Sonia. Sonia Sonia Sonia Sonia. Lovely name. Redolent of radio.
Sounds like sound. Did I mention Sonia? Sonia.
Soniasoniasoniasoniasoniasonia.
Sonia.
And that about sums up your columnist's mental processes this week. Maybe it also sums up this week's radio content. I don't know. I heard as much as ever, but I really only noticed the bits about Sonia. No, I don't expect you to find this endearing.
I'd love to tell you I listened to all her races on the radio. It would hardly be too much to ask of me. But, as that great radio star Tricky Dick Nixon once said, leaning in toward the microphone in the Oval Office lamp-shade, "That would be wrong". Watching-Sonia-race is an activity verging on the impossible - I'm still aching, quite literally, from injuries sustained in her first qualifying heat eight days ago, injuries related to a hazardous combination of stress and wall-bouncing, the doctors tell me - but not-watching-Sonia-race crosses the verge entirely: around here, it can't be done.
Anyway, I'm told reliably that listening-to-Sonia-race on RTE has been a rich and rewarding activity, particularly with Catherina McKiernan (what if she'd been there as an athlete to absorb some of the adoration?) providing expertise beside Greg Allen.
To be honest, I tried it. I tried it on the lowest-stress Sonia Occasion these Olympics provided. I tried it at 3 a.m. I tried it when Sonia, wearing her horrible Aussie "sunnies" and cruising dully to seventh-place qualification, ran as close as she can get to Not An Incredible Visual Phenomenon. I tried it with the television on but the sound turned down.
It was OK. It helped when I moved the radio right beside the telly. But the distancing effect was still almost unbearable.
I don't even like George Hamilton all that much - his classically over-optimistic and occasionally inept assessments of Irish soccer performances have broken my heart at least three times too often across the years - but it seems I need a tellyvoice at tellytrackside.
Still, during that 2FM race commentary in Wednesday's wee hours, even while my eyes were glued to the tube, I did hear McKiernan offering probably the best piece of expert commentary of the week. As an insomniac Irish nation took grave offence at those five ridiculous women who saw fit to run away from Sonia in that qualifying race, McKiernan was asked why on earth they would be doing such a thing, wasting their energy when it was so obvious that the Sonia Way was the only way to complete this heat. "Well, perhaps they just want to get it over with - they want to get off the track and back to their beds and get some sleep."
Not only was it an astute and human piece of analysis, of the sort only a true jock could provide, it doubled as a pretty decent piece of advice to the rest of us.
But hey, we had Olympics to listen to. Oh yeah, I listened plenty, to BBC Radio 5 Live's extraordinarily comprehensive coverage and to RTE Radio 1's invaluable Sydney Today late every night. Very different they were, of course, and not just because of the resources each had available. Five Live was laddish bordering loutish: proudly, loudly waving the British flag and all too often descending into silly and sexist banter among endless Bobs and Nigels. Whereas Sydney Today, even while it called upon RTE's handful of peripatetic reporters in Oz, had the feel of a one-woman show - the woman being experienced, talented sports reporter Yvonne Judge, mostly serious and reflective and particularly cynical about the drugs issue.
Still, RTE and the Beeb had something strange in common.
Out of their studios, away from their accustomed venues, often broadcasting from what seemed to be dismal corners of a vast press centre, talking back to us across 10 time zones, Judge and the Brit boys alike often sounded out of touch, like they didn't really believe anyone could be listening to this. It was too often slack, in a way that sport and talk about sport really shouldn't be.
Soniamania was elsewhere on the schedule too. It was particularly nice to hear RTE radio archivist Ian Lee get his due and presenting some old Sonia clips (e.g. 17-year-old Sonia sharing her Olympic dream) on 5-7 Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). I think Lee made a small and uncharacteristic boo-boo in his narrative, suggesting that Sonia's defeat at collective Chinese hands occurred at the 1992 Olympics rather than at the 1993 World Championships. But then maybe I'm just a Sonianorak, if not a Soniaddict.
THAT early-hours, 25-lap programme for living with Soniaddiction did leave momentary psychic space for one documentary. The lovely Where There is Light (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) told one of those stories that before you hear you're sure you've heard already, but once it actually starts unfolding it turns out to be new and wonderful.
These were the tales of the last of the Irish lighthouse-keepers - of the generations of the same families that toiled at this strange work, moving suddenly from Valentia to Inishowen, of the awful isolation wives and children suffered, of the "long, long silences", of the brass-polishing nautical tradition that drove these obsessive, so-important watchers.
Producer Lorelei Harris, a clever, affectionate and unpredictable radio brain as always, creates an aural space quite different from what you'd expect. There's hardly a gull or a gale, divil the crashing wave. Instead the constant flow of voices and stories and reflections are set in somewhere that sounds like memory, wide and echoing, with sometimes the rise of a woodwind instrument, at other times the swell of an orchestra. Each testimony had its own vibration, but they also worked together for a striking overall effect.
Where There is Light does drift out of the memory space and into a real old lighthouse, for a bit of a tour and a bit of history - but, to be honest, if Radio 1 didn't impose such an over-long time-slot on these documentaries, these interruptions might have been redundant. I'm not complaining: the programme is repeated tonight, when we're done with Sonia - if you missed it, check it out - and is just the drug for those withdrawal pains. Of course, you could watch the race repeats on television . . .