Colin Thubron

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 30:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is a restless traveller whose every journey is accompanied by words. He absorbs the countries he visits and then writes about them in a way that has delighted thousands of readers. He began as a young man with books on the Middle East, but it's his descriptions of his travels through Russia and China that have won him greatest acclaim.

Presenter0:50

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss him simply as a narrator, albeit a stylish one. When alone, relaxing in his Welsh cottage, he writes novels. His body may rest, but his spirit, it seems, never does. He is Colin

Presenter1:05

Colin, i is that restlessness, that inability to settle a a fundamental requirement of the travel writer, do you think?

Colin Thubron1:13

It certainly is in my case. I think it expands both to the novels and to the travel books. Why it's there I'm uncertain, but I think in many travel writers that it is sitting there as the basic reason why they go, even if they don't acknowledge it.

Presenter1:29

But is it a desire to travel, or or is it a desire to arrive?

Colin Thubron1:34

I think in my case it's more a desire to arrive. I have a dream of a place, an idea of a place, which I want to go and corroborate or find a a a difference in. I think the the love of simple movement may be there as well, but the ultimate thing is the realization of of a destiny.

Presenter1:51

But what happens if it doesn't come up to your expectation?

Colin Thubron1:54

I think it's never the same as your expectations. And when I first travelled, I had, I think, a romantic idea of the society I was going to, and imagined that it was going to be uh colourful and extraordinary, and and in in some way that secrets were going to be laid before me that would make human beings seem different and society seem different from how it was. I mean, radically different. Later, I think you become fascinated by the reality, and the romantic side rather diminishes, and what takes hold on you is the extraordinariness of what you find.

Presenter2:26

But does it also mean that you're you're searching for something? Does it indicate a a a lack of ease with that which you have?

Colin Thubron2:33

I think so. Yes, I'm a bit reluctant to admit this, but I think it

Colin Thubron2:37

It implies that what you have is in some way not enough.

Colin Thubron2:41

and that you're looking quite subconsciously maybe for something different, and I suppose something better.

Presenter2:47

Well, you must have come across some desert islands in your time, have you?

Colin Thubron2:50

A few.

Presenter2:51

Nice.

Colin Thubron2:52

And

Colin Thubron2:53

Yes, nice but static. I think that although the solitude of a desert island would quite appeal to me, I'd probably take about three weeks before I notice nobody else was on it at all. I think really that a traveller

Colin Thubron3:05

is looking at the horizon all the time. And probably it does an appeal to sort of domestic people that wanted to settle down. I would be trying to, I think, stitch her off together with monkey hide or something and and go over that horizon.

Presenter3:16

So even even if it were paradise, you'd still want to move on.

Colin Thubron3:20

Definitely, yes, yes.

Presenter3:22

Well, you have to rest long enough to play eight records, so we'd better hear what the first one is. What is it?

Colin Thubron3:26

The first one is I fell in love with the old singers when I was a teenager. I I loved the sort of Caruso generation of classical opera singers. And this one is Giovanni Martinelli, a very distinctive voice. Some people hate him and some people love him. It's a voice you're not indifferent to. And on my desert island there'd be nobody to hate him because I love him. I met him in New York when he was a very old man. And here he is singing a very difficult formal aria from Verde's La Forza del Destina.

Speaker 43:56

They are not

Speaker 44:01

Uh

Speaker 44:24

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 44:33

We are hiding.

Speaker 44:51

And all honey.

Speaker 44:57

The fear of all of you.

Presenter5:10

A recording made in nineteen twenty seven of Giovanni Martinelli singing the aria O tu que in Seno alli Angeli from Verdi's La Forza del Destino.

Presenter5:19

You must, Colin Theobron, be exceedingly practical because of all your experience. I mean, you're good at looking after yourself, are you, in adverse conditions?

Colin Thubron5:28

No, actually I'm hopeless. Uh I think in a way I'm not thinking about it very much, particularly when I'm travel writing. I think I find when I'm travelling that it's almost as if there are two of you going. There's the one that's writing about it, the one that's recording, the ones that's fascinated, and there's the one that may be having quite a bad time. But what you dread as a travel writer is that nothing's going to happen to you. And the bad things or the good things all in a way goes to the writer's mill. And so just as the one that's having an awful time is having it, the one that's writing about it is saying, This is a good copy of you can use this.

