05. Common Ground

This week Zoe Comyns is guided by the keyword: Common Ground.
We’re maybe more conscious now of the spaces we’re sharing with others. We’re told to stand 2 metres apart, we’re stepping off the pavement to let people by or we’re concerned if we feel that someone hasn’t given us enough distance. We’re also dwelling in the virtual world of cyberspace and sharing many experiences online that we never imagined doing only a few months ago.
Writer and broadcaster Fionn Davenport is based in Manchester and he brings his bike - and us - on his daily exercise route - a route which now demands extra negotiations, compromise and some cheerful greetings.
Poet Victoria Kennefick has written a poem called Hedgehog for this episode of Keywords. A slight departure from the well-beaten path ends up in a tangle of briars and reeds. It’s a meditation on what makes us different, but also, what can bring us together.
Neil Hegarty is a writer and he tells the story of a Sunday morning walk in his area in Dublin where he and his partner indulge in a bit of guerilla gardening. Neil describes the pleasure of planting poppy seeds and also notes that ‘these days it feels more essential than ever to cultivate a dialogue between our human civilization and all that surrounds us.’
Kate Packwood writes about how a woman’s body is not common ground and how one woman’s experience of sexual assault left her bereft ‘as truth and invention parted company’.
Journalist Bairbre Flood visited the migrant camp at Moria in Greece and spoke to people there days after a boy was stabbed to death. The common ground shared here is one fraught by anxiety, deprivation and fear.
Radhika Iyer is a journalist whose journal entry ‘Am I?’ explores how she has been made feel different. In a supermarket queue she realises that she is not in common ground. She’s the only brown person in line and her piece reflects on how the question ‘Where are you from?’ isn’t always an invitation to explore similarities between us all.
Judy Meg Ní Cinnéide is a radio producer - her great-grandfather fought in the First World War. The common ground he shares is in an unknown grave with thousands of soldiers who died in battle in Belgium. Through one surviving letter he left behind, Judy-Meg and her brother (who visited Ypres) recall the life of a man no one alive today ever knew.