Alison Richard

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 two thousand and five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is an academic. In recent years, she's moved from pure research into management, becoming as a result the first full-time female vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. No doubt her knowledge of monkeys and lemurs she's one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists will stand her in good stead as she wrestles with the academic maelstrom she's now required to lead towards profitability and efficiency. She's done it before. In her previous job as provost of Yale in America, she inherited a deficit, but turned it around and increased resources for students at the same time.

Presenter1:03

It all seems a long way from the jungles of Madagascar, where she spent much of her time observing the creatures that are the subject of her reputation. But then, as she says, I have an insatiable curiosity about more or less everything. I always have had. She is Alison Richard. Which is easier, then, Alison, uh, to win the confidence of Madagascar lemurs or Cambridge academics?

Presenter1:27

That's a very good question. I think that I would say that there are challenges on both fronts. I bet. Yes. But do you employ your kind of anthropological skills when you're dealing with the Cambridge Again? Are you watching them? Are you assessing them? Are you kind of collecting data and trying to analyse their motivations? I have to say that I really don't think of it that way. Perhaps a closer parallel is between my colleagues in Cambridge and the leaders of the villages with whom I work in Madagascar on the conservation activities there, because again, that's about sort of human dynamics of developing a shared sense of purpose, of trying to move things forward together with people. And the fact that the leaders of the villages in southern Madagascar largely cannot read or write, mostly wear groincloths and carry spears, actually

Speaker 42:12

Actually

Presenter2:13

Doesn't make them all that much different from my colleagues either at Cambridge or at Yale. I mean, we are all human beings, and the challenges of bringing people together are the challenges of being people together the world over. You'd be rather dismayed if your Cambridge academics suddenly put on l loincloths and carried spears. Well, I don't know. I mean, it would just.

Speaker 42:17

I mean we are all human beings and the channel

Alison Richard2:23

It'd be rather just made it.

Presenter2:30

That's your field, isn't it? You know, complex social systems among primates. I understand. But the other compelling thing about them, alongside the academic interest about the lemurs, I'm now speaking, I've left the Cambridge academics alone for a bit.

Alison Richard2:43

During the course of the day I thought

Presenter2:57

is as I understand it. They are enchantingly beautiful. Well absolutely. Absolutely. To go out in the forest as the sun is coming up, the animals I study stand about, and they do stand about three feet high and they're white and they sit in the tops of the trees as the sun comes up, looking like so many Dega ballet dancers. And they hold their arms open wide to the rising sun to warm themselves up, which has led to local people seeing them as animals who worship the sun. Actually, it's an exercise in thermoregulation. But never mind. But it is a beautiful exercise in thermoregulation. And you gave up the chance of studying those beautiful creatures to go to Cambridge.

Presenter3:37

The old place must have its attractions.

Presenter3:40

Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, when I first sort of imagined contemplating the idea of returning to Cambridge, rather than to returning to a life as a full-time anthropologist, I will tell you honestly that my first reaction was to say, No, no, no, no, I want to go back to being a full-time anthropologist after eight and a half years in the trenches as provost at Yale. But over the course of several months, as I was being interviewed as a candidate for this position, I fell in love with Cambridge all over again, and by the time I was offered the position, it was completely irresistible.

Presenter4:11

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter4:13

I don't consider myself to be a very musical person. I simply love music. This Miles Davis album reminds me of who I was as an undergraduate trying very hard, and I think probably not very successfully, to be very grown-up. And listening to Miles Davis struck me at the time as the height of sophistication. And this was music that I loved. And I would sit in my room in Newnham with one or two friends over, listen to this, and talk and toast marshmallows, which I think is rather less grown up, in front of my gas fire. And it all seemed to be quite the thing, shall we say.

Presenter5:41

Miles Davis and part of the Pan Piper, and memories for you, Alice and Richard, of being an undergraduate at Cambridge back in the 60s and feeling cool and where it was at and all those things. But you also apparently felt you were there by mistake, that you weren't worthy of being there. Can you explain that?

Presenter5:57

Oh, absolutely. It was such a remarkable thing to be accepted by Cambridge, and I could only assume that somehow the admissions office had made a mistake. And I spent the whole of my first term completely convinced of that. And at the end of the first term, discovered that the people that I'd got to know and become friends with had all quietly been nurturing the same view of things. And now in my current position, I think about that still because we have a challenge today, reaching out to students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, giving them the confidence, the academic confidence, to imagine themselves.

Alison Richard6:34

To you.

