A trio of things to divert us as we drift into the dog days: the Norwegian non-fiction hit Shark Drunk makes a perfectly dreamlike Book of the Week (BBC Radio 4, weekdays, 9.45am). Its author, Morten Strøksnes, navigates the waters around the Lofoten Islands looking for a Greenland shark, a highly elusive and languorous creature that can reach 200 years in age and has fluorescent-green parasites covering its milky, sad eyes.
Strøksnes is frequently distracted by the strange summer beauty of the islands. Like a naive hero in a dark-edged John Bauer illustration, he is helplessly drawn to their tiny shores, wandering through forests of rowan dripping with chlorophyll or sitting among a species of pretty yellow flower with a fragrance that has earned it the label “arse-wiper gut grass”. Oh, happy picnics!
Then, to a discussion about the “saucy bits” in One Thousand and One Nights on the BBC World Service’s The Forum (1 August, 9am). Dipping into the massive, ancient Indian/Persian collection of stories about flying carpets and genies reminds me a little of surfing the web – it’s a book that contains so many voices. Such a mixture of moralising and immoral behaviour and tall tales. On and on it goes. (The title in Arabic, Alfu Laylatin wa-Laylah, means “endless”.)
How about this? “The porter saw a girl with eyes like a wild heifer, a neck like a cake for eating and a mouth like the sea of Solomon.” A neck like a cake for eating. Phenomenal lines rush past in a gleefully gurgling whoosh, like water let out of the bath.
Finally, hands down the guest presenter of the summer is the American singer Beth Ditto, with her two-hour stint on BBC 6 Music (28 July, 7pm). Clicking her fingers, speaking with a wink, never short of a compassionate anecdote, Ditto has a unique knack of introing a song as good as Planningtorock’s “Living It Out” by increasingly raising her voice as the music starts thrumming beneath, and then louder still, like someone with her hand on the door of a holiday-island nightclub, excitedly shouting instructions at you before everybody bursts in, minus several flip-flops, and heads straight for the bar.
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This article appears in the 26 Jul 2017 issue of the New Statesman, Summer double issue