Scots radio station pulled off air over ‘unbearable' alarm noise
George Coyle and the team at Clyde Coast Radio have been begging for help to track down the owner of the unit to get them to switch off the alarm at the building which houses their studio in Port Glasgow.
George, who is an army veteran and lives with post-traumatic stress disorder, told our sister title The Greenock Telegraph that the alarm had caused a volunteer to have an anxiety attack while inside the studio.
The station has been off-air for the last 19 days due to the loud and constant beeping noise from a unit next door to the Clyde Coast Radio studio on the Muirshiel Industrial Estate.
The noise can be heard outside the building, and just as prominently inside the studio – and George says the alarm has made it impossible for the team to do their usual live broadcasts.
He said: "I don't know where to turn. I feel like I am letting people down.
"We just want to get back to doing what we love."
George Coyle in the studio (Image: George Munro)
The alarm sound is coming from unit 44 on the estate, a self-contained unit within the building.
George says the sound has made it impossible for the team to concentrate – and has stopped them broadcasting live shows, as the sound is clearly audible to the station's listeners.
He continued: "As soon as we switch the mics on, they pick up the noise.
"Nothing can be done musically or on our system to get rid of it. You can't be in the studio for any length of time, it does your head in.
"I've driven past at three in the morning to find out if it's still going off.
"I have cried myself to sleep over it. I don't know why we're expected to go on like this."
Lead volunteer and Clyde Coast Radio presenter Robert Gilmour added: "I'm so fed up with it.
READ MORE: Port Glasgow army veteran hails supporters for saving much-loved radio station
"We're having to disappoint people and that is not what we're about.
"People who listen to my heavy rock show are from all over the world, as far afield as California and Texas. They love the interaction.
"It's awful going home and trying to sleep when you've got a constant beeping sound in your head."
George initially contacted the Inverclyde Community Development Trust, which owns most of the building, but was told they do not own the unit where the alarm sound is coming from.
He has also contacted police, Inverclyde Council and former MP Ronnie Cowan, who is also a volunteer presenter on the station.
Mr Cowan said: "It is a very frustrating situation.
"It should be something as simple as phoning someone and asking them to come and switch it off.
READ NEXT: Couple kept kids in dirty flat covered in animal waste and insects
READ NEXT: Shamed English teacher groomed pupil at Glasgow school
George with lead volunteer Robert Gilmour (Image: George Munro)
"The problem is that it's within an industrial unit, so it can go off for days and days without anyone knowing.
"No one is taking responsibility."
An Inverclyde Council spokesperson added: "We provided help and advice, and our environmental health team is trying to assist further."
George says the alarm has forced the station to cancel training sessions with people who want to learn how to be a radio presenter – as well as losing the station hundreds of listeners.
He continued: "A teenager who is training with us lives with severe ADHD and we've have had to cancel his last three training sessions.
"Community radio saved my life. We set up this charity to help veterans like myself, and help people with their mental health.
"We all support each other.
"Some of our volunteers come in just for a cup of tea and a chat, but we've not even been able to do that due to the noise.
"We're here and we want to do what we should be doing but the noise is unbearable.'
George has sent a very simple message to the owners of the building.
He said: "Whoever owns it, please just come in and switch the alarm off.
"It will give us our music back and our lives back."
The reenock Telegraph managed to track down the owners of the unit, who said the continuing alarm sound was 'an oversight' and said it would be turned off as soon as possible.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Edinburgh Live
32 minutes ago
- Edinburgh Live
BBC Antiques Roadshow guest left speechless as 'treasure' kept in spare bedroom given top value
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info An Antiques Roadshow expert couldn't hide her exhilaration after examining an "extraordinary" item that's kept in her family's spare bedroom. Kay was initially taken aback by the historical significance of the item, revealing: "Sheltering from a passing shower, and sheltering with an object which is, I feel almost radioactive with power. "It's a very interesting phenomenon to be this close to something that is really quite important. I'm recognising, immediately, the personal standard of Oliver Cromwell. "It's a name we all know but let's just put him into his place in history, he was one of the signatories to the death warrant for instance to Charles I. Very much involved with the regicide, killing of the king and then he became in 1653 what was known as the Lord Protector of England. "It