PODCAST · society
Brittle Sounds
by Robert M. Ford
Brittle Sounds is a space for thoughtful conversations, essay reflections, and the quiet unpacking of what it means to live with more clarity and less illusion.Some episodes are read aloud. Others are spoken through. Interviews, world events, inner shifts—it all belongs.From the writer behind Brittle Views, this is where the thinking gets air. www.brittleviews.com
Episodes
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Minding the Gap
Someone has a plan. He’s been thinking about it for a while. He has the numbers, the timeline, the sequence of steps from here to where he’s certain this is going. He isn’t asking what I think. He’s telling me where we’re headed. I’m listening. I’m also somewhere else. The other place has…
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What I Choose to Keep [Narrated]
Every Friday, I return to an earlier piece of writing in a series I call Flashback Fridays. Not reprints, but re-entries — the past offers a fragment, and I follow it to see what else it might hold. This week’s story began with a poem from 2021, No More Talk. That poem was about letting go of…
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Chalk Dust Rising [Narrated]
This piece is an alternative version of my recent essay, What They Can’t Scrub Away. I came home from a month in the UK to find murals erased, rainbow crosswalks scrubbed under halogen light, and vaccine protections under attack—all dressed up as “freedom” for political theater. The original…
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The Queen Vic Incident (Narrated)
It began, as most small village incidents do, with the disappearance of something spectacularly minor: a biscuit tin. At precisely 10:07 on Tuesday morning, the vicar wheeled in the refreshments trolley—listing slightly, the way it had since the school jumble sale of ’09—for the Ladies’...
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Try, Try Again [Narrated]
Most Fridays, this Flashback Friday series revisits something I wrote years ago. A memory, a draft, a story I left in a drawer too long. But this week, I’m breaking the pattern. Because last Saturday, I published Things You Don’t Talk About, a piece about a football pools win that my parents…
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They Did Nothing
He folded his old handkerchief twice and wedged it under the front leg of the chair. His dad used to do that—pub chairs, church pews, anywhere the balance was off. Not for comfort. Just to stop the noise. Only thirteen people had come. Four looked like family. The rest, former colleagues and...
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Not Mine to Hold [Narrated]
The first companion piece followed Helen—full of longing, resolve, and the ache of quiet misrecognition. This one belongs to June. Where Helen offered presence, June offered something closer to insistence. Both believed they were helping. Neither was asked. Together, these two prequels sit behind...
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Jamgate [Narrated]
Magda Beckos—Magda when she’s feeling fancy, Maggie B. when she wants to fly under the radar—hadn’t meant to uncover the Great Raspberry Scandal of Lower Tissington. She only went for the Victoria sponge. Technically, she wasn’t even a member of the Women’s Institute. Her application had been...
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Still Held
Sometimes, a piece you’ve written stays with you—not just because of what it captured, but because of what it still carries. This poem began as a reflection on the moment I first held my daughter. But yesterday, on her 40th birthday, I wanted to revisit it—not to rewrite the past, but to reframe...
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No Arm In It
He didn’t ask. Just wandered over as we slowed on Hepthorne Lane, slipping into a Top Gear-style review—handling, performance, ride—before finally arriving at the boot. “Boot on these is like a glove compartment with ambitions.” No one asked. That never stopped Hicksy. He moved like someone who’d...
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Just Once. Just Enough.
Every Friday, I revisit an old story, essay, or poem. Sometimes the words hold. Sometimes they don’t. But what I return to isn’t the page—it’s the moment behind it. Like returning to an old dig—with sharper tools this time. Not to rewrite, but to listen more closely. To notice what I missed. What…
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Same as Last Time
This is a story about trying to hold on to a self you’ve only just managed to build. About hair as armour, as ritual, as one small thing you can control when the rest keeps shifting. It’s about being young, being seen, and what it takes to stay seen. A good haircut can make you feel invincible. A...
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Hope Wears Sneakers
On a weekend when the U.S. Supreme Court offered yet another gift to autocracy—and the GOP pressed forward with their grotesquely named “Big Beautiful” bill—I found myself, as I often do, reaching for hope instead of rage. And I found it, unexpectedly, in Hungary. This New York Times article…
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When the Highest Court Becomes the Final Punchline [Narrated]
One-Post-Per-Day Rule (Temporarily) Suspended I try to keep it to one post a day. Rhythm matters. Boundaries matter.But so does democracy. When the Supreme Court drops a week’s worth of rulings that feel like constitutional Mad Libs—fewer rights, more smugness—I make exceptions. This isn’t just…
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Dear Em: We’re Related, Apparently [Narrated]
Dear Em, I know you never had children. I checked. Twice, actually. Which makes this all the more confusing. I uploaded my 23andMe profile to a site called MyTrueAncestry.com—mostly out of idle curiosity. The usual suspects showed up: a Viking or two from Iceland, a Bronze Age farmer from what’s...
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If You’re Going to Be Caught [Narrated]
I came across this old-school meme on Facebook and couldn’t resist. You know the kind—pick your birth month, day, and the first letter of your name to generate a weird sentence. Mine? I killed + My best friend + To Kill Time Instead of sharing the sentence, I followed the feeling. The result? A...
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Not This Christmas [Narrated]
I was uneasy as I followed Katerina through the gate and down the overgrown path toward her apartment. She lived in one of the Victorian houses owned by the university, the kind that had been chopped into awkward units for single faculty. It felt like a place that held on to its ghosts longer…
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Survival of the Fattest [Narrated]
If you’ve read Eligible, Not Suitable, you’ll know that by the end of date five, I wasn’t expecting much from date six—except maybe closure. But then K—let’s call her Katerina, though that wasn’t her real name (something to do with discretion and a fraught departure from the motherland)—Katerina...
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Eligible, Not Suitable [Narrated]
The year was 2002, and the silence in my house no longer echoed—just hummed. My divorce had been finalized the day after 9/11. That fall, the world grieved—and I joined it, feeling everything and nothing all at once. We’d weathered a lot together—fertility issues, repeated relocations across the...
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Bridge Beyond [Podcast]
This narrated version of ‘Bridge Beyond’ was released to celebrate a milestone—200 subscribers.It’s my way of saying thank you. Not with performance, but with presence. The story itself is about the weight of absence, the pull of memory, and the quiet repairs we make—between people, across time,...
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Unbecoming [Narrated]
In yesterday’s Flashback Friday, I revisited a story I wrote four years ago—about a sledding mishap that ended with me breaking through the crust of a snow-covered lake of frozen chicken s**t. It was meant to be funny. And in many ways, it still is.But after I posted the new version, I found…
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Flashback Friday: Everything Was White Until It Wasn’t [Narrated]
Before Holding On was a novel, it was a pattern: of gestures, silences, things people held onto because they didn’t know how to let go. The Ralph in Holding On—milkman, watcher, a man both there and fading—is a direct homage to the real Ralph from my childhood. He delivered milk by horse and…
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Same Bruises, Different Wallpaper [Narrated]
I got to school early most days. My parents both worked retail, and Mum didn’t trust me not to leave the cooker on, or the door unlocked, or any one of the hundreds of things she’d worry about. So I waited in classrooms before anyone else arrived—quiet places where nothing happened, until it did....
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Withdrawn: The Quiet Undoing [Narrated]
Not everything ends with a door closing.Sometimes it’s subtler: a line through a name, a drawer left unlocked, a ledger closed mid-page. This is the beginning of Iris’s quiet departure—not from place, but from record, from habit, from view.She’s not unraveling. She’s editing. This is Part One of…
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Peace, as Boundary [Narrated]
Some articles don’t demand a response. They plant something quieter. A resonance. A recognition. And later—sometimes days, sometimes longer—they surface again, not as argument or summary, but as poem. I read a piece about why many empaths choose solitude. It described the quiet violence of...
