Harking Humanity

 If you were in any way aggrieved by your resident young ones on Sunday morning (when they feed the iPod but let... the cat starve), then the Documentary on One on Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome or Sudden Adult Death syndrome, made you love again every tangled hair on their heads.  Peter Greene, Cliodhna Murphy and Michael Arrigan had their stories told. Fifteen year old Peter Greene awoke, sick at 3.15 am and as dawn broke over Beaumont hospital, his mother Marie had heard the words, “We've lost him”.
Cliodhna Murphy died aged 30 in 1995. Her sister Karen, who was then working in Costa Rica, recalled falling to the floor when their dad called with the news. Michael Arrigan had been plagued by heart palpitations, unable many times to walk into casualty only to be told, as his racing heart settled, that nothing was wrong. His mother contacted the support group CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young, 01 8395438), set up by Marie Greene after Peter's death. That led to contacts which resulted in Michael having a five-hour operation. As a result of that networking and surgery, Michael's strong and healthy voice fairly leapt out of the radio at us.  
Sheila Hancock was Michael Berkeley's guest on Private Passions and her love of music – sparked at age 12 by her musical appreciation teacher Miss Tudor Craig – was one she shared with her late husband, the actor John Thaw. From Elgar's Malvern landscape to Benjamin Brittain's evocation of The Fens with “its mysterious whisperings, something very odd going on there”, she gave insight into a life with a constant soundtrack.
She loves temperamental musicians and had us listen out for the moment when either Menuhin or Stephane Grappelli “almost lose” it at the end of ‘Tea for Two'. The programme ended with her first musical love, Tchaikovsky, and a moment when the orchestra was “really panicking”. That's the way she likes it. “If it's too perfect, you might as well watch telly,” she said.
Radio Five Live's report on the London bombings: The Way Forward, features five people injured in the July suicide bomb attacks in London. Garri Holness lost his leg through the suicide bombing on the Picadilly Line (bombed by Germaine Lindsay). He was in conversation with Sue Hanish, who lost a leg in the bombing at Victoria Station in 1991. Both also have assorted other injuries to their good legs, but there was little moaning here – although Sue recalled being mad at people who said dumb things, like “And what HAVE you done to yourself?” She didn't want people to know “how much the world had hurt me”. Garri's mother died 14 days after the bombing and although he had visited her every day of the three previous years she'd spent in a nursing home, he was glad she had not seen “her eldest son with his leg blown off”.  
Sue warned Garri to be on his guard against lawyers who, in talking the claim up, were going to focus only on what he would no longer be able to do. “Your life has been devastated,” they told her, “You can't dance, you can't ski.” “They want you to get the biggest claims possible but it will do your head in terribly if you believe what they are telling you.”
Garri, who is waiting for a prosthetic leg at Roehampton Hospital has already negotiated the wine bars of Hampstead in his wheelchair. Sue climbed Kilimanjaro last year and “danced on the top with a guy from Ireland”. Aren't people smashing all the same?