Learning the hard way and loving it

Radio Review: Ten years ago Jo Rowling arrived in Scotland as a single parent with a young daughter and no money. While her poverty and the writing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in various cafés, the buggy beside her, have become the stuff of literary legend, it's less well known that at the time she was studying for her postgraduate certificate in education to become a teacher.

She was on The Learning Curve (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) to talk about how difficult it is for single parents to access higher education, and said that becoming a teacher was her way out of a £70-a-week existence on the dole. She recalled the "shame of living on benefit":

"I remember going into the post office on benefit day and I felt everyone was looking at me."

Her plan nearly fell apart when she learned that the college crèche had closed down - without childcare she couldn't see how she could manage. But a friend came forward with a loan of £4,000.

"It was like a half a million pounds to me at that time," said the woman now reputed to be as rich as Queen Elizabeth. "I used to worry about it constantly."

Other single mothers' experiences were similar to those of Rowling, and the writer was full of praise for women who had made it through and even for women who had tried but dropped out through a mixture of exhaustion, poverty and lack of childcare. The point stressed by Rowling was that if return-to-education programmes were widely available, the experiences of single parents would trickle down to the children and raise the expectations of entire households.

Presenter Libby Purves asked Rowling a question to which the only reasonable answer has to be a wild-eyed stare and a crazed cackle. She asked her if she was ever sorry she never made it as a teacher.

"Reading to young people now satisfies that itch," said Rowling, who sounds reassuringly ordinary. "And I can still get to use my teacher voice."

A new series, The Word on Travel (RTÉ1, Saturday), began this week, and its first outing included a well-informed trip through the spas of the world. These included French wine spas, where visitors are exfoliated with grape seeds, and one in England where they get naked and are covered in chocolate while chocolate-scented candles waft cocoa smells.

Travel writers Muriel Bolger and Carmel Higgins have been in spas across the globe and their personal take on them made for lively listening (mind you, the less said about Bolger's to-wear-or-not-to-wear emerald-green thong experience, the better).

A smart idea was to get Mark Little to do an Alistair Cooke-style 'Letter from Madrid'. His evocative report told of the spirit of defiance in a city that is "facing into a period of mourning as a collective". He spoke movingly of finding himself in the midst of the crowd of three million people protesting against the atrocities and it was interesting to hear the current affairs reporter let loose from his buttoned-up newsroom persona.

Artszone (Lyric FM, Saturday) went to Cork to look at that city's plans for its stint as European Capital of Culture next year. Already some tensions are emerging. One commentator suggested that if the event was going to take place in Dublin everyone would know about it and the funding would be flowing.

As it is - as vox pops revealed - the Cork man or woman in the street didn't even seem to know that the culture crown was about to be placed on the city's head. Then there's the bizarre fact that the city made the availability of a world-class new school of music (with the venues and resources that implies) part of the bidding process, yet finds itself months away from the event without a sod having been turned.

It's all about funding - or the lack of it - and so frustrated is Gerry Kelly, a lecturer at the school of music, that if an announcement about the start of building doesn't come by the end of this month he'll contest the June local elections as a "cultural candidate".

The programme ended with a round-up of the week's arts news and, shockingly, there wasn't a mention of the resignation the day before of Patricia Quinn as director of the Arts Council. Then again, there was nothing about it on Monday's Rattlebag either. Being head of the council is such a powerful position in the arts world that it's hard to make comparisons, but imagine if the head of the GAA had resigned and Des Cahill had spent an entire Sportscall programme ignoring the news and talking about the Irish cricket team instead.

Donald Clarke, standing in for Hugh Linehan on The Arts and Entertainment Show (Newstalk 106FM, Saturday), did at least cover the resignation in some detail, but the fact that it was not perceived to be a hot news item on the other specialist arts programmes says a lot about the quality of arts coverage on the radio.