Forum des auditeurs passionnés et critiques de France Culture

As the craze for cold water swimming continues, Jim Al Khalili talks to triathlete and Professor of Extreme Physiology, Mike Tipton. Is it as good for our mental and physical health as many enthusiasts claim? And do the benefits go beyond a rush of adrenaline causing feel good endorphins to be released in our brains?

Mike studies why people drown. He wants to understand the precise physiological changes that occur when we expose ourselves to extreme environments and to use that information to help save lives. (Shivering and sweating will only get you so far when it comes to temperature control.
(...)
What does the scientific evidence say about the idea that repeated cold water immersion can boost our immunity and have an anti-inflammatory effect?
Mike tells Jim how he came to specialise in this area of science and why he believes we should all be challenging our bodies more.

Producer: Anna Buckley

Iveta Apkalna's Pipe Dreams - Heaven and Hell

No other instrument is so closely associated with devotion and ritual as the organ. Yet for all the instrument’s proximity to the angels, it’s also capable of evoking the darkest infernal realms... an area of repertoire Iveta, and many other organists, love to revel in. Just don’t tell the vicar…

Iveta Apkalna presents a sequence of portrayals of the heavenly gates - as well as close encounters with Mephistopheles himself. With music by Liszt, JS Bach, Vierne, Messiaen, Janacek, George Thalben-Ball and Petr Eben.

The starship Challenger is on a 115-year-long mission exploring other galaxies for suitable Earth-like planets to colonise.
The current four crew members were born on-board and have never left the ship. From birth they've been looked after by two 'Angels' - voices surrounding and guiding their every move. Any advice is followed without question. A dangerous situation, perhaps, if the Angels aren't that angelic after all...

In his breath-taking natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic, Lopez reveals the essential mystery and beauty of a continent that has enchanted man's imagination and ambition since time immemorial.

Written well over a quarter of a century ago, Lopez's visionary account of his journey across the polar caps is a celebration of the Arctic in all its guises. A hostile landscape of ice, freezing oceans and dazzling skyscapes, home to millions of diverse animals and people, it is also the backdrop to massive migrations by land, sea and air and the setting of epic exploratory voyages.

In timeless, prophetic prose, as meditative and memorable as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams poses fundamental questions about how we should cherish our ever more vulnerable planet.

Arctic Dreams was written by Barry Lopez.
It is read by Kyle Soller and abridged by Richard Hamilton
The producer is Karen Holden

Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan considers Leonard Bernstein's complex faith life and religious roots as a 20th-century composer living at a time of great change in the USA.

Marin Alsop once wrote: "The question of faith is woven through every Bernstein piece - even when there is no obvious religious component. For Bernstein, the crisis of the 20th century was a crisis of faith".

James talks with conductor Marin Alsop who was a student of Bernstein's. Also to Joshua R. Jacobson, one of the foremost authorities on Jewish choral music and Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at Northeastern University. And to Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton.

Over the centuries, composers have created musical masterpieces which many listeners have come to regard as spiritual touchstones. For example, Tallis's motet Spem in alium; Wagner’s opera Parsifal; Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius; Bernstein's Mass. But what did these composers actually believe about God, faith, compassion, an afterlife and redemption? And do we need to in any way share these beliefs in order to have a spiritual experience as listeners to their music? Answers to these questions are complex, fascinating and challenging.
Producer: Rosie Boulton
A Must Try Softer Production

Five perspectives on the human hand. Today hand surgeon Simon Kay and double hand transplantee Tanya Shepherd consider our hands’ vital role in manipulating the world around us.

The very word ‘manipulate’ has the image of the hand embedded in it and the first episode explores how we use them to organise, shape and change our world. We hear from consultant plastic surgeon Professor Simon Kay who leads the UK’s only hand transplant service at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He considers the psychological aspects of hand injury and how much our identity and sense of ‘self’ is tied up in our hands.

We meet Tanya Shepherd who lost both her hands and one of arms to sepsis. In 2018 she became the first woman in the UK to receive a double hand transplant. She reflects on learning to touch and manipulate objects with a new pair of donor hands.