Presenter6:37

prospering, flourishing in such an academically rigorous environment. So I have a great sort of personal sympathy and sense of how it feels to be that insecure. To be that insecure. Yes, yes.

Alison Richard6:44

See?

Alison Richard6:46

To be that insecure.

Alison Richard6:48

Yeah.

Presenter6:50

Um but the idea I mean, if anyone had said to you then one day you'll end up running this place and had said that to you forty years ago, you'd have hooted with laughter. Oh, I would have hooted with laughter three years ago.

Presenter7:01

It is easy to look back now on my life and imagine it all as having unfolded in some very sort of rational and progressive way. I can assure you it has never felt like that. I sort of I've gone I've done one thing after another, but I've never known what I was going to do next. But you you were very, very focused as I read about you. I mean y you cared desperately about whether you were working hard enough.

Alison Richard7:11

Twinkle.

Presenter7:23

Yes, I think so. I think it's Woody Allen who said 95% of success is just showing up. And I think there's a lot of truth to that, that if you sort of you work away and you plug away. When I was a child, I was always sort of keen just to sort of go at it and worked hard at things and never thought of myself as particularly bright, but indeed you can make up for not being brilliant for by working very hard. That's just that's who I am. And do you st exactly, do you still worry about it excessively? Is that who you are?

Alison Richard7:49

And

Presenter7:53

I gifted naturally, obviously. I mean, everything, your whole academic history, you know, good O and A levels and scholarships hither and thither and first class honours and but you obviously

Alison Richard7:53

I think

Speaker 28:02

Glass.

Presenter8:04

I would say that what I learned as a provost at Yale, and which is also true as vice-chancellor, is that I spend my days surrounded by people who are brighter than I will ever be and more knowledgeable on many things than I will ever be on any particular thing. That is the nature of the kind of job that I am now doing.

Presenter8:27

If you're not comfortable with that, then you've got a real problem. And I have grown into feeling very comfortable with that. So actually I worry much less. I just say, Well, I am who I am, take it or leave it and how fortunate I am to be doing what I'm doing with these extraordinary people.

Presenter8:45

Record number two is Oh, Sacred Hearts All Wounded. I don't sing well, but I love to sing. I sing lustily. I have always loved to sing. I was admitted to my school choir, I think not I know, not because I sang well, but because I had a low voice, and I sang fourth, and they were short of fourths. In a girls' school choir, it's as low as you come. That opened up for me a world of choral music. We sang the St. Matthew Passion, we sang the Messiah, we sang and we sang, and I loved it, and the beauty of the music moved me deeply. And this is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of choral music, and I love it, and I love it for that association of those many years of singing.

Speaker 49:35

Holy friends, oh

Presenter10:27

O hauptfoll blut und wunden, O sacred head sore wounded from Bach St. Matthew Passion, performed by the Concertgebar Orchestra and Chorus Amsterdam, conducted by Nicholas Arnoncourt.

Presenter10:37

So, Alison, you were born in in Bromley, in Kent, the youngest of three children. You say it was a suburban middle class family, decently educated, but no one had been to university. You were the first, weren't you?

Alison Richard10:48

Yeah.

Presenter10:49

But it was your father, wasn't it, who was the great character in the household? Tell me about him. They were both great characters, my parents. But my father was born in 1886. So when I was born, he was already in his mid-sixties. So I grew up with a father who was really an old man. He came from a small village in Scotland and was the son of a village schoolteacher and went off to sort of make his way in South America and told stories of his life there that live on with me. Dumbfounded by these aspects of my father that I hadn't. So he was an adventurous spirit, but wasn't he once offered the opportunity of flying with the Wright brothers and turned it into the field. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I mean, wouldn't you? They flew down to South America on this very Wright Brothers plane, 1914, and offered my father a trip. And he said, as he described it to us, I wasn't going to go up in that thing. So he got an autograph photograph instead. So he was in the second half of his sixties when you were a little dot.

Alison Richard11:23

So he was in the

Alison Richard11:30

Yeah.

Alison Richard11:33

Yeah.

Alison Richard11:35

When was it?

Alison Richard11:37

Yeah.

Presenter11:50

Back in Bromley in the nineteen fifty five. You know, getting all the brownie badges, working very hard, all of those things. I must I suspect I was quite insufferable, if truth be

Alison Richard11:51

Back in Bromley in the nineteen

Alison Richard11:59

Twitter

Presenter12:06

You won a scholarship to a girls' boarding school in Herefordshire when you were thirteen, so you skipped a year there, didn't you? So, I mean, were you insufferable then with the girls who were in the older than you? Yeah, they were very difficult. Oh, it was very difficult. I mean, I don't know if I was still wearing ankle-length white socks, but if I wasn't, I metaphorically was. That was a big jump, and it was really

Alison Richard12:11

Didn't you forget that?