Presenter5:58

So you're sort of sitting on your own shoulder watching yourself?

Colin Thubron6:00

A bit. There's an element of that. So that you dare to do things that you wouldn't do if you were simply travelling to enjoy yourself or even for interest.

Presenter6:08

What's then the worst situation you ever found yourself in?

Colin Thubron6:12

It's always hard to say because you don't know how real the danger was. Um when I was in Tripolis, which was a very violent Muslim city, a mob assembled to, as they said, string me up, that I I grabbed the hands of the people in the front of the crowd and tried to make contact with them in very bad Arabic and spoke French to my shame, because the French were in better favour with them Arabs at that time. And they sort of became confused. I mean, if you made a human contact with them, you ceased to be an imperial symbol, and they eventually sort of let me drift away. That was an ugly moment. But usually in the Middle East it was sort of anarchy from below that threatened. In Russia and China I felt more sort of fear of sort of authority from above.

Presenter6:54

How did that manifest itself?

Colin Thubron6:56

On the border I had the horror of losing my notes, because without notes I felt the travel book would lose its sort of distinctness, lose its vitality. And uh for several months I'd been taking detailed notes of what I'd done, conversations I'd had in the Soviet Union, some of them with dissidents. And at the border they pulled my car to bits. I was driving and took the dashboard out and the door panels. They body searched me, they stripped me and they took out the film, my camera and developed it and so on. This went on for hour after hour. And finally I was taken down at the bowels at the border paste which was called CHOP, which is ugly in itself, and was confronted by, I think, a uniformed KGB officer who just had my dale. It's the only thing they couldn't sort of decipher. And he made me read out bits of these notes. My notes were in Dale form. But it's a ludicrous Dostoevsky situation because he couldn't tell what I'd written there. Even when I read them out, he couldn't read my writing, which is very small. And eventually he let me go. After about half an hour of my leaving out any difficult passages and saying how beautiful the sun was in Odessa and how so on. He let me go.

Presenter8:00

Did you fear for your life there in the Soviet Union?

Colin Thubron8:01

Do you feel

Colin Thubron8:03

No, not at all. No, I just thought I'd probably be chucked out. And the awful fear that a writer has that your notes will be confiscated.

Presenter8:10

Sounds as if you fear altogether more for your notes than your life.

Colin Thubron8:13

Yes, that's right. Yes, absolutely. Your notes are your life.

Presenter8:16

Let's have the next record. What is it?

Colin Thubron8:19

It reflects my first visit to Asia, first sort of touch on the East, when I was in Konya in Turkey and heard this music of the whirling dervishes, who are an ascetic sect of dervishes who basically feel that by dancing their soul goes out of their body and joins a kind of universal soul. And so it's a very strange dance which I later saw in Syria in a mosque in secret in which the dancers, they're usually sixteen of them, whirl very slowly in great white leaded robes while the worshippers all around them go mad and start chanting Allah Allah and and throwing off their clothes and going into ecstasy. In the centre is this pattern of dancers who go on for maybe uh an hour and a half turning very slowly uh to this strange music which is mostly flutes and and timbres and drums. It's a very eerie noise and like most Eastern music and I think this is why I'd like it on a desert island is that it doesn't have a western shape, it has a sort of continuum like eternity with variations played on it and it has no beginning or end.

Presenter10:14

The Ceremony of Mevlevy Whirling Dervishes, recorded by Colin Theobron himself, in Konya in Turkey, twenty seven years ago. Now, you went on that trip with your parents, visiting Syria and Egypt, too, I think. But since then you've always travelled alone. Why is that?

Colin Thubron10:31

I've usually found that alone you're more sensitive, and particularly if you mean to write, you have in a way to try to forget your own culture. If you're travelling with just one other person, you are sort of always revalidating your own point of view together, which is a sort of English point of view, instead of being the strange person in the landscape that is forced into understanding really what's around you. It's as if you're going a little bubble of Englishness and looking out and saying, That's funny, and look at that.

Presenter10:59

So do you in a sense go native?

