The young Orson Welles frightened thousands of New Jersey fellow citizens when radiating the story that some Martians invaded the earth, that 30 of the 1938.
I do not know, but if I know that one event after another confirms one and the other you see that the radio is the cave to always return, the half-refuge, the home, the safe place, the conforting uterus. Be a 23-F, be the explosion of a hypermarket, be it a sinking in the Carmel, be it a confinement by a viral pandemic, be it a cyclone called Filomena o Gloria be it a blackout like the day before yesterday. Whatever you are scared, you will run to the same place: the radio! And better if you go to the old transistor to batteries at that drawer, for your greatest peace.
This Monday, in the voices of RAC1, I was at home: with the radio, you will never be alone!
Of my recently deceased father I have inherited a Galena radio that he himself manufactured in the Orsonian year of 1938 – how chance – when he was a very scared Barcelona child on which Italian and Francoist bombs fell and the whole world sink: that child used five wooden plates, some green bathtub buttons and four hardware pieces, plus a cable knotted to the iron head and another as grounding – together with the pool – on the ground. This humblest radio in Galena is today one of my most precious goods, of course. And last Monday I understood that I must already repair that radio so that she saves me in these times that come to us. Hyperconnected, hyperdigitized, hypertecnological times, hyper -cybernetic and hyperfragile times. Everything will fail, it will fail everything .., but I will have my radio in Galena. Dad, thanks!
-A woman listens to the radio during the blackout in the electricity supply in Madrid.
Blanca Milz / EFE
Being a child of my father’s age when he made his radio Galena – so old – I suffered the chickenpox. Hit, my mother left for a while. I felt alone at home. I got up, I looked for my father’s transistor, I took it to bed. My mother, when he returned from the purchase, heard voices and ran to my bedroom at the shout of “Who is here!?” Poor, I will never forget his scare face. I had heard the voice of great Luis Arribas Castro accompanying me … Since then I have never been alone. The radio, the radio! With me always, the radio. And this last Monday, on the radio of the car, in the voices of RAC1 – Basté, the Oscars, Toni Clapés: My family – I was at home! We will always have the radio. To me all of you.