Alison Richard12:16

Uh

Speaker 412:16

No, they were older than you.

Presenter12:27

Humbling and hard. And I did a lot of growing up and a lot of being very careful. Except that it was boarding school, so you could sort of fudge it a bit because they wouldn't have known.

Alison Richard12:33

Except that it was boarding sc

Presenter12:37

Whether you had a boyfriend in the evenings or something. No, that was the good thing about boarding schools. I could lie or creatively embellish my encounters with boys during the holidays and nobody back at school would know quite how embellished the stories were. And I always thought that was one of the good things about going to a boarding school. If you're at a day school, everybody would know just how sort of inept and wanting you are in your sort of social schools.

Alison Richard12:39

You know, that was

Speaker 412:57

Uh

Alison Richard12:57

Yeah.

Presenter12:59

So then on to Cambridge and eventually um anthropology you chose and you followed that with a PhD in London. And then when you were twenty four you upped and off to Yale. Now was that was there some great strategic plan there or were you just following your style? No, no, no, but I wouldn't

Alison Richard13:13

Bye.

Presenter13:15

Grace anything with the idea of it being a strategic plan in my life. No, what happened was I was finishing my PhD at London University, in fact. And then I got a phone call from the man called David Pilbyam, who'd been one of my supervisors at Cambridge, who was then at Yale. And he phoned up and said, We have an opening. Would you be interested in applying? And I said, more or less, where's Yale? I mean, I had no idea. And off I went to Yale in the autumn of 1972. And you never came back for 30 years. Didn't come back for 30 years. I never imagined at that moment in time that I was making a decision.

Alison Richard13:40

And you need to come back to thyself.

Speaker 413:41

Then

Alison Richard13:41

Uh

Presenter13:47

That would uh that just did it.

Presenter13:51

Exactly. Exactly. Next piece of music.

Presenter13:55

In my early days at Yale, I lived in this wonderful great Victorian house that had been broken up into a series of flats. But the conversion hadn't been very well done, so it was entirely possible to put the whole house back together again. And this we did once a year. And we would throw a big party, and there was this graduate student called Bob Dewar, and he was really great in arranging the music. He put together a tape, and he always started it with Sympathy for the Devil. Well, this was the man that I then went on to marry. And this sort of memorializes that and our continuing love of dancing together in all forms and our love of each other.

Alison Richard14:30

Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of will, and today

Alison Richard14:38

I've been around for a long, long year So many men

Alison Richard14:46

I was round when Jesus Christ had his moment.

Alison Richard14:50

Doubt and pain

Alison Richard14:54

Me damn sure the pilot Washed his hands and sealed his face

Presenter15:00

Rolling Stones and Sympathy for the Devil. It's sort of fallen into place your life for you, hasn't it? What would you say? I don't know what I would say. I would say that I have enjoyed it and am enjoying it enormously and feel very you know, deeply blessed in all kinds of ways. There was one moment in your life when you

Alison Richard15:10

Do you say this?

Presenter15:24

felt less than blessed. I think you said that you you felt

Presenter15:27

Untouched by life until you lost a child. Yes, yes, yes. Our wonderful daughters uh were born in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty two, and then our son Gavin was born in nineteen eighty seven. And uh at the age of six weeks he died. It was a so called cot death and inexplicable, inexplicable.

Presenter15:46

m meaningless and appalling uh

Presenter15:51

thing and uh

Presenter15:53

It plunged me and my husband to the bottom of a deep, deep, deep black hole. As you can imagine, it was just sort of.

Alison Richard16:00

It was just

Presenter16:01

There are no words to describe that. I do think of my life as sort of life before Gavin and life after Gavin. And we have worked very hard to

Presenter16:11

to give meaning to his life and to sort of the meaningless tragedy of his death. And one of the ways I see that is that I like to think that I can reach out to people who are deeply distressed now

Presenter16:27

Because I'd been there too at one point in my life in a way that I couldn't have done up to that point, because I had led this sort of just very fortunate life.

Presenter16:35

And so, you know, from time to time still, I kind of think to myself, well, you know, chalk another one up to you, Gavin. Thank you. No?

Presenter16:44

Next piece of music. This is I think one of the most exquisitely beautiful moments in opera. It's so beautiful, just as music and voice.