And Professor Tracy Kivell from the University of Kent takes a paleoanthropologist’s view, considering the evolution of an organ which has the strength to grip and wield heavy tools but which can also perform the finest, most delicate tasks – for example by Simon Kay in a surgical operation.
Producer: Jeremy Grange

Richard Mabey, now in his 80th year, reads his groundbreaking book on the impact of nature on mental health.
When the nation’s foremost nature writer found himself in the grip of a severe depression, the natural world, a lifelong source of inspiration, became meaningless. This book charts the first year of his recovery and his adventure of re-engaging with nature.
Today, Mabey reflects on how nature helped with his own struggle with depression.

In this series considers the human hand from five quite different angles: manipulation, creativity, gesture, communication and touch. In each programme we hear from people who have a very particular perspective on hands and the way we use them, including a dancer, a blacksmith, a massage therapist, a priest and the recipient of a hand transplant. Each of them takes a long look at their own hands, describes what they see and considers the relationship with the world which their hands give them.
As we encounter healing hands, steady hands, talking hands, holding hands and the laying-on of hands we come to understand just how much our hands identify and define us

Un récit émouvant des années qui ont précédé la mort du poète Edward Thomas. La pièce "Nick Dear" explore les relations de Thomas avec le poète américain Robert Frost, qui est devenu son mentor et ami proche, et avec l'auteur et poète britannique Eleanor Farjeon, avec qui il partageait une adoration mutuelle.

Nous pénétrons également dans son mariage quelque peu difficile avec Helen Thomas, qui a souffert de ces deux relations et qui a dû subir les effets des accès réguliers de dépression de Thomas.

Nous découvrons finalement que la grande passion de Thomas pour la nature et la campagne est la véritable raison pour laquelle il s'est engagé dans la guerre - son besoin impérieux de protéger "la Terre noire et le Ciel clair".

Traduit avec www.DeepL.com/Translator (version gratuite)

A moving account of the years leading up to the death of the poet Edward Thomas. Nick Dear's play explores Thomas' relationships with the American poet Robert Frost, who became his mentor and close friend, and British author and poet Eleanor Farjeon, with whom he shared a mutual adoration.

We also journey into his somewhat uneasy marriage with Helen Thomas who suffered at the hands of both these relationships as well as having to suffer the effects of Thomas' regular bouts of grim depression.

We eventually discover that Thomas' great passion for nature and the countryside was the real reason for him signing up to go to War - his overwhelming need to protect The Dark Earth and The Light Sky.

The poet Edward Thomas died at the Battle of Arras one hundred years ago on 9th April 1917. He'd been a poet for little more than two years and his collected works amount to only a slim volume. Nevertheless he is regarded as among the greatest of English poets. What made him so? Poet and editor, Matthew Hollis, follows a journey Thomas made by bike in the spring of 1913 from London into south west England. It was a journey that produced a prose book for Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring, but it was also a journey that turned him towards poetry. Producer: Tim Dee.

Indian author, musician and international public intellectual Amit Chaudhuri presents a set of personal essays on the music and the songwriters that shaped his early life.

In this first episode, a Joni Mitchell lyric, one of whose lines is 'Nothing lasts for long', resonates through Amit Chaudhuri's growing-up.



Caught in the middle
Carol we're middle class
We're middle aged
We were wild in the old days
Birth of rock 'n' roll days
Now your kids are coming up straight
And my child's a stranger
I bore her
But I could not raise her
Nothing lasts for long

Down at the Chinese Café
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing "Oh my love, my darling"
One more time

Uranium money
Is booming in the old home town now
It's putting up sleek concrete
Tearing the old landmarks down now
Paving over brave little parks
Ripping off Indian land again
How long how long
Short sighted business men
Nothing lasts for long

Down at the Chinese Café
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing "You give your love, so sweetly"
One more time

Christmas is sparkling
Out on Carol's lawn
This girl of my childhood games
With kids nearly grown and gone
Grown so fast
Like the turn of a page
We look like our mothers did now
When we were those kids' age
Nothing lasts for long

Down at the Chinese Café
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing
 "Oh my love, my darling
 I've hungered for your touch
 A long lonely time
 And time goes by so slowly
 And time can do so much
 Are you still mine?
 I need your love
 I need your love
 God speed your love to me."

copyright 1982; Crazy Crow Music