Colin Thubron11:03

It's not a conscious thing, I think. It it's simply that by subjecting yourself to the culture, by travelling more or less as they do, um, if you can, living in the same way that they do, maybe i hoping to get invited into houses, that you

Colin Thubron11:18

You begin to drop your Western preconceptions, even your values. You watch your prejudices change, not always go away, of course, but you begin to, I think, without intellectually working out, you sort of see that their way of thought or going on is a perfectly natural one, given the conditions in which they live. I remember after some months of travelling in inland China that I saw a group of criminals who were being paraded in a square outside a railway station in a provincial Chinese town. A few months ago that would have appalled me. I wouldn't have understood it. And it still appalled me in a way. But I felt that after a long time of seeing the sort of conditions under which Chinese lived, it seemed more natural to me that they were doing things this way, that fifteen criminals were being paraded for the education really of the others, that their sentences were pronounced, the wretched men were going off for twenty-five years or something into forced labour. And I was looking at the faces of the crowd, who seemed to be blank actually, and in a way I was horrified at the sufferings of the individual. But there was some rather uneasy sense in me that I now understood this as the natural result of a culture that thought and felt that way, that was immensely poor and practical, and that this was a perfectly natural way to govern.

Presenter12:53

Does that then mean you weren't surprised by what happened in Tiananmen Square earlier this year?

Colin Thubron12:59

No, I was surprised. But after it had happened I found there was a sort of thudding sense of recognition in me as to what had occurred. It seemed natural that those old men had to do that. They didn't have any other way, given the generation which they belonged to.

Presenter13:15

So, what you learned while you were there was what form Chinese morality takes, and so.

Presenter13:21

You could just see what happened and understand.

Presenter13:24

in one ha having got over the initial shock.

Colin Thubron13:26

Was over the initial shock? I can't say I ever understood, but I came closer. It it's difficult to talk about this because it was more little things, even the way they treated animals. And this begins to sound again very uncomfortable with this, very racist. But when I talked to people, for instance, about what they had done in the Cultural Revolution in that period, that decade after 1966, in which the whole nation seemed to become a sort of instrument of its own torture, people who had beaten other people up or even killed them, when I talked to them I felt a deep disturbance because it seemed to me that they were alienated actually from what they had done themselves. They didn't recognize themselves who they had been at that period. And it struck me then that in Chinese society that more than with us morality is vested in government. It's a very old Confucian thing, that people are educated through government and less perhaps than with us, where it may come through that sort of monitor we call conscience.

Presenter14:27

Shall we pause there for some more music?

Colin Thubron14:29

Yes, my third will be, I think, Mozart. I loved Mozart from almost some childhood, and I don't know who it was who said, who contrasted the music of Beethoven and Mozart, saying that one was Beethoven talking to God and the other was God talking to Mozart. But this to me is one of the most poignant of all his slow movements from the Twenty-third Piano Concerto.

Presenter15:57

The end of the second movement of Mozart's piano concerto number twenty three in A, played by Alfred Brendel, with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter16:06

Let's just, Colin, if we may explore your background a little. You were born fifty years ago in Sussex, near Glynbourne, in a house with a beautiful garden, I think.

Colin Thubron16:15

Yes. Uh home to me has always been a garden ever since. Yes, it it um a very happy childhood, very secure, and very privileged. So where the restlessness comes from, I don't know.

Presenter16:26

Were you writing even then?

Colin Thubron16:28

Yes, um poetry mainly, or the bad poetry of a childish kind, when I was about eight or nine. I thought it was just my natural reaction to the world seemed to be to write poetry about it, rather than to dance it or sing it.

Presenter16:39

I read that some one once showed your poems to T S Eliot, is that right?

Colin Thubron16:42

Yes, and he very wisely said, I think, wait and see if this person is still writing um when he's twenty, because poets fade out.

Presenter16:51

And he was.

Colin Thubron16:51

I wasn't writing much poetry. I seemed to drift into prose.

Presenter16:55

Do you write poetry now?

Colin Thubron16:56

No. No. For some reason again, I don't know why. It vanished, I think, in my early thirties, finally.

Presenter17:03

And and you were born just about at the outbreak of war, um just before it, I think.

Colin Thubron17:06

Three.

Colin Thubron17:08

Yeah.

Presenter17:08

W was your father in the army?

