´óÏó´«Ã½

I’m prone to sentimentalising institutions,
but will admit to feeling oddly comforted when
channel-flicking on a hotel bed alights at last on
´óÏó´«Ã½ World News – you know, the one you only
get abroad, with the interminable drumming countdown
that gives way to a voice that sounds like home.
I grew up in a house where the TV was always on
to save us, I suppose, from having to be alone
with each other. Or later the nocturnal tones
of the World Service – all the other options gone –
would accompany the washing up my mum
liked to do in the small hours, with the fridge’s drone
and the beat-up Sony radio her sole companions –
her sunflower gloves circling in the gloom,
bowls clinking to beats from Mali, or the latest from
Kosovo or Sierra Leone. Places no less far flung
from our English kitchen than her native Hong Kong
where she taught herself this equivocal tongue
by intoning its unfamiliar vowels – The quick brown… –
from scrounged textbooks stamped with a Crown
that wasn’t exactly foreign. And where do I belong?
From my teens, well-meaning adults would exclaim
You have a lovely voice! Not picking up my flush of shame,
they’d keep going. When you grow up, you should be on
the ´óÏó´«Ã½! Well, here I am. Those Saturday afternoons
in Mrs Thorpe’s front room learning to recite Browning
(Oh, to be in England!) along with the other offspring
of suburban Asian parents, driven by anxiety or aspiration
that we shouldn’t sound like them. Well, here I am,
still the abashed colonial. Your voice is so beautiful. So calm.
In my mind’s ear, the night-time radio’s comforting hum.
Well, here we are. Look how far we’ve come.