Richard Mabey

Speaker 20:00

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. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Costaway this week is a naturalist. His love of plants and animals is as emotional as it is scientific. It's the relationship between man and nature which fascinates him, and he's equally at home writing about nightingales and their ability to keep loneliness and anxiety at bay as he is compiling his Flora Britannica, a huge encyclopedia of the native plants of England, Scotland, and Wales. Born in nineteen forty one, he still lives in the same house in which he was brought up. From there he writes and observes. The demands of the supermarkets, he thinks, are poisoning our land, and we urgently need a new ministry to regulate food quality. Man should try to control a little less, he says, and like the beaver, nibble and potter a little more. He is Richard Mabee.

Presenter1:17

Richard, we we take the attitude, of course, that we, man, are are supreme, we're in charge, and that we should manage that relationship, our relationship with nature. That's not how you see it, is it?

Richard Mabey1:27

No, sir, it's not. I think that we've taken this particularly arrogant position for rather too long. The position that's personified, if you like, in the word of steward, the assumption that we are not just in charge, but that we know best about how the natural world should regulate itself. And certainly, I think most of my life, both in what I enjoy experiencing about the natural world and what I've tried to write about it, is concerned with giving nature a bit of a free hand, of actually rejoicing in the kind of creativity that it can provide.

Presenter2:01

Do you mean like the deep greens in the States who believe in totally hands-off, just let it do what it does?

Richard Mabey2:06

Not entirely like them, no, because I think that human beings are part of the natural world, not actually necessarily in charge of it, but that we are creatures of nature as well, and that we have a right uh to as you put it, nibble away like beavers. And I think it would be very sad if we stopped doing that.

Presenter2:21

But can you give me an example of what you mean by that?

Richard Mabey2:24

Well yes, when I was doing Foral Britannica we had an absolutely delightful story from a woman in Yorkshire about a landmark tree that was called Nellie's Tree and she told us the story about how her father when he was growing up in Yorkshire in the 1930s used to be courting a woman in the next village and used to walk five miles there along a deserted railway track every night and one evening in a particularly ardent mood he noticed that there were three saplings of beeches growing along the edge of the railway track and he decided to make a memento or memorial to his beloved out of them and he he spliced them into the form of an N and the grafts took and thirty years later this immense N shaped out of living beeches actually grows in the landscape there. Everybody knows it as Nelly's tree.

Presenter3:07

It's still there.

Presenter3:10

But we do have enormous respect for certainly trees, don't we? Every time a you know, a a grand old oak is felled or b blown down in a gale, it makes front page news. We care desperately about these things.

Richard Mabey3:21

I think this is very new actually. I think that the passion for trees was very much an eccentric minority pursuit up until about 10, 20 years ago. And I think the hurricane of 1987 was a landmark in rescuing our respect for trees, if you like. And I think that what came out of that was not only a sense of their vulnerability, but also, as one began to see new saplings growing in their place entirely unhelped by human beings, a great respect for their powers of regeneration. I don't myself have a great sense of the spiritual in nature, but I am profoundly touched by what I once called transcendental materialism, which is the sense that even in the fleshiness, if you like, the thingness of nature, there is a tremendous power of renewal, of celebration of those rhythms that we see in nature, that we too are susceptible to. And by observing ourselves in the mirror of nature, if you like, we can remember that we too are living creatures.

Presenter4:20

Tell me about your first record.

Richard Mabey4:22

Well, it's uh it's it's very much on on this theme. It's Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending, which um I've always felt was one of the most perfectly English pieces of music and certainly is uh a lyrical invocation of a a bird unlike any other I know in music.

Presenter5:39

Iona Brown playing part of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter5:46

The book, Richard, maybe which first brought you to public notice, was Food for Free, which you wrote about twenty five years ago now, in which you said it was possible to find in some parts of the country a three course meal. Is it still possible?

