books

“Oi! Incoming!”– a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

A total joy to be invited to offer the 06.07.26 Pause for Thought on the first morning of the Sara Cox Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2! Listen here. Here’s what I shared:

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In our local park there’s a winding path – and from 8:00 in the morning it fills with kids heading to school, walking, or riding their bikes. I was walking the dog one morning in the park last week and noticed a group of adults chatting at the bottom of a little hill. They were spread right across the path, completely unaware they were blocking everybody else. Children were trudging around them. Kids riding bikes had to brake and pedal up into the long grass.

But then, there was this young girl – probably nine or ten years old. She crested the hill on her bike, she saw the adults, and she rang her bike bell. Well, the adults didn’t even look up. So she rang that bell again – they didn’t move. It was like they hadn’t woken up yet.

Finally, ten meters out, she rang that bell one more time and she yelled: “Oi! I’M INCOMING!” Suddenly the crowd woke up and scattered off the path, just in time, laughing. And the girl sailed through, triumphant.

Sara Cox – I thought of you.

It’s your first show and here you are, with energy and bells and a little bit of “Oi! Incoming!” To wake us up, to bring some joy to our days, and maybe even to move us on a bit, too. Welcome, we’re so glad you’re here.

I know you’ve got the amazing Tom Hanks coming in later. I heard him interviewed recently, about when he played Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, the children’s television presenter who was also a Christian minister. Tom Hanks said he’d once heard Mr. Rogers say something like: if the only prayer we ever pray is “thank you, God”, that would be enough. And Tom Hanks said: I’m not really a religious person, but I love that.

I’m a Christian, and I love that, too. Whether we’re people who pray or people who don’t, wherever we are on the spirituality spectrum (or not), I think gratitude – “thank you” – is something many of us recognise.

And so, this morning, Sara, as you arrive – incoming! – I pray:

Thank you, God, for new beginnings.

Thank you for Bolton pride and a strong Lancashire accent.

Thank you for the music on the radio.

For sass and surprise, and for the gift of waking up again, however we feel about it.

Sara Cox, may your show be a blessing – a space for laughter, a force for good, and an absolute ton of fun.

World Book Day: a BBC “Pause for Thought”

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 5 March 2021 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Early Breakfast Show with Vanessa Feltz on BBC Radio 2. You can listen in here on the BBC website, starting from 1hr13:20 or so.

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I remember packing for a family holiday once, I was about seven, and I filled up my suitcase completely with books. It weighed more than me, but somehow I dragged it down the stairs, ready to go. My mom said: You might need some clothes and a toothbrush?! But honestly, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. If I had enough books, I knew I’d be okay.

At that age, I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series popular in the 1980s. In these books you the reader were also the main character. Every few pages you had a couple of choices, each of which would unfold a few pages later into more choices, and on and on until one of many possible endings. The bookcover said: “You’re the Star of the Story!” and I loved exploring all the different paths.

Exploring ourselves – knowing ourselves well – is so important in life, and books can help us figure ourselves out. I remember being 13, nervously pulling a book from the library shelf and reading for the first time about being gay. Or at 19, diving into the Bible and finding ancient descriptions of mind-blowing spiritual experiences like the one I was having 2000 years later. Or at 32, opening the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and feeling like someone had taken pages straight from my journal.

Knowing yourself is important, but let’s be honest: if you’re always the star of the story, it gets boring, narcissistic, even dangerous: if the only information we take in is from people just like us, with the same backgrounds, politics, and beliefs, we risk living in the echo chambers that are killing our society.

Good books help us know ourselves but they also help us know others. I recently read Bernardine Evaristo’s wonderful novel, Girl, Woman, Other, which won the Booker Prize in 2019. In its stories of 12 mostly Black, British women, I was struck again with the truth that we are not all the same, we’re different, and that’s actually a beautiful thing. The best stories always unfold into the stories of others. The best endings are the ones where our differences don’t isolate us but hold us together. Life is not just about me, it’s about us.

There’s a verse from the Bible, about the ways Jesus meets different people right where they are. The verse goes: If these stories were all written down, the whole world wouldn’t have room for the books that would be written (John 21.25).

That’s a lot of books, that’s a lot of life. Way too much for me to fit in my suitcase alone, and that’s a beautiful thing.