Where do you think I am now?

Transcript

Hello. This is John-Paul Flintoff and this is Voice Notes to the World. A few days ago I was talking to Sara-Jane, who I first met at the BBC where she was working in radio, and she told me about a game she used to play during lockdown, and I asked if she’d tell it again in a voice note. Here it is.

Hi, JP. I do have a habit of recording these notes for people and then deleting them by mistake. So this one might be deleted anyway. Maybe it should be deleted.

Yeah, the game we played during lockdown was I would go and walk through an area that my friend Danny and I both knew sort of acoustically, because he used to get me loads of good music for my radio programmes.

And I would say, where do you think I am now? There’s a wall on my right-hand side, but that’s about it.

And just from the sound of the birdsong echoing or the proximity of a road or the acoustic, like where I was walking along, you could hear there was a wall on one side and an open space on the other. Or maybe you hear some kids screaming or whatever. It was kind of a clue for the other person to guess where you were in Lewes, where we live. It’s ridiculous.

So you could be, I’m in a big open space and there are people lying around me, but they’re very quiet. And they’re without the whoosh of distant A27. And he’d guess it was a cemetery or, yeah, all those kind of things.

Anyway, I’m leaving this for now because I don’t know what else to say right this second, except that I’ve sent you a link to an app that I used to use on my phone, which means you can record WAV or MP3 and you can change all the parameters. And it’s free, I think, and it’s called something like Voice Pro or Voice Record Pro. This is not an advert. So try it out, see if you can make it work.

One of the nicest things that happened to me during lockdown was I really missed David Sedaris. I kind of wanted to hear what his take would be on the whole COVID thing. And in the end, because there were none of his programmes appearing on radio and there was nothing in Sounds, so I think I emailed or maybe I Instagrammed Steve Doherty, the producer, and he very kindly sent me a whole load of recordings of David Sedaris going back years on Voice Pro. So that was really nice of him. What a lovely man. Never met him.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

jp at this domain name.