Presenter16:59

But it is also beautiful in terms of what is being sung about. It's the Marchalin letting go of her love, giving her love and giving this young man to Octavian, to Sophie, and it's the two of them struggling with their love for each other and their respect and admiration for her. It's so complicated and sad and happy at the same time. And I love it for that.

Speaker 418:14

Yeah.

Speaker 418:16

Be the boy.

Presenter18:26

The end of Richard Strauss's Der Rosen Cavalier, Marie Therese Habmirs Galoped, with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marshalline, Christa Ludwig as Octavian, and Theresa Steeke Randall as Sophie, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrion.

Presenter18:39

Before we get on to the issues that you grapple with in your daily life as Vice-Chancellor, let's just talk a little bit more about the work you've left behind and most specifically Madagascar. Why is it so special for the purposes of your study? Well, it's been described by Alice and Dolly as a kind of Noah's Ark floating out in the Indian Ocean. It's been isolated from the mainland for between 80 and 120 million years, something like that. So it only has the animals that it originally had? Yes, in a very real sense, evolution has taken its own unique path to the present in Madagascar. So the primates there are different from or behave differently from the primates you would find in Africa or India, and that's why they're so valuable for study, isn't it? They are evolutionarily separate, and indeed in the number of ways they behave differently. Probably most famously

Speaker 419:03

So we do

Alison Richard19:13

So

Presenter19:30

In many, though not all, of the species of lemurs and madagascar, females are socially dominant to males.

Speaker 219:35

Uh

Speaker 419:35

Bye.

Speaker 219:35

Yeah.

Presenter19:36

Ah, this is the as they say, the $64,000 question. We don't have a simple answer to the question, but part of the answer I am absolutely convinced has to do with the fact that the climate in Madagascar, the weather patterns, are highly unpredictable and it has major consequences for the availability of resources over time and the way in which animals interact and compete with monuments to get access to those resources. And you learn this kind of thing and can begin to arrive at these kinds of conclusions, extrapolate from the information the data that you collect by studying them very closely over long periods of time. Do you almost have a kind of register of births, deaths and marriages on these English? Pretty much. And in fact, we have been working with one population since 1984.

Alison Richard20:15

Yeah.

Speaker 420:15

Yeah.

Alison Richard20:15

Yeah.

Presenter20:22

We have darted animals, brought them back to camp, weighed them, measured them, tagged them and let them back out loose in the wild. And do you know them then? Do you recognize them? I recognize a num sum, but with six hundred at this point I don't I don't know. I don't recognize them. No, but you call them, don't you, my lemurs. You you you feel that you're part of them, they're part of you, you know them.

Alison Richard20:37

No, but you call

Presenter20:44

I don't feel that I'm a Lima. I don't have that kind of bomb with it. I think this is an extremely interesting population. I was trying to tempt you into some form of anthropomorphism, but obviously you don't go there. No. No, I don't. I don't. I'm sure you don't. Record number five.

Speaker 420:58

Um

Presenter21:01

This is perhaps a strange choice to be associated with Madagascar, but I remember vividly the surreal experience of being in a packed, very old Land Rover on an appalling road in a swarm of locusts so dense that you couldn't see the sky, and there was a kind of awful biblical terror to it all. But there we were listening to Credence Clearwater Revival at Fall Glass, and I thought to myself, it doesn't get odder than that.

Speaker 421:28

Uh

Speaker 421:31

Just got home from Illinois. Locked the front door, oh boy. Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch.

Speaker 421:40

Imagination sets in. Pretty soon I'm singing.

Speaker 421:45

Do you do looking out my back door?

Speaker 421:49

Pambarines and elephants are playing in the band.

Speaker 421:54

Take a ride on the flash

Speaker 421:59

One more South Mauritius.

Presenter22:01

Let's turn to Cambridge now, Alice and Richard, and the problems that face you there. Let's talk about selection first, how you choose your students. Um I believe in the main that the twelve thousand undergraduates you have there have straight A's, don't they, most of them? To that extent, A level results have become really an an impossibly blunt instrument for you to decide anything by, really, haven't they?

