“The writer” does some radio work from time to time. The first piece since Lockdown began, was finished yesterday. Like most radio presenters during this weird time, he was asked to work from home. In this case to record on his mobile and transfer the file to the radio station from his desktop. Easy, he thought, as he sat down in his favourite chair, held the phone in front of him and spoke. Sending it off was harder as the file containing the recording was, at first, nowhere to be found on his desktop. Eventually, we tracked it down, despatched it and relaxed. Job done.

A few hours later, the producer emailed to say the recording sounded as though “The writer”had been sitting in a swimming pool, so great was the echo and hardness of timbre. She suggested re-recording somewhere with lots of soft furnishings. “The writer” explained that we live in an entirely steel and glass building with wooden floors throughout. Soft furnishings are scarce, to say the least. We had several more goes – sitting on the sofa with cushions piled around, lying on a rug, speaking into the clothes in an open wardrobe – all no good.

Then, we remembered that the bedroom, although it has a hard wood floor, also has velvet curtains. All we had to do was drag in a chair and place the phone on a pile of books. Sound straightforward? I brought a pile of books and arranged them in a tower of appropriate height on which to balance the ‘phone so it was close to “the writer’s” lips but not too close for fear of sibilence, only to discover him sneaking back to the bookcase and returning them to the shelves, before removing several different books and reconstituting the tower.

When I enquired what was wrong with my choice, he explained that he felt books by authors he didn’t like – or liked too much – would be a distraction were he to catch sight of them while recording. He re-iterated his usual, only half-joking, explanation for insane behaviour around writing – that writers of fiction are like Gods, creating and re-creating the world. What’s more, they are Monotheistic Gods who can’t bear any Johnny-come-lately deity muscling in on their territory. The consequence of this theory is that the work of few writers is tolerable to other writers and, frankly, I’m surprised he could find enough acceptable books to create a pile.

I think you’ll agree that the eventual solution to producing perfect sound quality had nothing especially God-like about it.