B2 First listening practice

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for having me. I'm Nadia Holt, and for fourteen months I was the cook at the Fallow Island research station, which, if you haven't heard of it, sits about three hundred kilometres off the coast and is home to a small team of scientists studying seabirds. People always ask how I ended up there. I'd love to say I saw an advert in a newspaper or on some exciting website, but actually it was my cousin who sent me the details. She'd worked there as a mechanic years before, and she knew I was fed up with restaurant kitchens. I applied the same evening. The station changes completely with the seasons. In summer there can be as many as thirty people, with visiting researchers and students coming and going. In winter, though, it shrinks to a core team of eleven, and that's when you really get to know each other. You can't avoid anyone, so you learn very quickly to sort out disagreements before they grow. Now, cooking. Everyone assumes the hardest thing was the cold, or the isolation. For me it was planning. The supply ship only came every ten weeks, so I had to work out, almost to the gram, how much flour and rice and coffee we'd get through. Run out of coffee on a research station and you'll have a revolution on your hands. I kept a huge spreadsheet, and I'm not ashamed to say it became my best friend. Fresh food was the real luxury. We had a small greenhouse, and I managed to grow herbs and lettuce, but tomatoes simply refused to cooperate, however much attention I gave them. So the first box of fresh fruit off the ship was always a big event. People would literally queue to smell the oranges. One thing I hadn't expected was how important meals became as a way of marking time. On an island where every day looks the same, people lose track of the week. So I started a tradition: every Sunday was pancake night. It sounds silly, but it gave everyone something to look forward to, and even the scientists who usually ate at their desks would turn up. I also learnt a lot about the birds, of course. You can't avoid them. The team was studying a type of petrel that nests in burrows, and when they were short of volunteers, my job included counting them at dusk, as they flew back to their nests. I'd stand on a cliff with a clicker in my hand, freezing, and absolutely loving it. Was it lonely? Sometimes. The internet connection was limited to an hour a day, mostly for work, so I wrote letters, real paper letters, which went out on the ship. My grandmother kept every single one in a shoebox, and when I got home she read them back to me. It was like hearing someone else's adventure. The hardest moment came in my second winter, when a storm damaged the generator and we had heat in just one building for nearly a week. We all slept in the library, of all places, wrapped in sleeping bags between the bookshelves. Strangely, it's one of my happiest memories. Since coming back, I've opened a small café, and I've brought one habit home with me: I never waste anything. When you've seen how far food has to travel to reach a place like that, you look at a half-empty fridge differently. If any of you are thinking of applying for a job like this, my advice is simple: be patient, be flexible, and pack more socks than you think you need. Thank you.

Speaker 1: I'd never have thought of rowing if I hadn't damaged my knee playing football. After the operation, the physiotherapist said I needed something that would build up the muscles without any impact, and she suggested the rowing club down by the river. I assumed it would cost a fortune, but the membership's actually cheaper than my old gym. The early mornings are tough, I won't pretend otherwise, but being out on the water while the city's still asleep is something special.

Speaker 2: I go to an indoor climbing wall twice a week. To be honest, I'm not very good, and I'm not sure I'm getting much fitter, because I spend more time sitting on the benches chatting than actually climbing. But that's fine. I moved here two years ago and didn't know a soul. Now most of my friends are people I met at the wall, and we go out for dinner after every session. My job's fairly relaxed, so I don't need it to unwind. I just love the company.

Speaker 3: I took up fencing at forty because I'd always loved sword fights in films. I imagined a gentle hobby for grown-ups. What I found was a room full of people who took every single point incredibly seriously, even in practice. Nobody chats between bouts; they're too busy studying each other. I was quite shocked at first, but it's made me sharper, and I've started entering local tournaments myself. I don't think age matters at all, actually. Some of the best fencers in the club are over sixty.