Richard Mabey5:58

Oh, it's still possible, and I think probably more possible now, because the message of that book I don't say because of it, but certainly the idea that you can go foraging in the British countryside has has caught on.

Presenter6:08

So what's on the menu? Give me a give me an um idea.

Richard Mabey6:11

Well, one of the most extraordinary things that's happened is that the British appear to have got over their race hate of fungi. Twenty years ago it was unthinkable that one would ever eat any mushroom or toast all except those that you bought in a supermarket or

Presenter6:24

Yeah.

Richard Mabey6:25

They were, yes, though in fact there are very few poisonous species on the British list. Now you actually have to go out very early in the woods around me to have any hope whatsoever of finding uncut fungi. And I was interested that this autumn the Forestry Commission were again issuing prohibitions for fun mushroom picking in the new forest because so many people are going over the ground there that some of the species may be endangered.

Presenter6:51

So we're better at mushrooms. We certainly eat samphar, you know, that sea asparagus and so on. We're good at quite a lot of nuts and berries and things. But another plant you mentioned is the early purple orchis, which is apparently more nutritious than any other single plant. It said in your book of one ounce is enough to sustain a man for a day. Is that still there? And if so, why don't we eat it?

Richard Mabey7:09

No one I think would recommend the picking of early purple orchids now. They're really quite a scarce plant of old woodlands and old meadowland. But certainly in the Middle East where most of the recipes come from for early purple orchid they are used as a source of a rather health-giving drink called salop. And indeed in this country when the plant was much more common the same kind of drink was made out of them by working men in Victorian period for instance.

Presenter7:35

But I mean, the point is, it's jolly hard work getting this kind of meal together, but what you would say is it's the hunt.

Richard Mabey7:42

Oh, it is, yes. I mean, I I was sad that occasionally the book was misinterpreted as being a guide to survival, which I never intended it to be. It was precise, as you say, the excitement both of the the literal hunt for the plants, but also the historical hunt, of actually seeing the ingenuity of our ancestors in exploring all the foods that were available, and how they gradually became tamed into domestication.

Presenter7:43

Silachette

Presenter8:04

The interesting thing is, I suppose when you published it in seventy two, people thought it was all a bit hippie-ish.

Presenter8:10

Whereas now it's a very good thing.

Richard Mabey8:10

It was a bit hippie-ish with me if I was confessional about it. You should see some of the pictures of me on puffball hunts in my caftan. It was hippish. But yes, there was that about it. But there was also the resurrection of a tradition in this country which had been very active during the war. I mean, at any time when domestic plants were short, people turned back to the wild. And the Second World War was a very classic example. The Ministry of Food published umpteen little leaflets, including one called Hedgerow Harvest, which is something you can't quite imagine coming from math these days, to help people garner these sorts of things from the countryside.

Presenter8:50

Tell me about your second record.

Richard Mabey8:52

Well, it's a carol, a medieval carol, called Adam Leh Boundon. When I was at school, I was constantly chastised by my teachers for spending too much time involved in music. And one of the most exciting things I had at school was to be in a madrigal choir, which was one of the first experiments in twinning with our local girls' school. It sent us all dizzy with delight at the thought of singing with the these girls in gingham dresses. And at Christmas, we would go round some of the houses in the town singing these very select carols, which were nearly all medieval arrangements of some sort.

Speaker 49:36

They are both taken me.

Speaker 49:54

Blessed be the time that the music across.

Speaker 410:04

Hello, everyone's here.

Speaker 410:07

The world's love.

Presenter10:26

Adam Leigh Bounden, sung by the choir of New College, Oxford, directed by Edward Higginbottom.

Presenter10:31

Music was always important to you, Richard. You sang, as you say, in choirs at school and church, but

Presenter10:37

Were you aware as a as a young boy that your affinity with nature was was more highly developed than some? Did you roam the woods, bird spot?

Richard Mabey10:44

Oh, yes, I did. I wouldn't like to say it was more developed than anyone else's, but certainly I was acutely aware that it was something that was very important to me. I was romantic.

