at 25 i'm going back to my radio roots, in much the same way i'm trying to reconstruct, from the remnants of fractured grammar still in me, the once-contemned language teochew. i don't know how much radio had to do with your childhood - your parents must have listened to rediffusion - but the devotion to a single station my father kept from his youth, and so for me growing up entertainment was the bbc - i never watched much tv as a kid - i must be the only one of you who has never seen sesame street - i had books, and i had radio. i heard my first poems - tennyson's "lady of shalott" and "ulysses" on the world service's poems by post. i heard my first radio play at lunch (we alternated between english and chinese stations to suit either parent.) and while i can't remember what it was called or even about i remember the sensation of being impressed, and of the sudden light and delight of recognition of narrative structure in radio dramas. i laughed at radio comedies i could not have fully understood. i knew the sound of alistair cooke's voice. and yet in the intervening years it was as if a long illness had come upon me, and when the illness lifted all of those memories were taken with it - it wasn't that radio lost its hold on me - i simply did not know it existed, nor did i know a time when it existed for me - i was the person who had gone down the other leg of the trousers of time. but all of a sudden over the past 10 months i have started, first wonderingly, then methodically and now fanatically, trying to learn everything about the history of british radio, and to listen to as many old programs as possible. this is my radio revival, and the extraordinary thing is that the memories come back, one by one, and quickly, each lusher than before, and with greater import.