BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Thank you for downloading from our home correspondent on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Michelle Hussein, and our pieces this time include reflections on two years of

living with cancer and how the psychological side of it is much less understood or

appreciated than the physical one.

Jim Nokte's been reflecting on Burns' nights he has known and not always loved.

Wearing Asari for the first time, a right of passage for another of our correspondence.

We find out whether the trend towards cold water swimming might just help rescue a derelict

cumbrian Lido, at least that's what campaigners are hoping and

trains planes how about sailboats one correspondent has been discovering how

cargo could have a much greener future as long as you're not in a hurry.

Later this week, right across Scotland and in all its cultural colonies abroad, the rituals will begin. In village halls and

hotels they'll be preparing steaming vats of cocholiki soup, tiring pots of neeps and

taties, and getting in the supplies for bibulous pipers, all to celebrate

the centerpiece of the supper, the Hagis, which most Scots, like everyone else, don't have much time

for except at the end of January when it is revered

like the minced up relics of a medieval saint.

Having a national bard is surely a good thing, but Robert Barnes, that bubbling impatient irreverent man would

surely have a good laugh at the cultish practice to which his name is attached.

He liked the sub-masonic rituals of course because he did do all that, but the truth is

that while a good burnt supper is a fine thing indeed, convivial, touching, a baroreus,

a bad one is excruciating. I can remember evenings where someone has forgotten the words of

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