radio romance

I pulled over by the side of the road and my wife in the north talking book CD faded out from the blaupunkt with a sigh. I looked out of the window and up the hill that rose from the roadside. Could it be true, I asked my self, could that lonely figure atop that distant windswept northern hilltop really be what I thought it was? I had to find out if my eyes were really deceiving me. I began to run up the hill, stumbling over Heather and Dale (It was going to cost those two if they didn’t want to be shamed on my blog, I can tell you, this isn’t a bloody Melvyn Bragg novel you know, sigh). The car began to vanish below me as I climbed and climbed. Suddenly, a sound in the silence, a voice? Yes, a voice in the wilderness! Was it calling out a woman's name? I must be imagining things but no, ‘Cathy!’ called a man’s voice, ‘Cathy!’ I stood silent. ‘Cathy, is it really you?’ I could still not see the source of this most insistent and urgent cry, for a frightening and terrible mist did descend upon the hillside, hushing the very wind and drawing my world closely around me. The voice grew near. It was almost upon me! I shivered and drew my shawl tighter round my shoulders. ‘Cathy, Cathy, I thought I had lost you for ever but you have come back just as you promised you would!’ The man must almost certainly have been but yards away now. I turned and gave a start when a tall and imposing figure strode out of the ghostly swirlling fog . He was wild and tall (hmm, did I mention he was tall already) and handsome. ‘Cathy! He cried, raising his arms as if to embrace me. I was now within reach of his strong masculine grasp. I too opened my arms to receive him ‘Oh’ he said ‘bugger’ I lowered my expectant arms. ‘Most terribly sorry, I thought you were someone else’ He looked nervously from side to side. ‘Oh crikey, I feel like a right tit now’, he said apologetically. ‘I’ll be, errr, getting along then’ he said. ‘pleased to meet you and all that…’ and he vanished into the mist, the tails of his long coat being the last bit of him to disappear into the gloom. I shrugged and carried on towards the top of the hill.

I paused as, at one with the moor, the clouds and the birds, the object of my devotion, the subject of my dreams, the answer to my loneliness, which was abject and to my social status, which was reject, stood tall and unyielding before me at last upon the hill top. I began to fumble with my buttons, my fingers numb with the cold. At last, sign of life, a glimmer of hope a ….'No signal!’ My hopes were dashed as my phone told me this was not a phone mast before me, just a repeater for Radio Two. I should have known such a thing up north was too much to answer for. All the others I had seen had just been mirages. I hoped at least that chap I met earlier found who he was looking for, sigh. All at once, the mist enveloped the fell in a mistlike misty mistiness once more. Was that another voice I could hear? A woman this time? Not so much a voice, more like an eerie ghostly wailing . ‘Heathcliffe!’ cried the plaintive voice ‘Heathcliffe, it’s me, Cathy, come home!’ Where was it coming from? I looked around but saw nothing but the swirling fog. Oh, the lonliness in her voice, oh how I identified with her desperate unhappiness, oh if I could only meet her and tell her of my earlier encounter. The voice faded, to be replaced by 'Hello and top of the mornin' to my listener!' The new disembodied voice contined, 'That was a request from a loverly lady in Northumberland who says she misses her husband, so she does, who's on the other side, so he is, down in London, and if it wasn't for reading Strife in the North she doesn't know how she'd survive, so she doesn't, and now the traffic news...' I sighed. I knew now that my accounts of my grim life, painful as it was for me to relive each grim day at night in front of my computer, had brought solace to another lonely soul out there, although I wondered whether anyone actually spoke like that fellow on the radio in real life. I began to walk back down the hill and, as the sun broke through the clouds, I understood now how to really reach people, I understood how to get FM on my phone, and it was a long weekend coming up and I had managed to get in a romantic depiction of a radio mast before the power to the village went off untill Tuesday, sigh.