Neither. He talked about the impact of always being connected, always contactable, and how he needs self discipline to resist the obvious attractions phones have. He didn’t say anything specifically about social media, which is the thing I struggle with, thanks to its addictive functionality.

Quite. Certainly not on Desert Island Discs. Perhaps on a programme like Hard Talk.

WFMU (a radio station in New Jersey) has a weekly show on one of its web streams. It’s called Continental Subway, presented by an American called David Dichelle, who lives in Germany.

He plays all kinds of music in many different languages, as well as different versions of folk songs in English - he’s working through the Roud Folksong Index and has reached Roud 350, The Topman and the Afterguard / The Sailor and the Soldier. However, most of what he plays isn’t in English and as well as music from many different countries each week he will play 8 or 10 songs from a particular country chosen at random. This week it was Chad.

Very highly recommended, not least because all the shows back to 2017 are archived, so you can listen again when you want, and it’s listener supported so there are no adverts. Links to all the shows and playlists here: https://wfmu.org/playlists/CW

There is a history of inclusive radio in the UK which goes back at least to the 1960s. Anyone who was born here and is over the age of about 50 will know about Kenneth Williams, who appeared in radio comedies with Hugh Paddick. The material is dated and may be regarded as clichéd and demeaning now, but they played two gay men called Julian and Sandy on a show called Round the Horne from 1965 to 1968, and the same characters came up in later shows as well. Bear in mind this was on national radio at a time when gay sex was still illegal in the UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy for more details.

Oh yes, 6 Music is a good one. I notice that Iggy Pop has a Sunday afternoon show at the moment (16:00 UK time), and he’s had several series on there in the past, they just keep asking him back because he’s interesting and has good taste in music. And also on Sundays (20:00 UK time) is Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, which has been running for years - so long in fact that when it started I remember recording it on cassette tape so I could play it on my commute to work.

As with all BBC radio there are no adverts apart from their own promotional stuff, and everything is available for 28 days after broadcast via the BBC Sounds website and app - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/stations

I spend a lot of time listening to BBC Radio 3, which is their classical station, but they also have a jazz show 5 nights a week, and lots of other music apart from classical - ‘world’ music, experimental and new music, all kinds of interesting stuff in the evenings UK time. Serious music radio, done properly.

I really love WFMU in New Jersey. Of course they broadcast on FM, but they have four live streams (I especially like the ‘Give the Drummer Radio’ stream https://wfmu.org/drummer). Take a look at the schedules - you’ll find lots of music that you won’t hear on mainstream radio, across a wide range of different genres, and all of it is archived so you can listen to past shows and see the playlists for each one. It’s listener supported, so there are no adverts except for their own WFMU fund raising. My favourite shows:

• Continental Subway with David Dichelle, on the Drummer stream, playing music in many languages - https://wfmu.org/playlists/CW
• This is the Modern World, with ‘Trouble’, on the main WFMU stream. Incredibly eclectic - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/LM

I came here to say this. And for people who didn’t study Latin (which I did as an adult, having chosen German as my second foreign language at school), there is a video on YouTube which explains in detail exactly why that scene is so funny:

https://youtu.be/UfH6gjxTTgE

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn’t really very useful.

My 5th birthday. I had mumps, but my mother had already organised a birthday party for me, so I lay upstairs, confined to bed, listening to a roomful of other kids having fun downstairs.

This was a very long time ago, before children were routinely given the mumps vaccine.