Welcome to Letters from Radio Quotidia the NYE2023 program where, on New Year’s Eve, we look back at the things that, at times, we wish weren’t and forwards to what we wish might be. More

Cobb was preoccupied with the thought that the Dr Strangeloves of the world would miscalculate badly and reduce us all to glowing nuclear ash. His cartoon has two men cowering under a broken concrete shelter surrounded by rubble and skulls. One man says to the other, There’s a rumour goin’ round that we won. More

The overlay of mortal sadness, of one facing execution, has seeped into the melody of The Parting Glass. 24-year-old Chidiok Tichbourne's poem to his wife comes to mind- "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares."More

Most men and women who have been to outer space attest to the perspective distance gives and how fragile yet magnificent our blue earth appears from afar. Standing on the Moon, then, gives a wide perspective on life. More

In writing this song I was recollecting, in wine-assisted tranquillity, how I felt as a teenager caught a maelstrom over the developing relationship with my girlfriend- who is now my wife- ineffable proof that even miserable sods like me can strike it lucky. More

William Holman-Hunt, painted the Lady of Shallot. The Awakening Conscience, painted fifty years before, makes for an interesting comparison; there, too, is a mirror, a window and a beautiful woman depicted, but here, she’s on her lover’s lap as she gazes, transfixed out of the window. More

For me, T. S. Eliot set the scene for this sort of navel-gazing with his world-weary Sweeney Among the Nightingales, written in 1918 where his protagonist relaxes in a low bar somewhere in South America, Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees/ Letting his arms hang down to laughMore

We can’t comfortably categorise tradies as petit bourgeois. Soren Kierkegaard wrote, "the petty bourgeois is spiritless…devoid of imagination… he lives within a certain orbit of trivial experiences...This scornful depiction owes more to the prejudices of the philosophical Dane’s affluent middle-class upbringing than any thoroughgoing analysis. More

The golden record affixed to the spacecraft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. More

A. I.'s myriad nanobots will be introduced into the environment and infiltrate our bodies, and at a predetermined time, these little engines of death coursing through our bloodstream and brain will simply activate and cause every member of our species to…deactivate. More