My wife spent the last two weeks trying to fix an old radio. She opened it up and jiggled it and fiddled with things, and she tried my patented repair-technique of giving it a few hard shakes and then blowing vaguely but with intent in the general direction of the circuitry. She took it to four different repair places but this is Cape Town, where the providers of professional services are unstinting and unyielding in their efforts to avoid doing anything for which they might accidentally be paid, so three of them sent her away, saying, "That radio is too old."Finally she found a guy in a shop on Main Road behind a green door, a place so small we're not sure it has a name, where Quincy gravely accepted the responsibility of the radio. She collected it this morning and now when I open the door the house is annoyingly filled with music and cheer.The radio is shaped like a large old-time lunchbox stood on its side, with a handle to carry it and a knob for "Tuning" and another for "Fine Tuning" and a volume knob that swivels with a small satisfying click from "Off" and goes all the way up to "Loud". Metallic writing on the metallic baffle of the speaker tells us that it is a JetStar Transistor radio, and the specific model is the Marilyn. It is precisely the sort of radio that played you The Chappie Chipmunk Show and Jet Jungle in the afternoons while your mom was making boil-in-a-bag hake-with-cheese-sauce for supper, or that carried the cricket to you through the open window when you were barefoot outside on a hot December Saturday afternoon.The radio used to belong to her grandfather; he listened to the news while the rest of the house kept quiet, and on Sunday afternoons it played classical music. Personally, my one beef with classical music is that I associate it with the slow teaspoon-tinkling melancholy of Sundays in my own grandmother's house, but for once this isn't about me. My wife plans to bath each night with the radio tuned to Classic FM. "For one hour a day, I want to live in the 20th century again," she says. Her stance isn't political, it's technological. She wants to live a more Lo-Fi life, one so unburdened by options that she doesn't even have to choose the music herself.But of course that's not all she wants from the radio. This week a friend of hers died. He was a work-friend, not a friend-friend. They didn't know each other's families or visit each other's homes, but he was in some ways rarer and more precious than that: in a world in which colleagues and acquaintances and the tight-faced bastards out there care first about themselves, he was an ally, a kind voice, someone who helped her out and made her life a little gentler. Over two decades he had her back and saved her bacon and made her smile and he never wanted anything in return, and she loved him and now he's gone.This morning I stood at the top of the stairs, unseen, and watched her sit with the radio and twiddle the dials even though it wasn't on. It made me think of an episode of my favourite podcast, The Memory Palace, which introduced me to one of the most beautiful ideas I've ever heard.When the inventor Guglielmo Marconi was old and in poor health, lurching through a series of serious heart events towards the end, he became obsessed with the idea that every transmission ever transmitted, every sound ever made, every word ever spoken still exists, travelling through space and therefore through time, in frequencies and radio-waves that grow ever fainter and further away, yet still survive. If we could only devise a powerful enough receiver, thought Marconi, we could reach out through space and hear anything, everything that has ever been said.We could hear, crackling through our speakers, the Wright Brothers whoop when their first plane flew and Bach give music lessons to his son. We could hear what Jesus said when he talked in his sleep. We could hear our father meet our mother one night in a boarding house in Durban or a mining town on the West Rand. We could hear our mothers kiss us good night, night after night, and we could hear our older sisters tease us again, and hear them laugh. We could hear our fathers lie in bed beside us on Sundays after they became sick, telling us stories of their life. We could hear, over and over, any time we wanted, the ones we love tell us they love us. Nothing would ever be lost, if only we had the right radio to hear it...