It is a brilliantly sunny day in London and the sky is a deep, clear blue. A lonely cloud skirts the horizon to the east. As I set up for the satellite pass in the park, I think of a poem I have just tried to translate from Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian. It is called 'Pjesma žena' or 'woman's song' and it was written by Ana Matanja who is described as 'seljanka iz Ledenica' or 'villager from Ledenica'. The first lines go like this:

Crna noćca svud pritisla
Nigde bjela dana,
U kuhinju stoji žena
Ćvrste prikevana
To je bilo prošlog ljeta
A sad toga nije

The poem- from the archive of the Antifašistička Fronta Žena in Sarajevo - describes a scene in which the 'The black night fell / no daylight anywhere / A woman is standing in the kitchen / Tightly chained / That was last summer / And now it is no longer' (loosely translated by me). It goes on to make a call to arms and to the voices of women who form that AFŽ to protect their rights, including those of voting. The author - Matanja - is a villager, but 'Ledenica' literally translates as 'icicle' or 'icebox'. This, combined with the scene of the first lines, gives this poem of activism and mobilisation a sense of the dark, the cold, and the surreal.

As I attempt to catch the last fragments of signal from NOAA-18 over the southern horizon by standing on my tiptoes, two dog walkers approach and ask what I am doing. I explain, and we chat about my tape measure Yagi antenna briefly. As they are leaving, the man of the couple turns around and says:

'It's not who you know, it's what you know!'