Illuminated

Water has always been a threshold - a space between worlds where transformation unfolds. But what if the lakes, rivers, and seas we surrender ourselves to are not merely passive bodies, but keepers of our grief, our burdens, and our memory?Feature maker Hana Walker-Brown explores what pulls so many of us to the water at moments of rupture or change. Tracing the unseen currents that bind us to each other and to the natural world, Hana considers water not simply as an element, but as the ultimate solvent; a place where we go to dissolve, to surrender to the wild drift of it all, to allow ourselves to be held without condition.Part personal meditation, part collective reflection, A Body Of Water blends intimate testimony, poetic narration and cinematic sound design that echoes the rhythm of the ocean. With contributions from world champion freediver Helena Bourdillon, author and psychologist Dr Sharon Blackie, author and boat builder Wyl Menmuir and author Robert MacFarlane. Special thanks to Abigail Gonda, Bean Downes, Joey Hulin, Christophe Donot and Will Salt. This piece was developed during an artist residency at Hektor in Lanzarote. Presented, produced and sound designed by Hana Walker-Brown Mixed by Peregrine Andrews The executive producer is Peggy SuttonA Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 4

Historian Maurice Casey reveals the story of an anti-Nazi resistance network and the family at its heart, told through a newspaper crafted by two young girls. In the dusty corners of a Galician villa on Spain’s northern coast, Casey uncovered a forgotten archive of revolution, resistance and love. Among the documents was something extraordinary. The Alpenpost - a newspaper lovingly hand-crafted by Elisa and Alida Leonhard, two girls raised on Europe’s 1930s refugee routes. Created every fortnight from late 1935 until 1940, The Alpenpost charted the activities of the two Leonhard girls and their mother Emmy, a veteran of the repressed world of Weimar German communism. With a mixture of cartoons, light stories and precocious political analyses, the girls charted their unusual upbringing as the children of an anti-fascist father and an exiled revolutionary mother.Each issue was posted to the girls’ ‘papa’ Edo Fimmen, separated from his family, constantly travelling to maintain a network of activists and informants. Fimmen led the powerful International Transport-Workers’ Federation in continual resistance to fascism. Reading The Alpenpost, Edo could chart his daughters’ flight through 1930s Europe. Both a love letter to a father seperated from his family by dangerous work and a remarkable document of a childhood lived in flight from totalitarianism.This is a tale of survival against the odds - not only the survival of a family that lived under grave political threats, but an archive that survived a journey across countries and generations.Contributions from Pedro Ewald, Dieter Nelles, Rene Dumont, Bob Reinalda Voices of The Alpenpost: Hannah Nehb, Juno Nehb, Neva Nehb with Arjan SchipperProducer: Mark Burman A Storyscape production for BBC Radio 4

Hilik Magnus is Israel’s foremost search and rescue specialist. He has performed missions, public and private, for over 30 years across six continents. He has worked under the radar during disasters such as 2004’s tsunami and 2008’s Mumbai attacks. He has worked with everyone, from grieving families to cartels and the Taliban, all for the simple purpose of returning people to where they belong. Now, he opens up about this secretive world, and talks frankly about his origins and values.The start, in the 1990s, was simple. His operating base was an abandoned train carriage in the southern desert of Israel with three telephones and a dial-up connection. Hilik did not know what awaited him. All he knew was that he felt a ‘shlichut’ – ‘higher purpose’ in Hebrew – to help save lives, to return the unburied to their grieving families. Yet the business grew and now employs 80 people in a hi-tech hub in Tel Aviv. There is GPS, GSM, fibre-optic, and over 2,500 calls for help every year. In the midst of this change, Hilik is finding it hard to connect the now and then. For him, the purity of the work was in shepherding lost souls, alive or dead, to their rightful place. Strange, mystical encounters at 6,000m above sea-level, exposing national corruption in Bolivia - not board meetings and touchscreens. He hates the city and all it implies. Yet the world moves on, and the work means everything to him. When he lets himself stop, his 76 years catch up with him, leading to days laid up in bed. Producer: Jeremy Neumark Jones Assistant Producer, Additional Research: Robert Neumark Jones Original Music by Theo Whitworth Executive Producer: David Prest A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

