The Essay: Home Sweet Home
BBC Radio 3
This wide-ranging five-parter began with its presenter, the writer Madeleine Bunting, recalling with well-nigh Proustian precision the home of her early childhood: the warm scent of the laundry cupboard; the fraying stair-carpet; the downward-leading kitchen steps. Homes, she decided, were about family, comfort and the nurturing of identity – if you were lucky, that is, for at the heart of Home Sweet Home (9-13 March) lurked a suspicion that the ways in which humankind has traditionally gone about its domestic affairs were being knocked sharply out of kilter.