I began Wednesday’s show with a few mentions of people. As many of you will know, Caroline Symcox has just been inaugurated as Vicar of Fairford, which is not that far away from Bristol. I suspect that Paul Cornell is hoping that the vicar and her spouse get an invitation to the town’s famous air show.

Also in the mentions list were the environmental campaigners from Avonmouth, whom I had on the show back in July. Council staff had tried to sneak through approval of the biomass plant without debate, but the Councillors insisted on discussing the matter and, much to everyone’s surprise, denied the planning application. The expectation is that the power company will go running to the government who will order Bristol to change its mind, but at least our local politicians have made a stand. My colleagues at Bristol 24/7 have the story.

Finally I played a tribute to the great Acker Bilk, one of our local area’s finest musicians, who sadly died on Sunday.

My guest for Wednesday was local writer, Judy Darley. As Judy mainly does short and flash fiction, she was able to read some of her work on air. Much of Judy’s writing is inspired by works of art, which makes it very different from the sort of thing I normally read, but fascinating all the same.

Paulette took over for the next half hour, and welcomed Caz from the One Love Breakfast Show (which Ujima co-hosts with BCFM). Today they were doing a fund raiser for homeless people in Bristol, which is a very good thing to be doing at this time of year. Caz also looked back on the special edition of the show that featured Mayor Ferguson answering questions live in the studio.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

The second hour was given over entirely to a discussion of black identity, so it was very much a Paulette thing.

I suspect that most of you won’t know that Haile Selassie once lived in Bath. The house where is lived is now a museum, and naturally it is a focus for local Rastafarians. It was great to have Shawn Sobers from that project on the show.

Some of the discussion will ring true with those of you who get irritated by the habit of our American friends of referring to all black people as African-American. (He’s from Wakanda, damnit! He’s African.) I was also reminded of a discussion on the Writers Of Colour tweet stream over the weekend in which they talked about being “politically black”.

You can listen to the second hour here.

As a reminder, next week I will have Juliet McKenna and Lucienne Boyce in the studio to talk about historical fantasy. I think I might play some Bat for Lashes.