If you ask many women in recovery from alcoholism what the term ‘functioning alcoholic’ means to them, they will laugh. In truth, a large percentage of women who end up in treatment had been, to the outside world, ‘functioning’. Holding down jobs, raising children, paying their rent or mortgage. However, internally, ‘functioning’ is about the last word they would use to describe their mental and emotional landscape as alcohol increasingly tightened its grip on their lives.Here, two women share in raw and brutally honest detail their descent into alcohol dependency, which took place incrementally, behind closed doors, and, for the most part, under the radar as they continued to appear to live regular, ‘functional’ lives.​​Functioning offers a rare insight into the experience of leading a completely dual existence - the secrecy, the agility and the alchemy required in maintaining a ‘functioning’ exterior, while your interior is coming apart; and a lesson in how much can go undetected when you are not what the world assumes of an alcoholic.Sound design by Action Pyramid Produced by Jodie Taylor A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Time is a journey - the future ahead of us, the past behind. Our burdens are a weight that we carry, our problems are a puzzle that we solve.Metaphor is at the heart of how we understand our existence. In a period of huge change and global uncertainty, are we outgrowing the metaphors we have lived by?The poet Jack Underwood is offering his services as a metaphor consultant, for a very reasonable fee.Featuring conversations with poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir; Dr Stephen Flusberg, the Director of the Framing, Reasoning And Metaphor (FRAME) Lab at Vassar College; computer scientist Melanie Mitchell; the philosopher Dr Julia Ng; and the linguist and author of Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff.Location recording by Mitra Kaboli, Kristina Loring, Gustavo Martinez and Donelle WedderburnProduced by Eleanor McDowall A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Bass guitarist and record producer Jah Wobble has had a lifetime’s immersion at the low end of the musical spectrum. Over four decades, his hypnotic bass riffs have powered music from punk to reggae, fusion to world music.He relates his first experiences as a teenager attending blues dances where Jamaican sound systems played cuts of reggae dub where the bass felt like a force like gravity, and seeing Bob Marley and the Wailers where he was captivated by the playing of bassist Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, and on to his own involvement with Public Image Limited, where he brought a dub sensibility into their post-punk music. He discusses his long years as a solo artist, and collaborations with musical legends from Can’s Holger Czukay to Sinead O’Connor, and Primal Scream to Pharoah Sanders. During these years, Jah Wobble has also been interested in the Science of Bass. So, he meets up with Dr Duncan Edwards of Salford University, to ask him about the special, physical properties of Bass Notes. How do they reach our brains and, once there, what psychological, emotional effects can they have on us? To understand this, he submits to an experiment where his head is wired up, and the Wobble brain waves measured. After years lost in drink and drugs Jah Wobble turned to Buddhism and became fascinated by alternative explanations of his bass playing that this could give him. He interviews eminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Jampa Thaye, to find further enlightenment. And in a south London Prayer room, he listens to the extraordinary low-pitched chanting of exiled Tibetan monks, where one mantra has the awesome power of a bass note.Presenter: Jah Wobble Producer: Alastair Laurence Sound Design: Jake Wittlin A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

In 1939, Emma Freud's mother Jill was evacuated from London to the suburbs of Oxford. After staying with Lewis Carroll's friends the Butler sisters for a few years, she arrived at her next designated accommodation clutching a small suitcase and a copy of her favourite book, The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. It was just a few weeks later, after she spotted several copies of that book on a shelf, that she realised she was actually living with CS Lewis himself.In this telling of Jill's fascinating story, Emma hears all about her mother's love for CS Lewis, known to her as Jack. How she cared for him, how he paid for her to go to drama school and how a big, old, wooden wardrobe became part of her story...Illustrated with readings from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Emma captures these precious memories as she sits down with her mum to hear her magical story.Readings of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Olivia Williams. Other readings by Richard Gibson.Presenter: Emma Freud Producer: Elizabeth FosterThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis © copyright 1950 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.Lady Jill Freud, April 1927-November 2025.