was after the Civil War and he ran the country essentially from 1653 to 1658 and that is his importance in English history and why this object has such resonance." The owner of the historical piece then shared its background: "It was in a collection about seven years ago. My father actually bought the collection of militaria. (Image: BBC) "We now own it as a family, it's actually kept in one of our spare rooms and, as you say, it's one of those objects that make you tingle." Kay agreed: "It does make you tingle, because this is the standard that was part of the funeral procession of Cromwell's on November 23, 1658, and this was extraordinary. "Here was the non king being revered really as a king with a royal crown. It is an extraordinary image that we have here which was totally against everything that he stood for." She revealed the item's dramatic history, explaining it had been "stolen from the hearse by a young boy that was in the funeral crowd", with its inscription corroborating the tale. "Snatched from the funeral hearse! At that moment too, it's just brilliant," Kay enthused. The guest proudly mentioned: "My whole family's been into history for generations and my maternal grandparents are actually founding members of The Sealed Knot, the re-enactment society for the Civil War." To which Kay responded: "Which is amazing, what a coincidence! It was meant to end up with you." (Image: BBC) The guest then expressed a deep connection to the artefact: "Absolutely, I believe so. Because we're the kind of people who really want to look after it and preserve it and make sure it's seen by everyone it should be seen by for generations, I guess. "It's a real treasure, it's a pleasure to own." Kay praised the item's condition, noting it had been "beautifully restored" but emphasised the importance of proper care. The expert humorously suggested: "It does and however great your spare room is and I'm sure it has almost museum like qualities, I do think, even if it went on loan somewhere, I think it deserves to be looked after." The expert was visibly challenged by a unique item's worth, noting: "And as far as value's concerned, this is about the trickiest thing I've ever had to value. "It is certain to fetch £25,000 but how much more would it go?" Overwhelmed by the valuation, the guest stood there astonished, while the valuer Kay expressed her elation: "It's going to take me a little while to come down from this. "It'll take a couple of bars of chocolate and a cup of tea but this has been a really special moment with a really extraordinary object, don't you agree?" Antiques Roadshow is available to watch on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Wild animals shouldn't be kept as pets. It's like a prison sentence...
And we don't just mean the teensy-weensy pooches that Hollywood starlets plop in their Gucci shoulder bags, before schlepping them on to the red carpet for a photo opportunity. No, apparently some Americans also own pet zebras, which are very difficult to squeeze into a shoulder bag, Gucci or otherwise. They also don't particularly enjoy being pets, which probably explains why a zebra named Ed did a runner in Tennessee. The stripey escape artist seemed to be enjoying his freedom. Unfortunately those pesky humans managed to nab him, and he was airlifted in a giant net back to his owner. Reader Bruce Martin was telling his wife, Sally, about the great escape and the even greater capture. 'That's horrible,' winced Sally. 'Wild animals shouldn't be kept as pets. It's like a prison sentence for the poor things.' 'It's not so bad for a zebra,' reasoned Bruce. 'They're already behind bars.' Mind your language The audacious Diary is daring to venture where few adults (who aren't in possession of a teacher's certificate) have the boldness to tread. That's right, folks. We're tip-toeing through the school gates of Scotland's schools to discover what the young scholars have been up to. An English teacher in one of Glasgow's finer educational establishments tells us that a curious student wanted to know: 'Where do they speak jargon?' Read more: When a Glasgow teacher gives a young scholar dietary advice... Money matters These are fiscally ferocious times. Inflation isn't just through the roof, it's now blasting into the stratosphere and will soon be colliding with one of Elon Musk's rockets. Thankfully reader Brenda Collins knows how to scrimp and save. 'I'm great at budgeting,' she boasts. 'Unless there's a dress I want, or a great new wine bar opened in town, or I'm desperate to buy my 100th pair of high heels…' Work or shirk? Overheard by reader Mark Talbot on a Newton Mearns bus. One teenage girl said to her pal: 'My mum wants me to study really hard and go to uni. But why should I? Being intelligent is so uncool.' Bad habit When a pal of Trish Cummings slipped a packet of cigarettes from her bag, Trish said: 'You told me you'd stopped smoking for good.' 'I did,' nodded the pal. 'Now I smoke for evil.' Fine without spine Politically engaged reader Craig Ellis points out: 'The fact that jellyfish have survived for 650 million years despite not having brains or a spine gives hope to the entire political class in Holyrood.'