Presenter10:52

Romantically or scientifically?

Richard Mabey10:53

Oh, uh romantically at that time, and indeed it has remained like that, I think. Certainly when I was a teenager I I would uh be lost in uh mooning uh expeditions into the undergrowth around uh my hometown and uh carrying books of romantic poetry with me.

Presenter11:08

And did you write your own?

Richard Mabey11:10

Yes, I did. Um some of it was fairly shameless imitation of essayists like Richard Jefferies, but uh when I was at school I was quite sure that being a writer was one of the things that I wanted to do, though I never thought that I'd make any money from it.

Presenter11:23

But you went up to Oxford to read biochemistry?

Richard Mabey11:25

That's right. I still quite can't entirely understand that, except that uh at school we had to make the choice about our futures at the age of twelve without a great deal of consideration um for other things. And by the time I got to Oxford and was suddenly plunged into a subject which I hadn't done much of at school, I'd done science uh in terms of physics and chemistry, but I hadn't done any biology. And the uh the the experiments that we were required to do both on ourselves and on other creatures were

Presenter11:51

What did you do on yourself?

Richard Mabey11:52

Well, the very first experiment that was on our lists in the first week of my first term at Oxford was to extract the contents of our own stomachs for analysis. I thought this was as as deep end deep ends go, this was pretty deep.

Presenter12:04

So you swapped a PPE quickly.

Richard Mabey12:05

That's right.

Presenter12:06

But in the end the bit of science has stood you in good stead.

Richard Mabey12:08

I have never regretted that I did science up to a moderately high level at school, because it means that I am scientifically literate now. What the other part of my education did in the humanities was to not be afraid of criticising science. So whilst knowing what scientists are talking about, I'm not as inhibited as they themselves are about actually challenging some of their claims.

Presenter12:30

And not being afraid to write, perhaps, you know, just being a bit more liberated.

Richard Mabey12:34

I think the tradition of our literature in this country about nature and the countryside has relied on people being willing to confess their feelings about the seasons, about place, about birds. And in the last fifty years they've very much closed down. The great tradition that gave us W. H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies and Gilbert White has virtually vanished now. And all our literature about the countryside is very much couched in scientific terms.

Presenter13:00

Tell me about your third record.

Richard Mabey13:02

Being a great fan of music rather than necessarily a performer was not entirely true when I was at school when I did play the guitar a lot. Indeed, I was the the second guitarist in the school skiffle group at the same time as perfecting all these mediaeval carols. And one of the best of the kind of English school, if you like, of modern folk music seems to be the Kink's Waterloo Sunset.

Speaker 413:26

Keep her so busy

Speaker 413:28

Make me feel dancing, taxi light shine so bright

Speaker 413:45

As long as I gaze on watching the sunset, I am in paradise.

Presenter13:54

The Kinks and Waterloo Sunset.

Presenter13:57

Let's talk about nightingales. Can you remember hearing your first one?

Richard Mabey14:01

I can remember it very vividly because I hadn't expected to. I was on a birdwatching trip to North Norfolk with an old friend. There was nothing about and we sat rather indolently in one of the car parks and suddenly this electrifying call came out of one of the hawthorn bushes, full of these wonderful sobs that nightingales do and the pauses between the phrases that were such an essential part of the performance and I was hooked.

Presenter14:27

What do you think it is about the Night? Why you know why haven't we fallen for the Blackbird in the same way? Wh why is the Nightingale so romantic? Why has it inspired so much poetry and metaphor? What is it?

Richard Mabey14:36

Meta

Richard Mabey14:38

I think that there are two or three characters of the nightingale song that make it very special, one of which of course is the fact that it sings at night and that you very rarely ever see it singing. So it becomes a disembodied voice. But the quality of the song itself is closer to a human voice than perhaps any other songbird. And it does have this quality of phrasing, which is so like oratory. The song is broken up into short phrases, which are delivered very strongly at one moment and then very quietly and reflectively in the echo afterwards. Then there are these pauses which are just like waiting for a response or allowing the crowd to get excited. And it is that sense of listening to a recitative in an opera, for instance, that I think one gets from a nightingale that you don't get from other birds.