Presenter22:30

Yes, but I would say that there is no single kind of assessment that is going to be a magic bullet. If there were, it would have already been discovered. But the truth of the matter is, in my view,

Alison Richard22:37

Then why

Presenter22:43

That the greater the array of ways of assessing a student's achievements and potential, the better. So you have the interview as well. You always interview, really, don't you? Yes. Yes. But on top of that, as I understand it, in order to add, as you say, to the kind of smorgasbord of how you will choose these people, these students, you're thinking of introducing some kind of aptitude test. Is that what you had at Yale? Is that how they do it in America? We are piloting at Cambridge a number of aptitude tests, as are other universities in this country now. But I just I would emphasise that none of the judgments about who to admit are made on a kind of mechanical basis. It's all made on looking at the sum total of a student's qualifications. But I'm saying, would it be wrong to think about returning to the old system where you have your own broad-ranging

Alison Richard23:27

Yes, but like an older.

Presenter23:37

uh entrance exam that that at the same time might have an element of this potential testing thing. And then you really could sort out the creme de la creme because let's face it, that's what you're after. Or is that a politically incorrect suggestion? I don't know about whether it's politically incorrect or not. I just think that uh

Alison Richard23:50

It's too

Presenter23:56

If talent could be rank ordered readily from one to thirteen thousand and you draw a line at three thousand, it would all be easy, but it can't be, it hasn't been, it's not this is this is a difficult issue to which there is no simple correct answer. So you constantly work at it and think about it. But a lot of people think that it's been uh heightened, you know, the problems that it sets because A levels have become too easy. That's what people say, isn't it?

Alison Richard24:13

Of course, but a lot of

Presenter24:22

Yes, and I don't know whether that is the case. I read what I read, that more and more students are getting better and better A-level results, and there are two explanations. Absolutely. I don't know which of those explanations is correct. In a sense, it's immaterial. The problem is the problem. You know, I look forward rather than trying to second-guess what's going on with A-levels. Next piece of music, number six.

Presenter24:43

Ah, the Goldberg variations for me. Sunday morning on the Upper West Side in New York, eating scrambled eggs and bagels and cream cheese and lox, 1973. If Miles Davis made me feel that I was somehow suddenly sophisticated and cool, well, doing this was my I'd never eaten I'd never seen a bagel before and I'd never heard of lox and and I'd never heard this music. And I loved the music. It was crisp. It was Sunday morning, wonderful music. I think that that was when I first really actually started to feel like a grown-up.

Presenter26:22

The aria from Bach's Goldberg variations played by Glen Gould.

Presenter26:26

Your most urgent problem as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and it's true of other leading universities as well, you said is one of funding. You're underfunded by twenty four million pounds per annum.

Presenter26:39

I mean, that it sounds huge. How serious is it? Does it threaten Cambridge's position uh in the front rank of the world's universities?

Presenter26:46

I think the real question is what ought the expense base to be to support the excellence and the scale of one of the finest universities in the world. And my own strongly held belief is that our expense base needs to be higher because we need to be able to provide adequate bursaries for students, but we also need to be able to reach at the high end because we are competing globally to recruit and keep the finest minds at Cambridge. But maybe then universities shouldn't do everything and maybe the recent closures we've seen in Exeter of a couple of departments, chemistry and music, is the way we should go. Places should become more specialised and then we begin to be able to afford it. I think it is no bad thing for universities to be making choices and very clear

Alison Richard27:07

But we only have a

Presenter27:35

Headed choices about what they do. But let me just ask you: I mean, is there a department that Cambridge would volunteer to close?

Presenter27:42

Why would one volunt Well, in order to have more money to put into other departments. We are constantly making choices about where we are. focusing our investments and our energies. And that's the problem, isn't it? No university would ever want to close a department unless it were really pressed to do so. But that may be what has to happen, greater specialization.

Speaker 427:54

Mm-hmm.

Alison Richard27:54

Yeah.

Speaker 427:54

Uh

Alison Richard27:54

That's the problem.

Presenter28:04

I think that greater specialization is coming at us. The University of Cambridge is a community that spans from the arts and humanities into the the science and technology, and that is part of what makes us a great university.

Presenter28:20

We will make choices and we will, in a disciplined way, within that.

Presenter28:25

But I not with a view to simply running profit centers. That's a different conception of this enterprise.

Presenter28:33

Number seven.

Presenter28:35

Going right along with having been co-opted to sing fourth in the school choir for want of any fourths, they needed a bassoonist in the school orchestra. And I brought to the task about as much, i.e., very little, raw talent as I did to the question of singing. But again, I brought great enthusiasm to the task. When I was provost at Yale, we had annual Christmas parties, and I was speaking to the Dean of the School of Music and said, Were there bassoonists in the school? And he said, Yes, would you like a bassoon quartet for your Christmas party? And they played wonderfully, and everybody loved it. They, it turned out, really thought the food was pretty good and the drink wasn't bad either. So the next year I was asked, would I have a bassoon sextet? And by the time we left, I had a bassoon octet playing every year and the maestro. These folk songs by Vaughan Williams are wonderful music, and the bassoon's voice is a wonderful voice.

