Time and the Forest, Radio 4
Morning Ireland, RTÉ Radio 1
Woman’s Hour, Radio 4
THIS portrait of the sculptor David Nash opens with the sound of trees – the ease and creak of living wood, as if they are whispering to us.
A tree is loaded with time, says Nash, and this is a portrait of the artist and his meditation on time and nature; how everything in time is moving and changing.
In 1977, David Nash moved to Wales, to an old slate mining area, far from the world of his artistic contemporaries, a place of quiet and low visibility.
In the run-up to his 80th birthday, he takes us on a walk through the woods with him near his adopted homeland of Blaenau Ffestiniog.
“I’m not Welsh by blood but the land here lives in me just as I live in it.”
There are tongues in trees and limbs in wood – the artist works to balance nature and human nature.
It’s a beautiful portrait in sound from Falling Tree productions (it had to be) and worth a listen.
Graham Norton has written six novels (Jane Barlow/PA)
We like to keep it local when we read. A survey of more than 300 libraries across the Republic of Ireland found that seven out of the 10 most borrowed books last year were from Irish authors.
Graham Norton, Sally Rooney and John Boyne are all extremely popular, and top of the Irish writers’ list was Norton’s Frankie.
The writer Richard Osman was the most borrowed author, but seven out of 10 is not bad.
“We hear ourselves, we hear our friends, our family, we recognise situations, places,” Darina Molloy, senior executive librarian at Mayo Libraries, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
“It’s escapism but escapism to a place we know very well.”
The Irish appetite for crime novels seems insatiable – she cited writers like Jane Casey.
While the Driver Theory Test Guide has fallen out of the top 10, it is very high up there, she added.
A Woman’s Hour special, meanwhile, offered a guide to sleep.
Shakespeare called it “nature’s soft nurse” and the lack of sleep can lay you low.
This easy chat wasn’t for people suffering from sleep disorders but rather offered reassurance to many of us who faces the challenges, brought on by a new baby or the menopause or just the aging process.
Sometimes the issue is not actually sleep – we tend to blame it – but the underlying invisible mental load of life.
Perhaps ditching the idea that you absolutely must have eight hours a night is a good start.