Let's be honest: it's been a television week. Happily, or not, robbed of our common commutes and regular periods of quiet and isolation, we have less time for our usual relationship with radio - and radio has less time for its usual relationship with us.
Sure, there's the music, and this year Fairytale of New York - the only reason to listen to pop radio in December - managed to edge up another notch on the poignancy scale (where it was already using the telescopic extension) because of the death of Kirsty MacColl. (The raised profile of Shane MacGowan's living also played a role.) Even for music, however, we're more likely to be listening to our new CDs.
In speech radio, 'tis the season for pro-forma end-of-year packages and more-or-less inspirational documentaries such as the fine Christine's Voice (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday). This told us about Christine Delaney, who found her voice as a writer when she lost the ability to vocalise because of Parkinson's disease.
I Think we were meant to draw inspiration from the presenter of Joe Duffy and the Mysterious Stranger (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). Despite the children's book title (I look forward to Joe Duffy and the Missing Puppy), this was our Joe's "personal odyssey" with a tape recorder, in search of the Irish years of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein - who worked on Philosophical Investigations here between 1947 and 1949.
Some of this was pretty silly. Duffy, as is his wont, got bogged down in "How great was he?" nonsense with Wittgenstein's biographer. (Answer - surprise, surprise - the greatest since Plato.) At least he didn't say: "on a scale of one to 10 . . ."
Anyway, I can't say I was over-impressed with the philosophical rigour of that biographer, who employed in a highly problematic way the category "real" in the following description of Wittgenstein's sojourns in Wicklow and Connemara: "Although he didn't strike up a particularly close friendship with the local people . . . he liked the sense that he was, as it were, among real people in a real culture. He liked the lack of artificiality. He liked the informality of the culture, the fact that if you got on the bus, the people would start chatting to you straight away."
The line about "particularly close friendship" turns out to be astonishing understatement. Wittgenstein's stay in Ireland comes across as a continuous, and continually frustrated, quest for silence: he eventually had his eye on an island after the noises of a fishing pier and a nocturnal sheepdog drove him around the twist in the back end of Co Galway.
In Wicklow, a man who was then a child in Wittgenstein's boarding house remembered him: "That's where he would hit the wall to tell us to quiet down". The folks there have only recently started trying to keep the woodworm out of his old desk, since "we realised that he is such an important person".
Joe's odyssey to the Connemara Deutschtacht found one old local who wasn't prepared to acknowledge this importance. Festie, the now-octogenarian currach-maker, initially took Wittgenstein "for a tinker". As for the philosopher's propensity for hill-walking: "We thought he was a man that was expecting a submarine or something. Now, that's the truth." It was his walking along Festie's ridges of spuds that caused their falling-out.
Said Joe: "He was very interested in language and communication."
Said Festie: "Well, dammit, he wasn't. No, that's wrong about him anyhow. He didn't want to talk to anyone."
A short documentary featuring calligrapher Donald Jackson never got better than its opening lines, in which Jackson recalled his moment of vocation: being a child in school, and the pleasure of joining up the letters in the word "wigwam". My Sistine Chapel (BBC Radio 4, Christmas Day) visited Jackson's scriptorium in Wales, where he and his three scribes are producing the first hand-written Bible since Gutenberg rendered such an endeavour, well, kind of pointless.
Presenter Etta Halliday got mileage out of the scriptorium's former life as a blacksmith's shop, and wasn't she right? This surely is one of the sweetest twists yet on the Old Economy/New Economy interface.
Some sounds radio is unsure about capturing, and the near-silence of the scriptorium is one of them: instead we heard Jackson's summary: "the scratching of the quills, the rustling of the pages, the murmuring . . ."
He calls his ambitious, international, multicultural project his Sistine Chapel, but Jackson never voiced the bitterness of Michelangelo, quoted here complaining about the goiter he'd developed on his back for the pope.
Its producers at BBC Northern Ireland only got a quarter-hour slot for this programme, but you felt the eloquent Jackson could easily have gone on far longer. Here he is on the significance of using ink: "What I feel is that liquidity, that sense of the ink, the pen dipping in wetness. We are wetness, we come from wetness. We are a product of the blood of our mothers and our mothers' mothers' mothers, in a continuous stream, from beyond time." Well indeed. Ink sounds good, so.
There were more women, this time speaking for themselves, in Women of the World (BBC World Service, Thursday). This is Kate Howells's follow-up to her 1995 series, Born a Girl, which interviewed teenagers internationally. But "women of the world" turned out to be something of a misnomer for the two programmes featured over Christmas: Dana Kiblawi, from Amman, Jordan, and Tara Mohr from Palo Alto, California, turned out to be, at 21, still quite sheltered and naive.
Completely bourgeois too, though perhaps it's not surprising that the clearest enunciation of values came from the Jordanian: "I'm interested in money - let's say, frankly. I think that when you study medicine it's clear that you get rich quickly, and that appeals to me." In a further frank revelation of a widespread bias, Kiblawi explained that she switched to dentistry because studying medicine was too much like hard work.
Going to the mall to shop for clothes is the Jordanian woman's great passion. Meanwhile, the California girl has grown up to give tours of the campus at Yale, where she recently graduated. (We hear her telling the tourists that Yale's architecture is "kind of a spin-off of Oxford and Cambridge".)
"Nothing in California," she tells us, with more passion than accuracy, "is 300 years old."
While Mohr works on a Jewish-feminist project at Yale with Rabbi Sharon, her friends are all going into law, medicine, consultancy, investment banking. She's not pushed for time herself: she evidently expects her parents to move anywhere from California to be near her, and she's got her Eric: "He's super-intelligent . . . I'm, like, really moved by how nurturing he's been to me". (Nurturing Eric, still an undergrad, runs his own Internet graduate-recruitment company. He expected to be an instant millionaire, but the bursting of the e-commerce bubble means, "we've actually had to run a business, which is much more interesting, and much more rewarding". Yeah right.)
This is a damn-good series, and I'm already looking forward to the next instalment in five years' time. What will become of Tara? She says that while she has ideas and thoughts about her future, "I don't think I've found the manifestation in the world that matches up with that yet".
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie