Home Sweet Home

Writer and standup AL Kennedy has upped sticks and left Glasgow for London, but English conveyancing law and her solicitor's concern about sewage pipes leaves her bewildered and confused.

She misses her old, familiar writing room back home, and criss-crosses the capital looking for a new place to call her own. Meanwhile, her favourite black writing chair beckons - but it's boxed up in a storage warehouse somewhere near Heathrow. It's a writer's life...

Producer: Mark Smalley.

English conveyancing law and her solicitor's sewage concerns leave Kennedy confused.

Writer and stand-up performer AL Kennedy gives three talks on the subject of home

After all, a writer these days is seldom at home. There are therefore, she muses, all manner of things to be learned about your accommodation options: avoid rooms over pubs where the new day's clean linen is dumped on the carpet outside every door; try and insist on running water, maybe of two different temperatures and only from the taps. How to deal with posh room service, dodgy room service, in-room picnics and the lack of kettles across Europe.

Is it, she wonders, worth learning conversational breakfast phrases in other languages?

Perils to avoid: noise, light, the crazy people next door, the people having sex next door, the lift

doing TARDIS impersonations all night, free-floating despair, the ventilator that funnels smoke into your bathroom, the mayhem that breaks out in the streets at 3am, wildlife, health difficulties and the

almost universally insane people who run B&B's.

Producer: Mark Smalley.

AL Kennedy reflects on hearth and home: why does she spend so little time there?

Writer and stand-up performer AL Kennedy gives three talks on the subject of home

What's home to you or I?

Writer and stand-up AL Kennedy asks why she spends so much time away from her own hearth and home, when so much of her life is spent on the road.

It took a year for her to make the recent move from Glasgow to London. This only brought home the recognition of how important it is to have a room of one's own - especially a bathroom of her own.

But when staying with others, and in particular, relying on the generosity of friends, there's the challenge of observing the peculiar bathroom etiquette of others, while being polite to one's hosts. And when she's house-sitting, and those generous friends are away on holiday, there's the issue of lying awake at night in their habitual, well-used beds, everything in their home covered with the patina of their lives, an intrusion too far.

Producer: Mark Smalley.

AL Kennedy considers the challenges associated with staying in other people's houses.

Writer and stand-up performer AL Kennedy gives three talks on the subject of home