Musing on musings of Alistair Cooke

Amongst all the new cultural pleasures that I discovered on moving to London in the late 70s was an introduction to BBC Radio 4. I swear that I had never heard it before. Having listened then with a now dear friend, it has since become my daily radio station, both at home and in the car.  So not only do my days continue to be played out to such as the Today programme, The Archers, Desert Island Discs, The Food Programme and Book at Bedtime, but I also quickly became a fan of Alistair Cooke’s  ‘Letter from America’.  Little did I realise at the time that this extraordinary writer had been broadcasting for the BBC since the 1940s. He continued his weekly commentaries until his retirement in 2004 and he died later the same year. So I checked in half-way through his Letters, from about the time of Reagan until George Bush and the Iraq War. Yet because Cooke covered America from his apartment home over-looking Central Park, New York, and not as a Washington correspondent,  his Letters were never overtly ‘Political’. If they were, I doubt I would have been so engaged by them. Rather he mused on and wrote beautifully about, ‘politics’ with a small ‘c’, about everyday life as he travelled to nearly every US State, about sport and the arts, about the weather and cities and countryside and mostly just about people, their habits and their history. I’ve been reminded about how much I enjoyed his broadcasts by coming across a volume of his Letters in my favourite Oxfam Bookshop in Ealing. Goodness, what would he make of today’s America, I wonder?