only a straightforward, matter-of-fact answer is possible.
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