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Please, Help Yourself [Narrated]
I wasn’t supposed to be here.Not really.Not with those grades. October, 1979.Brinsford Lodge, Wolverhampton Polytechnic.B.Sc in Combined Studies—which sounded less like a qualification, more like a confession.Computer Science and Economics: the sensible face I put on something more tangled. If…
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Flashback Friday: You Can Do Better Than That [Narrated]
Flashback Friday began as a way to revisit older work—not to tidy up the past, but to reexamine the stories that shaped me. Some essays ask to be reworked. Others ask to be re-seen. Thirteen years ago, I wrote Life in a Northern Town. It was part family history, part personal reckoning—a tribute…
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Chapter Two – Holding On [Narrated]
Welcome back to Holding On. Last week, we stepped into the green room. The nerves. The lights. The impossible weight of a story almost too personal to speak aloud. This week, we go back—back to where the story truly begins. Not with cameras, but with a silence thick enough to stretch across…
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The Worst Kept Secrets [Narrated]
The Rec had the best slide. We’d sit on waxed bread wrappers to pick up speed, launching ourselves off the end toward a patch of grass, and just beyond that, a roundabout. Our goal wasn’t to stop—it was to fly. Not land—launch. We never stopped to consider how that might hurt. At the top, we had...
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She Stayed for Tea [Narrated]
By the time June came up the drive, I knew I couldn’t let her in. We weren’t really dating—just paired off by mutual friends who thought shared faith was enough. We were all church kids—Methodist by label, Evangelical by tone. Singing solos in borrowed pews one week, speaking in tongues the next....
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Additionally Banned
Some memories show up like clockwork. Others arrive mid-sentence. If you’ve read Step Away from the Synths, you’ll know I once got banned from Woolies for pretending to be The Human League. That wasn’t the first time. This was. No synths. No Woody. Just music, Woolies, and the kind of glorious...
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We Kept It Instead
The floor was too clean.No prints, no scuff, no trace. The docent, voice dry as ice,leads us through halls cooledby preservation, not grief. Here:a sealed metal box — expired, unopened —still marked For Use in Emergencies.Beside it,a photo of a woman with two jobsand one warm coatshe gave away in...
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Close Enough to Hurt
There’s always a third. Sometimes it’s a person.Sometimes a ghost.Sometimes just the version of yourself you’re still trying to save. Triangulation isn’t geometry. It’s choreography—a dance of avoidance mistaken for connection.One person reaching, one retreating, one pretending the pattern is…
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The Grass Was Always Meaner
The sod was still damp when I pressed it to the wall behind his desk. Not the floor. That would’ve been too ordinary—too expected. A prank. A protest. A gesture that could be explained away.But I wasn’t looking for legibility. I was looking for somewhere to put the ache. So I started building a...
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A Shape to Punish
BREAKING: Shells Commit Felony on American Beach In an unprecedented breach of national security, a group of seashells reportedly organized themselves into a terroristic numeral formation earlier this week. Eyewitnesses say the shells appeared “calm” and “innocent” at first—typical behavior for...
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Flashback Friday: Never Spoken Twice
Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece called ‘Losing and Finding Myself’—a linear account of grief, rage, and reinvention in the wake of my mother’s death. At the time, I wrote with a burning sense of injustice: toward my school, which mishandled her passing; toward the silence that followed;...
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Melvin Gilberthorpe Misses His Moment
Melvin didn’t buy a ticket. Not from disinterest—never that. From loyalty. The band—early punk pioneers, now mostly grey at the temples and part titanium at the knees—had announced a reunion tour. But the original singer, the one with the gravel rasp and eyeliner from ’78 still smudged into…
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Eli Woz 'Ere!
Eli wasn’t trying to impress anyone when he raised his arm that day—just to be seen differently. The school playground buzzed with the low, familiar static of boys showing off. Near the cracked tarmac, Colin leaned against the fence, his anorak zipped halfway, sleeves bunched tight at the wrists....
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Held, Not Hidden
it’s not a wallit’s the shape of staying not a door closingbut a way of choosingwhat gets to come inand what doesn’t it’s the pausebefore I say yesbecause I want to—not because I’m afraidof what happens if I don’t it’s menot shrinkingnot twistingnot performingjustmeno longer leaving myselfto stay...
