Anyone who is in the habit, as I am, of reading and listening to the radio at the same time must be familiar with the phenomenon of a word being spoken on air at precisely the moment it is being absorbed from the page.
I had an astonishing example of this on Saturday afternoon while I was simultaneously reading Modern Railways (sad!) and listening to Dale Winton’s Pick of the Pops (even sadder!) on Radio 2.
The latter featured the charts from 1986, and high in them The Bangles’ American No 1 Walk Like an Egyptian. As lead singer Susanna Hoffs sang the words of the title I realised that I was reading a version of them at precisely that moment on Page 48 of the magazine.
The superstitiously minded might see something odd in this; I merely thought it a remarkable coincidence.
The headline, in fact, read “Walk Like an EGIPtian” — EGIP being the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme.
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