Speaker 4: My daughter came back from university and announced she'd joined a sea swimming group, and she talked me into trying it. I'd expected the cold to be unbearable, but after the first shock I felt wonderfully calm, and it costs absolutely nothing, which helps now that I've retired. What keeps me going, though, is that it's our thing now, just the two of us. We go every Saturday, whatever the weather, and we talk all the way there and back. On my own, I'm not sure I'd bother.

Speaker 5: There's a table tennis table in the basement of our office building, and one lunchtime a colleague challenged me to a game. I lost badly, but I was hooked. I work in customer complaints, which can be exhausting, and twenty minutes of hitting a ball as hard as I can clears my head completely. I go back upstairs ready for the next angry phone call. I bought a decent bat, which wasn't cheap, but it was worth every penny. And I don't really regret not starting earlier; I wouldn't have had the patience as a teenager.

Interviewer: My guest today is Imogen Vale, who spends her working life recording the sounds of the natural world, for films, museums and a growing online archive. Imogen, welcome.

Imogen: Thanks, it's lovely to be here.

Interviewer: How did it all start? Were you one of those children who were always outdoors?

Imogen: Not at all. I was a city kid, and I spent most of my time indoors with headphones on, listening to music. The turning point was a school trip to a nature reserve when I was about fourteen. Our teacher made us sit in silence for ten minutes with our eyes closed, and I was astonished by how much was going on, layers and layers of sound I'd never noticed. I went home and borrowed my dad's old voice recorder the very next weekend.

Interviewer: And was it easy to turn that into a career?

Imogen: Far from it. I studied geography, not sound engineering, and for years I worked in a bookshop and recorded at weekends. I sent recordings to every film company I could find, and almost nobody replied. Looking back, though, I'm glad it took so long. Those years of recording just for myself taught me patience, and that's worth more than any qualification in this job.

Interviewer: Patience must be essential. What's the most challenging part of what you do?

Imogen: People expect me to say the weather, or finding rare animals. Actually, it's getting away from human noise. There are very few places left where you can record for an hour without hearing a plane, a road or a distant chainsaw. I once spent four days in a valley and got about twelve usable minutes. You learn to sit very still and wait, sometimes for hours, and to accept that most days you'll come home with nothing. The animals were there all along; it was us who kept interrupting.

Interviewer: When we watch nature documentaries, how much of what we hear is real?

Imogen: Less than you'd think. A lot of the sound in wildlife films is added afterwards, because the cameras use long lenses and are a long way from the animal, so they can't pick up what it's doing. Some people find that shocking. I don't mind it, as long as the sounds are accurate, the right species in the right place. What bothers me is when a film uses a bird that would never be heard in that country simply because it sounds pretty. That's misleading the audience.

Interviewer: You've recorded in some remote places. Is there one moment that stands out?

Imogen: There's a forest in the north that I go back to every spring. One year I'd left my microphones running overnight, mainly hoping for owls. When I listened back, there was this strange rhythmic knocking at three in the morning. I was convinced it was some equipment fault and nearly deleted it. Then a colleague told me it was a woodpecker, drumming in the dark, which they almost never do. It's now one of the most downloaded files in the archive.

Interviewer: Tell us about the archive. Why does it matter?

Imogen: Because places change. Some of the recordings I made ten years ago could not be made again today; the wetland has been drained, or the birds have moved on. In a sense, the archive is a record of what's being lost. Scientists use it to compare how busy a habitat sounded then and now, which tells them a great deal about its health. And it's free for anyone to listen to, which matters to me.

Interviewer: Finally, a lot of our listeners are students. What would you say to a young listener who'd like to do what you do?

Imogen: Don't wait until you can afford expensive equipment. A phone is perfectly good to begin with. The real skill is in listening, and you can start that today, wherever you live. Go to a park, close your eyes and try to name everything you hear. Do it every week, and keep notes. That habit will teach you more than any microphone.

Interviewer: Imogen Vale, thank you. It's been fascinating.