Everyone I know has got one. I mean, not everyone I’ve ever met, but everyone who I can just pitch up at their house and be welcome without phoning, everyone I recognise as my tribe, they’ve all got one.
It’s not a Barbour. That’s pretty much just me these days, and mine’s not a traditional wax kind that newborn lambs have died on, but a modern techno-fabric one you can stick in a washing machine. Nor RayBans, not any more anyway. Persol do the job better these days for looks, and Vuarnet for optical quality, more so on a dull day.
No, the real signifier, the thing that makes you go mmmm, that’s got to be a Roberts solar-powered digital radio. Even though they’re pretty rubbish really, especially for the price.
To be fair, they’ve got a nice big speaker inside, so they don’t sound like a wasp in a tin or someone making a tune by blowing through a comb with tissue paper over it, if that’s still a thing. The big idea though is that we can show how eco-friendly we all are by…not buying batteries! Impressed yet? We hardly ever burn orang-utangs, even by proxy, being really careful to scan the ingredients of anything and if it says palm oil emphatically put it back on the Waitrose shelf, sometimes even muttering ‘Palm oil – you’ve GOT to be joking.’ I’ve pretty much managed to stop pronouncing it ‘jaking’ these days too. That’s how progressive I am. That and spending seventy quid on a radio that however long you get the sun to charge it gives you about 90 minutes of Radio 4 Extra, top whack.
As Mark put it, borrowing Hunter Thompson’s habit of quoting the Bible (Mark 16:17-18 in fact and look, I’ve been to his house ok? When he was alive. Very disappointing actually, but anyway) although we’ve pretty much stopped drinking any deadly thing, mostly, we shall cast out devils, we shall speak with new tongues. We might, one day, get a radio that you can actually listen to without a plug, too.
