Huge news! House band Martin Austwick and I made a radio version of our live piece Souvenirs, and it’s being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 22 July at 16:00 UK time, and rerun at 00:15 BST Monday 28 July - here’s the link for listening live. It’ll also be available online via the BBC website and BBC Sounds, for a bit of time after.
UPDATE: it’s currently not available outside of the UK, so for now, people anywhere can hear it via Falling Tree’s archive. Ignore Soundcloud’s request to sign in, you can listen without doing so.

Souvenirs is a sort of essay/musical/tragicomedy about the Doves Press and its founders’ friendship collapsing and all manner of bitterness ensuing over their in-house typeface. Later in the year I’ll put something on the podfeed with more information about it. For now, I’d love for you to listen to Souvenirs, which I think is one of the most emotional pieces I’ve written. Some of those emotions are ones I recognise in myself and wish I could banish.

Look mum, I’m in the Radio Times! [Falls back down to Earth] With my name spelled wrong:

A lot of people assume that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, but the first known Scottish Fiona is from the 1890s: Fiona Macleod, the enormously popular novelist of Scotland's Celtic Revival movement. But when she suddenly stopped writing in 1905...and there turned out to be far more surprises about Fiona Macleod than the novelty of her name. Writer and performer Harry Josie Giles and PhD researcher Moll Callaway-Heaton consider the first Scottish Fiona.

This is part one of a pair of episodes about the name Fiona; part two will explore the etymology of the name and similar ones in various languages, and examine the first appearance of Fiona in literature, which comes with its own cocktail of complication.

There's lots of fun etymology of creatures and a lot of fun etymology derived from creatures, and now it is gathered into this fun playalong quiz about animal etymologies!