Colin Thubron17:10

Yes. In fact, I can remember him coming back from the war, I think in late 1945, from Austria, and I didn't have any idea what he looked like. Um I couldn't remember my father. And I remember standing on the platform with my mother, waiting to see what he would look like, what my father would look like. And um all these soldiers were coming down, um many of them looking rather boring. Um and then this very tall man, almost six foot five, came down covered in medals, very handsome, and this was every boy's idea of his father, and he was mine.

Presenter17:43

Wonderful. Shall we have some more music?

Colin Thubron17:46

Yes, this is the song of the earth. Mahler fascinating to me always, I think, because of his delight in the beauty of life and yet the consciousness of its transience. This also has romantic associations for me, this music. It ends with the repeated words Evig, which means forever, forever, and it's got that Mahler sense of mingled eternity and sadness and beauty.

Presenter19:15

Christa Ludwig singing Der Abschit, the last song from Mahler's Song of the Earth, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer. It's very beautiful, Colin, and very sad. You write in your novels about lost love. It's a it's a a fairly continuing theme. I mean, it is obviously something you've experienced.

Colin Thubron19:27

To make

Colin Thubron19:32

Yes, o of course it is. I think most people have. And I seem to go back in my novels to the things that upset me. Maybe, yes, the a love affair or or perhaps loss of religious faith or i it always seems to be the the unhappy things that need going over and the happy parts of yourself you leave alone.

Presenter19:54

But your lost love was lost uh was for whatever reason presumably unattainable. Um perhaps that suits the nature of you.

Colin Thubron20:03

I don't know. I think I could have been happy under very different conditions to those in which, say, I'm relatively happy now, which is as a single man. Marriage in itself never appealed to me as a sort of institution. It doesn't. I've never actually wanted that in itself. To be with the woman I loved for a long period. Yes, of course it did. But I think marriage was something that always struck me as constricting, maybe.

Presenter20:32

It it would certainly constrict the lifestyle you have, that is to say, going off for long periods by yourself.

Colin Thubron20:37

Yes, it sounds a sort of uncharitable idea, but but there's some sort of a emotional, kind of spiritual perhaps for lack of a better word.

Colin Thubron20:46

isolation or or solitude which is necessary to light for me, um which could easily be intruded on. So maybe I felt of marriage in some ways was sort of cule de sac. I think as a very young man, I felt it was the end of relationships, the end of adventure, the end of that sort of travelling, if you like.

Presenter21:04

Your fifth record, please.

Colin Thubron21:06

My fifth is Janet Baker, a singer I love, singing a leader, Mala leader, Ikbinda Veltab Handan Gekoman. This I remember meeting Janet Baker once, and I always thought there was something special about this song, and she said indeed it was her sort of signature tune. It's a perfect desert island stuff. It's really about a treat into loving and song, a very touching and deeply felt ali, I think, which she sings immaculately.

Presenter22:36

Janet Baker singing Ichbinder Welt Abhandengekommen, one of Marlow's Roquet songs with the Halle Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter22:45

We left your childhood behind somewhere along the line, Colin. I must ask you, you were you were sent to Eton, but you've said since that you feel spiritually as though you hadn't been there. Can you explain that?

Colin Thubron22:57

Yes, I think it's too easy to blame on an environment a kind of state that you would have been in at that age, wherever you were. And I wasn't particularly happy adolescent. The usual things about identity and a feeling of not belonging were very strong in me. And I think at Eton there was a sort of ethic, which looking back on it was just a whole lot of boys pretending to be men, really, that I didn't care for. It was a sort of ritualised uncaringness about almost everything. You were con meant to be above it in some way. It was the apotheosis of character, personality, above everything, whether it was world poverty or God, or your own failings. And this I was hopelessly at odds with looking back. Of course you blame it on yourself while you're there. You wonder why you're not fitting in. Now, or later perhaps arrogantly, I started more to blame it on the place. Now I think I don't really blame it on anybody.

Presenter23:51

But whatever you you didn't learn there, you you certainly um must have learned how to

Presenter23:56

learn quickly, as it were, because you've taught yourself lots of languages, haven't you?

Colin Thubron24:01

Only poorly, I would say. I'm too impatient, really, to become proficient at a language. I get to a chatting stage, and then I have to go to the country that I feel I can chat with. So it's not been as as good uh as it should have been, and I seem to be a walking morgue of half-remembered languages.

Presenter24:17

But how long does it take you to learn a a Mandarin Chinese to chat by?

