I was an inveterate synthesiser nerd before I hit my teens. I've always been particularly obsessed with the strange timbral effect on the human voice that could be produced by feeding it into something called a Vocoder, particularly models made by EMS and Roland (and, later, by Sennheiser). Today I have several emulations of the technology in my home recording studio and I've made extensive use of them. But as an avid listener I can remember sitting spellbound as the BBC Radiophonics Workshop's production of Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains was first broadcast on BBC Radio Four back in 1977. In my opinion it remains one of the classic works of electronic sound design and its unique atmospherics owe much to the expert application of the vocoder to the cast's performances by the director and producer Malcolm Clarke. I was obsessed with the production as soon as I heard a preview of it and made sure that I could record it off air on my trusty Decca cassette recorder at the appointed time. I ended up listening to that recording over and over again over the years, often several times in a row. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I still have that cassette kicking around somewhere. But these days everything like that is on the internet and I don't have to go digging through storage crates in order to find it, because here it is, in gorgeous quality, on YouTube:

It's radio, but with pictures.

Bradbury was riffing on an earlier poem with the same name written during the closing stages of the First World War by Sara Teasdale who, like Bradbury, muses on what would happen to the rest of the world if mankind suddenly disappeared. Teasdale gives no explanation for the absence of humanity, even though her poem was written at the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic which killed millions; in contrast, Bradbury's vision is bleakly explicit.

I mention it today, because today is the day on which the events of the Bradbury poem take place. Despite its apocalyptic nature, this is the sort of thing that tickles my neurodivergent brain in a pleasing manner. I hope it does the same thing to yours.

Helen is visiting this week. We had a nice meal yesterday at The White Horse at Buckover, which we seem to end up at every summer. I'm helping her put together her book about her brother Phil and we've been having fun reminiscing about our rock and roll adventures back in the 80s.

We were interrupted this afternoon by—wonder of wonders—a heavy shower of rain. It was nice to smell the petrichor; it's been a while!

After a good therapy session yesterday I decided that as it was pretty much a perfect summer's day outside, I should go for a walk. So I picked up a camera (of course) and headed off around my usual circuit of the village on Devil's Lane. There hasn't been any rain here for weeks, and we're in a severe drought. The creek which runs through a culvert at the end of my road has pretty much dried up, and this photograph which I took up in Churchend shows what most of the countryside around here looks like at the moment.

It's all looking a bit brown and crispy around here.

There are signals in the forecast for the tail end of next week that we might finally get some showers, although there is still no sign of any serious amounts of rain. This weekend is expected to remain dry and sunny, with temperatures much closer to their seasonal norms than they were last month. And I'm very grateful for that, even though I found myself wide awake at half-past two this morning.