Fred (host, reader)

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362 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Fred (host, reader)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Undertow: Familiar Haunts · The Green Book, Part 1 · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

But I didn't mind this one, because I was so glad I had seen those singular dances and could imitate them.

I went down, creeping through the bushes, and a tall nettle stung me on my leg and made me burn, but I didn't mind it, and I tingled with the boughs and the thorns, apparently laughed, and sang.

Then I got out of the thicket into a close valley, a little secret place, like a dark passage that no one ever knows of, because it was so narrow and deep and the woods were so thick round it.

There's a steep bank with trees hanging over it, and there the ferns keep green all through the winter, when they're dead and brown up on the hill.

and the ferns there have a sweet, rich smell, like what oozes out of fir trees.

There was a little stream of water running down this valley, so small that I could easily step across it.

I drank the water with my hand, and it tasted like bright yellow wine,

and it sparkled and bubbled as it ran down over beautiful red and yellow and green stones, so that it seemed alive, and all colours at once.

I drank it and I drank more with my hand, but I couldn't drink enough, so I lay down and bent my head and suckled the water with my lips.

It tasted much better, drinking it that way, and a ripple would come up to my mouth and give me a kiss and I laughed, and drank again, and pretended there was a nymph, like the one in the old picture, at home, who who lived in the water and was kissing me.

So I bent low down to the water, and put my lips softly to it, and whispered to the nymph that I would come again.

I felt sure it could not be common water.

I was so glad when I got up and went on, and I danced again, and went up and up the valley under hanging hills.

And when I came to the top, the ground rose up in front of me, tall and steep as a wall, and there was nothing but the green wall and the sky.

I thought of forever and forever, world without end, Amen.

And I thought I must really have found the end of the world, because it was like the end of everything, as if there could be nothing at all beyond except the kingdom of Wuer, where the light goes, when it is put out.

And where the water goes when the sun takes it away.

I began to think of all the long, long way I had journeyed, how I had found a brook and followed it and followed it on, and gone through bushes and thorny thickets and dark woods full of creeping thorns.

Then I had crept up a tunnel under trees and climbed a thicket and seen all the grey rocks, and sat in the middle of them when they were turned round, and then I had gone on through the grey rocks and come down the hill through the stinging thicket and up the dark valley all a long, long way.

I wondered how I should get home again, if I could ever find the way, and if my home was there any more, or if it were turned and everyone in it, into grey rocks, as in the Arabian Nights.

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