Colin Thubron24:22

Oh, well, if you were to learn the script, then it would take you four years, really, before you were sort of literate at all. But I could speak in a sort of halting way in manner. And after a year I had a full time year, mainly with a a private tutor.

Presenter24:37

And you did the same? Um, you taught yourself or or were taught Russian and went to the Soviet Union? Yeah.

Colin Thubron24:42

Uh

Presenter24:42

Uh

Colin Thubron24:42

Uh

Presenter24:42

What's the time scale of all that? How do you if you decide to write your book on China or on Russia, how long do you set yourself for research and then travel and then back and writing?

Colin Thubron24:42

Yeah.

Colin Thubron24:51

Well, it sounds strange, but the travelling itself is quite a short time, and it's embedded in this enormous time, really, that you spend at least a year and a half with language and research, then maybe no more than three or four months, in the case of Russia and China, in actual travelling, and then probably a year in writing it. So the actual

Colin Thubron25:12

Experience of travel is probably no more than four months.

Presenter25:14

Why, why so short?

Colin Thubron25:16

I find that it pays diminishing returns, really. The first month you're receiving a massive data and pouring down notes, and then that starts to dwindle, and you realize there's a time when you sort of know in yourself that you must go home.

Presenter25:29

And when you come back, you bring, I think, very few mementos back with you.

Colin Thubron25:34

Yes, um that's partly been practical, inasmuch as I'm practical at all. I wouldn't stuff my rucksack with a whole lot of things, even if I could afford them. And I rather like to see things there in the society that produced them and where they seem to belong. I want to see an icon in a Russian church, not on my bedside table, and I want to see a Chinese vase i in a Chinese temple. I I don't have that instinct to bring it back with me, to own it.

Presenter26:03

Another record, please.

Colin Thubron26:04

This is Beethoven talking to God. I love these late Beethoven string quartets. This is the one in C sharp minor, and I I love the sheer richness and inventiveness and vitality in them.

Presenter27:04

The opening of the final movement of Beethoven's quartet number fourteen in C sharp minor, opus one hundred and thirty one, played by the Lindsay String Quartet.

Presenter27:14

Among the Russians you wrote in nineteen eighty three, Colin, an awful lot has happened in the Soviet Union since then. Are you encouraged, heartened, by the reports of Perestroika at work?

Colin Thubron27:25

Yes, of course. I think anybody must be. It's extraordinary to look back, say, ten years ago, or even the last year of Brezhnev's rule, when I was in the Soviet Union, to think that this has all had happened all happened. In those days, we thought of Russia as a sort of unchanging grey mass. And I don't think anybody could have conceived of what's occurred since. Um at the same time, I think knowing Russia a little, having been there, you realize that what's happening is happening over

Colin Thubron27:54

a very dense bedrock of national character which is not going to change at the stroke of a political axe. And our sort of unspoken idea in the West that Russia was once perhaps a burgeoning economic nation which was artificially aborted by communism is quite wrong. There's a sort of feeling that once you take the lid of communism off this society that it will flower into a Western liberal nation. It won't. It'll flower into something quite different. We'll have to wait and see. But the force in Russia is and has always been nationalism, that deep feeling of love of the motherland rather than communism. And that of course is still there.

Presenter28:33

And what of the future for China? I mean, perhaps again their their sense of time is completely different from ours, so they can lie low for a decade or two, as it were, and see what happens.

Colin Thubron28:44

Chinese rulers and people often talk in decades and centuries. They they're very conscious of being the oldest continuous civilization on earth. And yes, they feel they can wait. But I think we may see in, say, twenty years' time the Chinese cities becoming rather like Taiwan, as now say, extremely important economic.

Presenter29:07

It does seem that wherever you've been there's been some kind of war or revolution not long after.

Colin Thubron29:12

No.

Presenter29:13

Where are you planning to go next?

Colin Thubron29:15

I have a bad effect. Well, I would like to go to the Islamic part of the Soviet Union, to Samarkand, as it were, which is a wonderful area, a great sort of unacknowledged nation sitting there in the heart of Asia, these Turkic peoples, Kazakhs, Uzbek, Uyghur, who also extend into northwest China and northern Iran and Afghanistan. It's a whole sort of people that have never been united really since the time of Tamilen or before. And there are a good sixty million of them. And I think it's these people that are one of the reasons for the Soviet Union turning to the West, that they represent a possibility of an Asiatic Islamic fundamentalism exploding in the belly of the Soviet Union, which is a tremendous threat.

