Why “Postcard from Bishkek”?
I am a creature of habit.
One of my routines back in the UK was, every Sunday to take the weekly washing that had been put into the washing machine and do the ironing listening to Radio Four … the Brit’s reading this will understand what that means … it’s a Talk Radio station run by the BBC. There was a lot of ironing to do, and I hated doing it, (but it was a “necessary chore”), and so it used to take me a long time to get through it all. I would listen to the news, a discussion programme, the Sunday service, the weekly omnibus of the Archers (the world’s longest continuously running radio soap opera “about country folk” in a mythical English village which was supposed to be modelled on one near where I grew up) and there was Alistair Cooke’s “Letter from America” – another long running programme … .
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Alistair Cook began broadcasting his “” Letter from America” in 1946. He was a journalist working as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the BBC. Originally the programme was scheduled to run on the British Home Service, (the forerunner of Radio Four), and around the world on the BBC’s World Service, for just a 13 week season … but it finally came off the air only shortly before his death in 2004, by which time it had become the world’s longest running speech programme.Although he would have a script of sorts, it always seemed as if he was simply rambling … taking his listeners through a maze of thoughts and ideas, but always ending promptly after his 15 minutes were up with a wry comment that summed up his theme like his famous “… and the rest is now history” on the resignation of Richard Nixon.
The programme established itself as a favourite amongst many English speaking people throughout the world – even amongst those who disagreed with him and, sometimes, disagreed with his observations and conclusions about America, its people, history and culture. As a commentator, however, he provided an insight into all things American with reports on global and domestic affairs, as well as individual incidents and impressions. A selection of his articles can still be found on the internet … at www.bbc.co.uk … and several collections of his talks have been published as books. |
I was a great fan of the programme, and when I first came to Kyrgyzstan it was one of the things that I missed … it was difficult to pick up the World Service here at that time … I remember sitting over a shortwave radio shortly after I arrived, trying to listen to a crackling broadcast that faded in and out. You can imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that the BBC were publishing the text of his weekly talks on their internet site. So, I began a new routine … every Tuesday morning I would log onto the internet and read his latest missive, before downloading and going through the emails. I suppose these days it would have been a podcast and I could have downloaded the programme and listened to his dulcet tones on an i-pod.
When I decided to start my own personal website, ianbek.com, I had to decide what to call it. I considered several contenders … “Mini sagas” was a possibility … although the word is normally associated with the Vikings, (the word has an Icelandic origin), they were tales of heroic deeds done in days long ago and for centuries Kyrgyz culture was based on an oral tradition with several epic poems, (including the world’s longest epic poem, Manas). However, the requirement for a mini-saga to consist of exactly fifty words was going to be a definite problem. There was no way I felt I was going to be able to keep to that word limit.
It occurred to me that it might be nice to model it on Alistair Cooke and do a similar «Letter from Bishkek» … I hoped that I could emulate him and pass on some interesting insights into a foreign and interesting society, culture, and community … and I recognized that, just like Alistair Cooke, I also tend to ”know my own mind” and can be somewhat opinionated (… and maybe, someday. this will get me into trouble). However, I still felt that this was a bit presumptuous of me, because I didn’t think that I had the experience, wisdom or ability of Alistair Cooke - and I wasn’t sure that I had the stamina to turn in a regular weekly column as he did … but, as a former schoolteacher with an inborn tendency to educate, elucidate and explain, I decided to give it a go and, in deference to the great man, I decided to name my efforts as a more modest “postcard”.
Anyway, that’s how the “Postcard from Bishkek” was born.
Bishkek