Presenter15:26

Now it's an important bird for you. You've written a book about it indeed, but it's it's a highly personal book. It seems to me about a love affair that ended and about the illness and subsequent death of of your mother, and how the nightingale helped you during both of those crises. Can can you describe why, how? How did it offer comfort and consolation?

Richard Mabey15:47

Somehow the Nightingale has come to stand for.

Richard Mabey15:51

Certain things to do with

Richard Mabey15:53

England and the spring for me. And I found it in I found it in moments when I was distressed to be a reminder of places that I felt very at home at in England. Um Heathland in in Sussex in May.

Richard Mabey16:10

Which is a very comforting environment, as are woods, where you can also hear nightingales. So for me it became a voice which spoke of places where I felt safe and secure, and also that the world was still spinning, that sense of renewal that you get from a migrant bird returning and singing the same song as Keith said that it has sung since biblical times. I found tremendously reassuring.

Presenter16:34

So again it's that it's nature forming that bridge, isn't it, between the

Richard Mabey16:38

It's forming a bridge. It's it's giv it's not just uh a a bridge.

Presenter16:38

It's forming a

Richard Mabey16:42

Between yourself and nature, but it's also a bridge that you can actually walk over in both directions. It's actually saying, here is a universe of which human beings are a part. We can, even though those songs aren't intended for us, we can actually, in a way, understand what they're about. They're about a bird being in the right place, we're saying,

Richard Mabey17:04

Nightingale here, who are you? And you can answer back, it's Richard Maybe here, you know, hello. And that that sense of being part of the same world, of singing to each other, if you like, even though you yourself may not utter a note, um kind of heals the world for me.

Presenter17:20

Next piece of music.

Richard Mabey17:22

Well the next song is is uh Canteloup's um arrangement of songs from the Auvergne, which uh more than any other um music I think sums up for me the the feeling of being in southern Europe in the spring.

Speaker 417:34

I suite

Speaker 417:45

Yeah.

Presenter18:34

Netania Davra, singing part of La Delisado from Conteloube's Songs of the Auvergne. You still live, Richard, maybe, as I said at the beginning, in the house where you were brought up. Is that chance, or is it again something deeper you'll need to be close to your roots, perhaps?

Richard Mabey18:50

I I think it's

Richard Mabey18:51

More the second than than the than the first. Um I

Richard Mabey18:55

I find that I am very committed to the idea of roots. I like knowing

Richard Mabey19:02

the place that I live in and knowing it.

Richard Mabey19:06

through a long period of time. I've still also got a lot of friends in in the area which are important to me, but uh if I was uh scrupulously honest, I think it is the the sense of of uh having a a habitation in a place for a long period of time that's important to me.

Presenter19:16

Yeah.

Presenter19:20

And you bought a wood. How close is that to home?

Richard Mabey19:23

The wood is about three miles away, and I bought that about 15 years ago now, in a period of my life when I was intellectually very fascinated by woods, and I wanted to see if one could look after a wood using some of the techniques and management styles that I'd learnt about in studying woods in the medieval period. But again, I think there's a degree of cover-up there, and really I wanted somewhere to play in again, because I'd in in when I was a small boy, I spent half my life up trees.

Presenter19:53

How big is it?

Richard Mabey19:54

The wood is sixteen acres.

Presenter19:56

Hmm.

Richard Mabey19:56

Um and it's a very higgledy-pickled-y place with uh all kinds of hills and valleys and different sorts of tree stands in it.

Presenter20:02

It was quite a large decision to buy the wood, wasn't it? You spent a long time wrestling with yourself.

