The Cat's Whiskers

I was watching the BBC Last Night of The Proms last night, but decided to bail out to bed before the finale, as I was tired. However, I fired up BBC Sounds on my iPhone so I could listen through to the end lying abed. I actually preferred the 'radio' listen to watching it, and I think I know why. Because that was the way I was exposed to The Last Night in the first place, back in the mid-1960s as a child. My uncle Edgar made me a crystal set for either Christmas or my birthday one year: from scratch, in his own workshop, from scavenged bits of GPO cast-offs and components from his stock of bits and pieces. He delivered the device to me, and rigged an aerial from my back-bedroom window to the furthest point from it at the back of our small garden. The thing was constructed of a black vulcanite front plate upon which all the controls and components were mounted, and it was housed in a simple wooden box of Edgar's making. [Pictured, a commercial crystal set].

The sound issued forth through a pair of [GPO?] bakelite headphones with a fabric cord, dating back some twenty or thirty odd years before that; simple: crude, even, but the receiver required no electrical power to enable its function in pulling in radio signals from hundreds or thousands of miles distant: the magic of the ether revealed through a simple wooden box. That I already owned a transistor radio of my own, of far greater sophistication than the crystal set itself, in no way overshadowed the joy of tuning in to the Last Night of The Proms on that first occasion, distant and fading, but somehow, the experience was more akin to discovering something for oneself, rather than simply consuming it at someone else's behest. I think that it's a lesson still worth heeding to this day, sixty-odd year later...