Alison Richard29:22

Playing every year.

Presenter30:30

That was Spurn Point one of Vaughan Williams's studies in English folk song, with Laurence Perkins playing the bassoon, accompanied by the new London Orchestra, conducted by Ronald Corp.

Presenter30:40

And then, Alison Richard, there's the job of Vice-Chancellor itself, which is huge. I remember asking your predecessor whether he was an academic leader, an administrator, a fundraiser or a politician, and he said yes. But your problem is, surely, that you still don't quite have the kind of executive power that you really need to run the place. I mean, there's a very archaic system there, isn't there, with a council, a senate, and then a three thousand strong parliament. How do you cut through all this to do the job? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, slow down here. At any university, it's sort of worth its salt. You're recruiting your academic staff because they have the finest minds in the world and they are committed to scholarship science.

Alison Richard31:09

Yeah.

Speaker 431:09

Do the

Alison Richard31:09

Yeah.

Alison Richard31:12

It's really dying here.

Presenter31:23

Teaching and education. What they don't know about running a big business has a turnover of $450 million a year.

Alison Richard31:26

But they don't know about running a b

Presenter31:30

Correct. Isn't that a little problem? But since you are not recruiting these people primarily as team players and institutional managers and leaders, if you will, it is nothing short of miraculous that as many of them are highly institutional and have a real sense of being part of a larger whole. So that's great. And it is also the case that this community of scholars, because precisely because these are incredibly talented, able people, they tend to have very strong views about things. And so I would say the day that you think that you can tell

Alison Richard31:31

Isn't that your problem?

Presenter32:01

very bright, able people who are recruited to be just that, what to do, is the day that you should kind of walk out of your office. So it's seven years. It's a seven year appointment. You've got six years to go. Are you going to last the course?

Alison Richard32:11

Do you see

Presenter32:14

Am I going to last that? Well, I hope so. I'm in I'm enjoying myself enormously. Life's too short not to, you know, not just last the course, but relish every moment of the way. What about you? Because you'll be sixty-two by the time your term at Cambridge is up. Do you think you'll get back one day to those magical Malagasy forests and your Leemas? I don't not go to Madagascar still, I still don't know. Not very often, I bet. No, not very often. Oh, I who knows? Who knows? If my husband was sitting at this table, he would tell you whatever she says to you, don't believe her, because she doesn't follow her plans. I think it's probably better to not have plans at this point. I'll figure out what on earth I'm going to do when I get older, losing my hair many years. But we're not having the Beatles. What is the last one? The last one is once in Royal David City. It's the King's College Choir.

Alison Richard32:36

Lehmann.

Alison Richard32:39

Not very often either.

Alison Richard33:00

Yeah.

Presenter33:10

It's the music with our girls and my husband that we decorate the Christmas tree by. And before I get too lyrical, it's mainly sort of arguing about which ornaments should go where. But what better arguments to have in front of a fire with Once in a Wild David City? This evokes all of that.

Presenter34:17

Once in Royal David City, performed by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by Sir David Wilcox and Philip Ledger.

Presenter34:24

If you could only take one of those eight records, Alison, which one would you take? The trio from De Resmen Cavalier. The opera. Absolutely. That that would sustain you more than any other, would it? I think so. I think so. What about your book? We give you, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter34:43

Right now, the book that I would take are the Journals of Captain Cook. Have you ever read The Journals of Captain Cook? It's a story of extraordinary courage and fortitude.

Speaker 434:47

No.

Alison Richard34:47

Yeah.

Presenter34:53

Who knows what would be a good book to take. But I just thought it's long enough and it would at least give one to say, Well, this may be bad, but it would probably be worse to be seasick pitching on a boat with three hundred people about to mutiny if they don't get scurvy before they mutiny.

Alison Richard35:08

You know, the

Presenter35:10

I don't know.

Alison Richard35:10

Good luck in that.

Presenter35:11

And finally your luxury.

Presenter35:13

This comes from the experience of spending months, if not years, of my life living in the middle of a forest, in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity and no running water. What in Madagascar, when I'm out there in the field for months on end, what is the best, best thing? And I tell you, it is having a solar shower. Having hot water pouring over you at the end of a day restores the body and the mind and the soul. Brilliant. Alison Richard, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 235:52

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