Richard Mabey20:06

Yourself. It was real fingernail biting time. The amazing thing was that I knew this would, and I was walking up the lane.

Richard Mabey20:14

That runs past it one evening, and saw that there was a for sale sign pinned to a tree. And I knew that this had to be mine.

Richard Mabey20:23

I I spent many months while men in peak caps and carrying clipboards walked around it assessing it for rather more dubious futures than the one I had in mind and and desperately hoping that I wouldn't be gazumped.

Presenter20:34

But you got it in the end, and you persuaded all the community, I think, to to help you put it to rights.

Richard Mabey20:39

Yes, one of the main things I wanted to do with it was to see if it was possible to have a place which produced a bit of timber, was good for wildlife, but was also very good for people and could actually be looked after literally by them. But now much of the work is done, people come to enjoy it and celebrate it. And one of the nicest occasions in the year is Ascension Day, when the children from the local primary school process across the fields and come and hold their service amongst the bluebells. And they sing all things bright and beautiful under the beech leaves, and all the adults blub in the wings. There is a particular moment when the bluebells are coming out in one corner of the wood at the same time as the beech leaves are coming out over it. And the light, when it comes in from the west in that particular corner of the wood, is almost submarine. It has a blueness about it, both a dappled blueness coming from the translucent beech leaves, but also the blueness rising up from the bluebells underneath you. And to walk in that bit of the wood is like wading very slowly underwater. And I find when I go up there, I just kind of walk backwards and forwards in this strange, this funny little bit of path, imagining myself to be some aquatic creature.

Presenter21:55

Record number five.

Richard Mabey21:57

Well perhaps appropriately it is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. I once had a girlfriend who was a dancer at Covent Garden and she played one of the significant figures in The Rite of Spring one evening and it was the evening I suddenly understood what dance was about, having known her as a person who walked and ran about in a particular way and suddenly seeing on the stage this person articulating Stravinsky's music, I suddenly had an insight into the whole meaning of what ballet was.

Presenter23:25

Part of the dance of the young girls from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez.

Presenter23:31

Flora Britannica, your encyclopedia of wild plants I mentioned, is particularly special because it's a kind of twentieth century doomsday book, really, isn't it? You ask people to write to you with all their beliefs and superstitions about their plants. How surprised were you by the response?

Richard Mabey23:48

I was staggered by two things. Firstly, the the scale of the response that we got, because we heard from literally tens of thousands of people.

Richard Mabey23:56

And what they told us was surprising in one very particular respect. I think that I had expected to get indications of of old folklore still being believed in or used or practised. What I hadn't expected was the extent to which there was a new and deeply personal folklore being invented round the country at the moment that whereas I suppose

Richard Mabey24:19

A hundred years ago, folklore was very much located around groups like the parish. Now the new folklore is being invented by individual families, by

Richard Mabey24:28

Gangs at school by little neighborhood groups.

Presenter24:31

What kind of thing?

Richard Mabey24:33

Well, we heard, for instance, a very touching story from a woman about her father, who lived in the West Midlands, having a ritual with bracken every time he managed to escape from Smethick and go down to the Seven Valley. And the very first thing he would ever do to remind himself that he was back in the countryside was to pick a sprig of bracken and just rub his fingers along the frond and smell that marzipan scent coming from it. And that stood for the countryside for him. This was a deeply personal, one-family story, but it seemed to stand for a kind of attitude towards the natural world that was very much more common, that I suppose is very much representative of the way our society runs at the moment, that is more individualistic than it was 100 years ago.

Presenter25:17

But there are are, I think, many stories that are common around the country. I mean, we do think, don't we, that we shouldn't bring May blossom into our houses and that, you know, those kinds of things are unlucky. Do you mean people go on believing in those kinds of things?