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OPERATION: J-DAY
Phase I: The Briefing The Derbyshire Times arrived every Thursday evening—slipped under Mrs. B’s arm, along with an oversized bloomer and a block of strong cheddar that she still hoped to taste, if we didn’t get to it first. She and Mr. B both worked in Alfreton, so we’d be waiting—hovering near...
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The Jumper That Would Not Die
About a year after my mum died, Dad and I moved to a smaller house in Old Tupton. It was closer to my school, closer to Chengsville, and to the friends I was starting to spend more and more time with. That part felt good. But it also meant leaving the only home I’d ever known. Pete — or Puzzle…
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Still Choosing You
We sat on the sofa, letting easy TV soften the edges of a day too full. No words needed—just the quiet recognition that not everything can be solved, not tonight. What mattered was being beside each other in the uncertainty. This is what love feels like, sometimes—less like a decision, more like…
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We Never Did Swim in Oggy
It was the summer of 1979, a few months after my mum died. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to college, and I definitely wasn’t sure I wanted to leave my dad on his own. I was spending more and more time at Chengsville—a rambling former Quaker house with a burial ground in the garden and a curious...
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Person. Woman. Man. Camera. Tattoo.
It started with a video. Trump and Terry Moran, circling each other—one insisting that a deported man had “MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles, the other gently, then not-so-gently, pointing out the image was fake. Trump wouldn’t let it go. Wouldn’t move on to Ukraine. Wouldn’t entertain the...
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A Fire Born of Staying [Podcast]
The idea for A Fire Born of Staying came from a comment I made on a poem I read on Substack about vulnerability. It made me think about how, in the past, mothers would intentionally bring their children together to catch childhood diseases like chickenpox — not to make them sick, but to help them...
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The Quality Street Gang
Some memories knock gently. Others kick the door in wearing Cuban-heeled winkle-pickers. In this episode of my series Needle Drops, we head back to Leeds, 1980 — to the beer-soaked, bass-blasted mess of the Futurama 2 Festival. It’s a story of stolen vans, stolen sleep, and the moment our scrappy...
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Flashback Friday: Open [podcast]
A narrated version of my piece, “Open.” It’s a poem I wrote not long after moving to Saint Petersburg—before I fully understood just how much I needed a new beginning.Let me correct that: I knew I needed a new beginning.I just wasn’t ready to let go of the life I’d built…and I was going through…
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Notes I Never Gave Him
After finishing two stories—Folded Small and Where the Colour Lives—I found myself asking a question I hadn’t expected: Am I writing about the same boy? They didn’t seem connected at first. Different settings. Different lives. But something about them stayed with me—boys who noticed more than…
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Where the Colour Lives [podcast]
A narrated version of my piece, “Where the Colour Lives.” It’s a quiet story told in fragments—part poem, part memory. A boy. A fridge door. A sun with a face. It’s about what we give when we don’t have words for it. About presence, hope, and small gestures that mean more than they say. You can...
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Last Birthday [podcast]
If you’ve read Last Birthday, you already know it’s not a performance.It’s a memory held gently. A goodbye spoken in gestures, in silence, in sunlit garden paths. Yesterday evening, I recorded this podcast version—a quiet retelling of that final birthday with my dad. It’s tender, raw in places.…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Brittle Sounds is a space for thoughtful conversations, essay reflections, and the quiet unpacking of what it means to live with more clarity and less illusion.Some episodes are read aloud. Others are spoken through. Interviews, world events, inner shifts—it all belongs.From the writer behind Brittle Views, this is where the thinking gets air.
www.brittleviews.com
HOSTED BY
Robert M. Ford
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Brittle Sounds have?
Brittle Sounds currently has 58 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Brittle Sounds about?
Brittle Sounds is a space for thoughtful conversations, essay reflections, and the quiet unpacking of what it means to live with more clarity and less illusion.Some episodes are read aloud. Others are spoken through. Interviews, world events, inner shifts—it all belongs.From the writer behind...
How often does Brittle Sounds release new episodes?
Brittle Sounds has 58 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Brittle Sounds?
You can listen to Brittle Sounds on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Brittle Sounds?
Brittle Sounds is created and hosted by Robert M. Ford.
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