Presenter30:00

Another record, please.

Colin Thubron30:02

This is a typical travel writer's choice, I guess. Um Schubert's Winterreiser, which is a journey in music, if you like, with sort of time seen as a road, and a series of loosely knit songs. I think this song, Dreison and Three Sons, literally is the climax of the piece, an enigmatic song in which he says that, rather miserably I suppose, that two suns have set and there's just one a third uh that that's left.

Speaker 430:34

Aricha mechien, Hablung and Fusien.

Speaker 430:54

Um see our standards of steel.

Speaker 431:02

I support you.

Speaker 431:08

Break for me.

Presenter31:22

Die Nebenzonnen from Schubert's Winterreiser, sung by Dietrich Fischer Discar, accompanied by Klaus Billing. It's beautiful again, Colin, but very melancholy. Do you think you might die of misery before you lash this raft together?

Colin Thubron31:35

No, I'll be writing travel books in the sand or something. No.

Presenter31:40

You mentioned um Sama Kan just now. Of course, these days people go to places like that. They go to Shanghai. All these

Presenter31:47

Hitherto secret places have been opened up. Is there a sense in which, therefore, you have been robbed of something?

Colin Thubron31:54

I feel ambivalent about it. On the one hand, uh, you

Colin Thubron31:58

feel glad for countries that are normally been so impoverished that they should be open to the outside world, receiving even things like tourists and receiving the material benefits of tourism. And it it's crass, I think, to look at them as if they're just features of your own mental landscape or something and that they don't exist out there with a lot of very poor people living in them usually.

Colin Thubron32:24

At the same time, of course you feel that the differences are being ironed out, that the places that seemed extraordinary are are now less so, partly because of being so accessible.

Presenter32:34

Pot

Presenter32:36

So if if burgeoning tourism has has robbed you of something, has not also the travel writer been robbed of something by the camera, by the travelogue?

Presenter32:45

Do we need to read about it any more when we can see it?

Colin Thubron32:48

Yes, we need to read about it, because I think what the what the travel book does, that the camera doesn't, is to give you a country th seen seen through somebody else's eyes. If you're looking at a a television documentary, you're basically, whatever the subtleties of music or of commentary, you're seeing what you would see if you were standing where the camera lens was. If you're reading somebody else's version, you're seeing with their eyes their sensibilities, their historical knowledge, their preferences and fears, and it's a completely different experience.

Presenter33:19

Shall we have the last record?

Colin Thubron33:21

The last is Haydn's creation, and I've chosen from it the the first love song on earth, I guess, the wonderful Adam and Eve love song sung by Guner Janowitz and Diotrch Vishidiska.

Speaker 433:40

Uh

Speaker 433:49

It's here.

Speaker 433:51

Finish my buffalo.

Speaker 433:56

Here, sire's on stand

Presenter34:28

Gundele Janowitz and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau singing the love duet from Haydn's Creation with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karian.

Presenter34:36

Now then, Colin, which is your favourite of all of those? You can only choose one.

Colin Thubron34:41

It would have to be Haydn's creation. I could wake up every morning and hear the world being created again. That'd be perfect.

Presenter34:43

Mm.

Presenter34:47

And your book. I know you're writing one in the sand, but you can have one real one other than the Bible and Shakespeare. What shall that be?

Colin Thubron34:53

I would need, I think, many different voices, so I would choose Victor Gollang's A Year of Grace, which is a collection of mystics, philosophers and poets. And it's a very tranquil but powerful book, and it might even just stop me wanting to get away at all. It might reconcile me to being on the island and stop me building my monkey hide boat.

Presenter35:13

And your luxury.

Colin Thubron35:15

The luxury I think would have to be some scuba diving equipment, so I could discover other landscapes under the water.

Colin Thubron35:22

And provided I was on that sort of coral island that I expect you could avenge for me, it would be enchanting.

Presenter35:28

I think you're really going to have quite a nice time, don't you?

Colin Thubron35:31

I think so, except for that horizon, which will haunt.

Presenter35:35

Colin Subron, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 335:46

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.