Richard Mabey25:30

It's hard to know whether they actually believe them. I got the sense that people believed it rather like they believed that walking under ladders is bad luck. That is, oh well, I don't really believe it, but I'll just be on the safe side. What was fascinating about the May blossom beliefs is the different reasons that people gave for believing that, or the reasons they'd been given when they were first instructed in it. And they range from the belief that the Celts used to dress their victims in wreaths of May blossom, and therefore it was the last thing you wanted near your house, to the idea that it was the smell of gangrene, of corpses, that was once very familiar in this country when death was a thing you kept inside the house, but had been lost now. But the association between the smell of May Blossom and the smell of death was the reason that it was considered unlucky to bring the blossom in the house.

Speaker 225:39

Oh what I

Presenter26:20

Was the right

Presenter26:24

And and as you observe, you know, children still do so many things, even in this sophisticated age at the end of the twentieth century, you know, we still make daisy chains and children still whack conkers, we still name our streets and houses after flowers and trees, and we still import mistletoe and holly into the house at Christmas. But is it all habit? Is it all superstition? Or is there something else, something deeper in all of that?

Richard Mabey26:50

I'm quite sure that it is something much deeper. I think that the fact that

Richard Mabey26:55

What we discovered in Fora Britannica that folklore is still a living thing, that people are still making up things to do with with plants, ways of appreciating them, ways of revering them, is an indication that we do actually need that bond between ourselves and the natural world.

Presenter27:12

Record number six.

Richard Mabey27:14

This is um a piece that reminds me of uh an another bit of my life when I was living in London and uh working in publishing, and rather wishing that I could play the guitar like Stephen Sills.

Presenter27:56

Stephen Still's An Owl Cooper and Season of the Witch.

Presenter28:00

Abolish math, the Ministry of Ag and Fish, you say, Richard Maybe. Britain no more needs a Ministry devoted to agriculture and the food industry than it needs a Ministry for Wallpaper and Deodorants. Why not? Surely we Government needs to look after our farming and agriculture.

Richard Mabey28:14

Why does it need to look after our farming more than any other of our industries? The reason I have said, and I'm by no means the only person who says this, that the Ministry of Agriculture perhaps is superfluous, is because it really has become a ministry for the encouragement of the agricultural chemicals industry. And I can't think that that is really what it was meant to do. MAF was really got underway when Britain was desperately short of food during the war. And that habit of assuming that we are going to be short of food and that, incidentally, farmers might look out after the countryside as part of the superfluous work that they were doing, both of those things have been shown to be untrue. We've moved into an area where most of the time our crops are in surplus and it has been one of the clichés of the last 30, 40 years that farmers are the worst people to look after the countryside.

Presenter29:09

But you couldn't meet the demands of the big supermarkets if you didn't farm in the way that we farm, could you, if you didn't use the artificial fertilizers and so on.

Richard Mabey29:17

It's a moot point. We haven't really given the alternative systems very much of a chance. People who have done the maths on this believe that we could very easily be self-sufficient in food by switching to a greater reliance on vegetable products and more organic vegetables. The price of food would probably go up a little bit, but then

Presenter29:39

A lot, if the price of organic food is anything to do with that. And it wouldn't look like the customer wants it to look. It would be misshapen and knobbly and.

Richard Mabey29:41

And it wouldn't

Richard Mabey29:45

Well I wonder if the customer really does want it to look like that. I mean they customers now have the choice in a few supermarkets of being able to choose warty apples and knobbly cucumbers, but in most places that choice is not open to them and it's rather assumed, I think probably improperly, that customers will always choose food which looks like plastic rather than like growing substances. And of course if if subsidies were largely removed from other sorts of produce then even though the cost of food would go up our taxes would go down to the extent of about £20 a week because that's the sort of figure that's going in for an average family.

Presenter30:22

But despite your radical stance on all of that, and despite the fact that our forests go on being depleted, as we hear most recently, for material gain, you are nevertheless you're not known to be an ecological pessimist, are you? Why not? Why aren't you full of foreboding and doom and gloom, like so many people are?

