Knitting, crochet and podcasts

I just listened to Avery Trufelman’s podcast Lace and Labor. What a banger. An absolutely thrilling episode for all sorts of reasons. For a start, I loved the idea that just as the machines came for hand knitting, they have come for podcasting. So Avery Trufelman got two smooth-talking faux-hosts to talk about the history of knitting. No idea what kind of prompts she used, but the results were both fun and indicative of the vast distance between Trufelman’s own art and a stochastic parrot’s version; close, but not nearly close enough. I was reminded of my own attempt, long ago (1995) and far away, to do something similar. Richard Sanders and I made a programme for Farming Today on BBC Radio Four about the modern peasant and various practitioners who were not ashamed to call themselves peasants. I came up with the cracking wheeze of getting my swanky Apple computer to speak out loud the email replies I got from one of them, which Richard would otherwise probably have voiced. It worked…