New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
We are all Mrs Dalloway now
Photo byEveryone has cracks; we hear that's how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted 'everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work'. In her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, published a century ago, she wanted 'all inner feelings to be lit up'. But so much light meant so many cracks. Virginia Woolf is now such a large figure in global literary culture that she has at least 15 full-length biographies. But Mark Hussey's new Mrs Dalloway is a biography of a novel by Woolf, relaying its conception, execution and propagation. Hussey is Professor of English at New York's Pace University, and we believe him when he tells us Woolf is 'my favourite writer': he has published several books on her, and includes a charmingly domestic photo of his personal Dalloway stash, piled 20 editions high, which he started over 50 years ago. By scholarship's best guess, Dalloway's scene – 'life; London; this moment of June' – is 11 June 1923. For the last eight years, with Woolf's reputation higher than ever, a 'Dalloway Day' has been celebrated, with tours of Woolf's London led by the Virginia Woolf Society. The festivities will be particularly exuberant this year, the centenary of Dalloway's publication. Walkers will see Bloomsbury and Westminster in all the 'absorbing, mysterious… infinite richness' Woolf imbued them with, 'as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious'. The amusements may sound little more than a short walk around central London. But so, really, might the book's plot. In the story, a politician's fashionable wife, Clarissa Dalloway, gives a fancy party, and a traumatised young veteran of the First World War, Septimus Warren Smith, kills himself after his doctors neglect him. Hussey is correct that, asked what the book is about, one might answer 'not much.' But, of course, for Woolf it was all about what was happening inside her characters. In that way she was of her modernist cohort, trying to find her artistic bearings after the moment 'on or about December 1910', as she put it, when 'human character changed'. To Woolf, to Joyce, to Proust, there had been what Hussey calls 'a fundamental shift in relations' between subject, object, and the nature of reality. What Woolf called Edwardian writing was futile just as describing a house's exterior was futile to convey the soul who slept inside. If art was to answer the 'astonishing disorder' of modernity, it had to directly penetrate conscious experience. It was an ambitious project, but Woolf felt confident. She had brought off two fairly conventional novels, and her more daring third, Jacob's Room, had attained wide praise. She felt she could write freely, and that she at last knew 'how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice'. Or, putting it another way, that she was 'beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain'. Her voice was her mental mechanism, however flawed that mechanism. Woolf had had to stay in a private nursing home after a severe breakdown that came a year after the marriage from which she wanted everything. A few months later, chance alone her saved her from death, after she took a deliberate overdose of Veronal (a sleeping aid). And two years after that she had suffered another severe breakdown. But with her confidence and reputation waxing, she felt 'madness is terrific… in its lava I find most of the things I write about'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Readers liked in her what she liked in those she read: what she called 'queer individuality'. So the project was to inspect her self as it shattered and reconstituted. No humans were 'as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'. Instead they were 'splinters & mosaics', and art should show them as such. A plane broken to pieces and put together again became a mosaic, and thereby turned particular, beautiful, and more interestingly refractive. At one point in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway is seen mending her dress. To do full justice to her 'queer individuality', she devised for Mrs Dalloway a 'queer & masterful' design. For it, she had 'almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity.' So she devised Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who would show 'the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side' and who, as in a long-held idea for a play, would only ever 'almost meet – only a door between – you see how they just miss – and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again'. But they did come near again. The problem we all know, visible in the book and its author's life, is that the separation did not hold. Sanity went into insanity, life went into death. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Clarissa does not commit suicide, but was originally intended to, and it may be telling that one early reader mistakenly believed she had after finishing the book. Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who fought to defend Shakespeare's England, does kill himself, and gives lie to the vision of art as individualisation. If the war launched Woolf's project, it also undermined it. Compare Woolf's artistic vision of splinters and mosaics, of lively Clarissa mending her dress, with her thoughts when visiting a relative, wounded during the First World War, in his hospital ward. She felt 'the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again'. It is hard to say what differentiates life-giving art from death-giving war. In one letter, Woolf described the War in artistic terms, as 'the preposterous masculine fiction'. Septimus is a traumatised veteran, but if any character has 'queer individuality' it is he. And he grows 'stranger and stranger', more and more alone, by allowing himself to think too much. The modernists thought leaving 'description' for 'insight' would help them ascertain truth; in fact it destroyed it. They were not writing, as they thought, after Einstein and Freud, but after their closer contemporary, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who found that electrons refused to be fixed under observation. So did the modern self, inspection only creating uncertainty. Woolf was closer than she knew on writing in her essay 'Modern Novels' that consciousness is an 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms'. The self-attention they hoped would achieve stability in fact wrecks it. The more you look, the less you know. Woolf's own metaphor was a 'tunnelling process', which allowed her to 'tunnel behind the façade of objective appearance' and reveal consciousness. But efforts to light up anything can only ever illuminate a new, deeper darkness. There is nothing at the back to reach. Clarissa feels 'the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone'. The best option might be to turn back while you still can. The generic life Woolf feared, inert and inartistic, 'mute & mitigated, in the suburbs,' may be preferable. Septimus loathes his boorish physician Dr Holmes, and Woolf loathed the psychiatrists she based him on. But it is hard to dismiss his insistence that introspection offers no delivery from itself, and his prescription that what Septimus really needs is to stop thinking about himself and become occupied by external things. To do so would certainly be to neglect his individuality, but the depths of his individuality killed him. Perhaps he should have joined the dull masses. The bores were right. In a preliminary, more frivolous appearance, the character of Clarissa Dalloway exclaimed, 'How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!' How much? Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf's children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the 'dark region of psychology'. She never found it, but we have continued her search. Her 'queer individuality' is a public deity. That the unexamined life is not worth living is a truth inviolable; indeed we examine relentlessly. It is almost axiomatic that inward tunnelling breaks through to rewarding clarity. But Mrs Dalloway is a warning as much as guide. Perhaps, for once, we need not go deeper. [See also: Who's offended by Virginia Woolf?] Related