Richard Mabey30:42

I think it's partly because I've always been touched by the natural world's capacity for renewal and regeneration, which seems to me incredibly magnanimous given what we do to it. Just after Food for Free, I wrote a book called The Unofficial Countryside, which was about the improbable appearance of wildlife in London. And I was touched very deeply by tumbleweed growing in the Ford Works at Bagenham of the extraordinary plants which grew up on old refuse tips. And that sense that nature will always come back if we give it just the slightest chance has buoyed me up ever since. I have to say I'm less optimistic about the third world. I think that the environmental struggles of the future are going to be, or indeed they are being already, very largely decided in many of the poorer places in the world. And unless we as a developed nation can begin to show a little humility, I think, and begin to demonstrate that the things that we've done to the environment we are sorry about and can actually begin to export some real solutions to other parts of the world, then I think the outlook in many parts of the world will be very bleak.

Presenter31:55

Record number seven.

Richard Mabey31:57

Bob Dylan. He's been a very important voice in my life, both because I've pretty much most of the time liked his music, but also in his early years I found great political inspiration from his records.

Richard Mabey32:14

Chosen Visions of Johanna as my record. It isn't it isn't a political record, but I thought that trying to work out the wonderful meaning of the cryptic lyrics would at least occupy my time on the island.

Speaker 432:28

Ain't it just like the night To play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?

Speaker 432:39

We sit here stranded, but we're all doing our best to deny it.

Speaker 432:49

Anne Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to

Presenter32:54

Defiant.

Presenter32:57

Bob Dylan singing Visions of Johanna. Well, now what about the ecology of a desert island? I mean, have you given any thought to it? Where will you find the bridges to your soul there?

Richard Mabey33:07

Well, I I like to think that I'd be quite good at feeding myself on it. I jolly well ought to be.

Richard Mabey33:13

I've done a bit of foraging in Europe, though not further afield than that. But I think I know some of the main rules about experimenting with wild foods in alien places. And I think that I'd be okay at feeding myself. What I wouldn't be any good at is actually enduring the loneliness, because even though I like being by myself in the countryside for short periods, not for long.

Presenter33:38

You'd be badly in need of a nightingale, wouldn't you? I wonder if they found it.

Richard Mabey33:41

Well, yes, I mean it might there might possibly be a be a songbird there which had the same kind of qualities.

Presenter33:46

Last record.

Richard Mabey33:47

The last record is a piece of Bulgarian gypsy music in the improbable time signature of 916 and it's played by Planksty, an Irish band. It's called Smekeno Horo. I like the idea of an Eastern European gypsy piece being played by an Irish band because that's my family background. One quarter Polish and one quarter Irish. So I think it's an appropriate one.

Presenter34:40

Banksty playing Smicano Horo.

Presenter34:43

Um if you could only take one of those eight records, Richard, which one would it be?

Richard Mabey34:46

Oh, I think definitely the Canteloup, songs of the Auvergne.

Presenter34:49

Hm. And what about a book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Richard Mabey34:53

Well, um I'm I'm rather hoping you would allow me a an immensely condensed book, um because I'd I'd like to take all the novels of Thomas Hardy, but if I'm not allowed that

Presenter35:03

Probably not.

Richard Mabey35:04

In which case I'll take the wind of the willows and be thoroughly sentimental the whole time.

Presenter35:08

And what about your luxury?

Richard Mabey35:11

Again, I rather hope the ship's cat would swim ashore, but not a lot of cats.

Presenter35:15

But swim ashore. Cats can't swim and in any case you can't have it.

Richard Mabey35:18

In which case, uh I'm going to take a guitar.

Richard Mabey35:22

I would really like to do what I should have done, which is to continue my my guitar and become as uh not as good as Steve Stills, but at least a bit more proficient.

Presenter35:31

Richard Mabey, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Richard Mabey35:34

Thank you, Sue. I enjoyed it.

Speaker 235:42

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