LAST Sunday I dreamt I went to Venice again. Or maybe I just listened to Opening Lines on Radio 4. John Yorke’s short reflection – a mere 15 minutes in total – on Jan Morris’s 1960 book about the Italian city still felt capacious. It managed to encompass Morris’s own story (from foreign correspondent to his transition from James to Jan), as well as a sense of Venice past and present; the city’s grit and glitter and decaying majesty. It also caught its unheimlich ability to be both a real place and a dream space.

“Venice is a very theatrical city,” poet and author Rachel Spence argued, “and Jan Morris captures that element of spectacle. But there is also a backstage, a behind-the-scenes. She shows you that Venice is a city of light and dark, of grime and shine, of charm and grumpiness. She also shows you the melancholy of Venice.”

Yorke reminded us that EM Forster once said that the best way to look at a city was to wander aimlessly about in it. And there is no city better designed for wandering aimlessly through than Venice.

I can’t think of anywhere I’ve visited that has entranced me more and Yorke’s vivid little hors d’oeuvre conjured up a few memories of my own, as well as a desire to walk in Morris’s footsteps.

When Morris first encountered it at age 19 in 1945 it was, she said in a vivid slice of archive, “half empty, it was lonely, it was defeated, just my style”. You couldn’t say that now as cruise liners dock every day and spill thousands of tourists into its mediaeval streets. More than 60 years on Morris’s Venice doesn’t really exist.

It was maybe disappearing even as Morris wrote it. “It reads like a romantic fantasy of what a city should be,” Yorke suggests of Morris’s book. But you can still catch glimpses of that fantasy if you visit the city itself. Listening to this, I so wanted to go back there.

On melancholy … The passing of Sinead O’Connor hit like a punch in the gut. The physical impossibility of her silence in the mind of someone living, to paraphrase Damien Hirst. She was a fierce girl, thrillingly so. Strong, bold, vulnerable, a truth-teller. There is much made of her getting booed by the audience at the Dylan 30th anniversary show after she had previously torn up the photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. What isn’t as well recorded – though it’s easily the most thrilling thing in Kathryn Ferguson’s recent documentary Nothing Compares – is the way O’Connor stepped up to the microphone that night and exploded into an a capella version of Bob Marley’s song War with a mixture of pain, indignation and righteous fury.

One of the sad joys of Tom Robinson’s Now Playing tribute to her on Sunday evening on 6 Music was the way songs from her back catalogue reflected the quixotic fullness of her personality. She was always much more than her cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U (though how different that song now sounds).

My favourite track on Now Playing was Daddy, I’m Fine, a wonderfully salacious, vibrant advertisement for herself in which O’Connor told us she wasn’t meant for marrying and how she wanted to make her own life as a “strong independent pagan woman singing”.

As the record faded, Robinson, with real emotion in his voice, said simply: “Aw, bless her.” Of the many tributes to O’Connor, those three words were the ones that caught me out most.

The most enjoyable two hours of radio this week was Pete Paphides’ Soho Radio show on Monday. A continuous mix of music made on synths, taking in everything from Kraftwerk to Gary Numan, Joy Division to New Order. And Giorgio Moroder.

All my yesterdays, in other words. Paphides played New Order’s Your Silent Face and I’ve now decided I’d quite like it played at my funeral. Send me off for cremation just as Bernard Sumner sings: “You’ve caught me at a bad time/ So why don’t you p*** off.”

Now, that’s an exit line.