Lives captured in transit

It’s such a simple idea. Take a tape recorder. Hang around at the entrance to a railway station or in the departure lounge of an airport. Look for an intriguing face, an unusual couple, a dashing outfit. Rush up to them (having remembered to switch on the recorder) and ask, ‘Where are you going?’ As Catherine Carr said at the beginning of her programme for the Freedom 2014 series on the BBC World Service at the weekend, ‘Every interrupted journey is a portal into somebody’s life.’

Of course, in Where are you going? (produced by Jo Coombs) we only got to hear from the travellers who had something interesting to tell us, but even so this was an hour of pure radio, with so many vivid snapshots, such compelling stories. It was as if we were given insights into a whole life as Carr’s interviewees told us in just a few minutes before dashing off to catch a train or plane about the journeys they were about to take and why. In those moments of transition, perhaps, the real essence of a person comes into play.

Pity the poor philosophy professor who is caught by Carr as he is just about to get on a train on his way home to Manchester from Cambridge, where he had been giving a lecture. He made the mistake of telling Carr right away, without needing to be prompted, what his talk had been about. ‘The philosophy of language and the theory of truth.’ Go on, she asks him, in the two seconds before the train leaves, tell us what was ‘the thrust of your talk’.

He laughs nervously. ‘I’m trying to explain what it means to say that truth depends on reality.’ Not, he adds, ‘in a heavy-duty metaphysical relation. It’s a conceptual relation.’ Clear as mud to me, but how revealing to hear from a man who must spend his working (and waking) hours pondering such things.