Rory Stewart

Presenter0:00

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.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand eight.

Presenter0:26

My castaway this week is the traveller, author, and one-time diplomat Rory Stewart. He's been nicknamed Lawrence of Belgravia.

Presenter0:34

Witty, but only half accurate. Eton, Oxford, and the Foreign Office all point to a terribly privileged old school way of doing things. In reality, his astonishing life has been as far from convention as is possible.

Presenter0:47

Running wild in the jungles of Malaysia as a boy, walking alone across Afghanistan in winter after the fall of the Taliban, without so much as a map.

Presenter0:56

And besieged by shelling in the Iraqi province, he was supposed to be in charge of.

Presenter1:01

Snapshots of an existence filled with adventure, danger, high farce, hope, and tragedy. Sir Rory, you were just twenty nine when you were charged with running this province in post war Iraq.

Presenter1:12

On that day in May two thousand four when your compound began to be shelled by a man you'd had lunch with only the week before, did you think that maybe your diplomatic skills had failed you?

Rory Stewart1:22

It was a very worrying situation because I had then about twenty civilian staff in the building. The Italian quick reaction force, which was a military force, was supposed to be twenty minutes away, and in reality took nearly seven and a half hours to reach us, during which time about a hundred mortars and rocket propelled grenades were falling into the compound. The glass would smash in. People would be dragged in from outside with blood all over them. Of course underlying all of this was the irony, as you say, that the man who was leading the attack was a man who was a friend of mine and who I'd had lunch with just previously.

Presenter1:57

A terrifying situation. How did you manage, as the man in charge, to at least try to keep everybody calm?

Rory Stewart2:04

There were a couple of things that I did which in retrospect seem a little bit farcical. One of them was to hand out some oat cakes which I had been saving up in my desk drawer the other was to put on some music.

Rory Stewart2:16

and then to spend quite a lot of time that night and then over the next two nights, because the siege went on for three days, phoning Baghdad and trying to call in air support and convince people that we were really in danger.

Presenter2:28

And during this there was the threat constantly of all communication shutting down. You were losing your links incrementally to the outside world.

Rory Stewart2:35

Absolutely. The mortars were taking out our satellite connections. In the end, all that was left was a hand held satellite telephone. In order to operate one of those, you need to stand outside to get line of sight to the sky. And of course, when you've got mortars coming in, you're not very keen to stand outside. So every half an hour I had to go out with my helmet on and stand there, hoping that I could call Baghdad and argue strongly against the Italian General, who kept saying that everything was under control.

Presenter3:02

Um you have described your life as predominantly an adventure. Where does that spirit of adventure come from?

Rory Stewart3:09

A lot of it, I think, comes from my father. When I was young, living in London, he would wake up at six o'clock every morning and spend the first three hours of every day with me. He'd lay out Napoleonic battles with toy soldiers on the floor of our nursery. He'd take me to Hyde Park and give me fencing lessons. And he had led a very adventurous life himself. He's much older than me. He's fifty years older than me. He'd fought in the war. He'd landed on the D-Day beaches. He'd been the British representative in Vietnam during the Vietnam War being bombed by the United States. So he was very much an inspiration to me in a lot of this.

Presenter3:46

Tell me about your first piece of music, then.

Rory Stewart3:48

The first piece of music for me sums up everything that I love about Scotland and home. It's sung by a friend of mine called Sophie Ramsey and it relates to me also because I first heard it when I was very young from a man called Colonel David Rose who's now 96 and who I saw three days ago at home in Creeff and he used to hear it from his father who was another 40 years older than him. His father had it as his party piece when he was serving in the British Black Watch in India in the 1870s. So hearing this connects me back over 140 years, not just of Scotland but of Scots abroad.

Speaker 14:28

Laird a cockpit, he's prude and he's great, His mind's taken up with the things o' the state. He wanted a wife, his brow who's de keep, But favour with wooing was fascist to seek.

Speaker 14:45

By the dike-side a lady did dwell, At his table he did thought she looked well, Mahlish is a doctor of claver sally.

Presenter4:58

Sophie Ramsey and the Lairdocock Pen. As you were saying, it reminds you of Scotland. I mean, you don't sound terribly Scottish, but you consider Scotland to be home.

Rory Stewart5:06

Well, I was born in born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia, but I I'm obviously not Chinese or Malaysian, so I think I'm Scottish.

Presenter5:13

And when you go home, home is in Creeff in Perthshire.

Rory Stewart5:16

Holmes and Creeff and I've been

Rory Stewart5:20

Working there on the land for some time I've planted nearly six thousand trees at home, and that's one of the things that attaches me most strongly to my home is the sense of watching these trees grow.

Presenter5:30

Right, so you you you, as you say, were born in Hong Kong. You went to live in Malaysia when you were six. What sort of lifestyle was that?

Rory Stewart5:37

It was a a wonderful idyllic time for me. I was, I think, a a very wild child.

Rory Stewart5:43

The best thing about it was.

Rory Stewart5:46

for me the holidays and we would go and spend time in the Borneo jungle, and this continued throughout the time that I was at prep school in England.

Rory Stewart5:55

The contrast between a rainy Oxfordshire prep school and being in a Borneo longhouse, with people who had been head hunters a generation before, and seeing the astonishing height of these jungle trees, and the animals seeing a tiger floating down stream, bears, monkeys

Rory Stewart6:15

and the freedom of walking barefoot and imagining, I suspect, that I was Tarzan.

Presenter6:20

And so how on earth did you manage to fit in when you went to the rainy Oxfordshire countryside and had to be at prep school with a a uniform and some arm down hair and a a school satchel?

Rory Stewart6:30

I think I was pretty bizarre because I had a ridiculous pudding bowl haircut, and in my spare time I wore batik shirts which I'd brought out from Malaysia.

Rory Stewart6:41

It's a real tribute to the school that people didn't make me feel quite as odd as I must have looked. In fact, it wasn't really until I got to secondary school that I began to have to really behave and conform.

Presenter6:52

More of that in a moment. For now tell me about your second piece of music.

Rory Stewart6:56

Well, the second piece of music is something I associate very strongly with my father, because when he wasn't laying out Napoleonic battlefields or fencing with me, he was singing me songs from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Rory Stewart7:07

But secondly, this is also a song which is a joke about the modern age. It's about jargon and management jargon and consultancy. Gilburn and Sullivan in this case are really acting like David Brent in the office. They're making a joke which means a lot to me because I see it again and again when I work with government about people who spout jargon and special new theories at you rather than getting on with their job.

Rory Stewart7:45

I am the very modern I'm a modern major general, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral. I know the kings of England and I quote the fight historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

Rory Stewart7:55

I'm very well acquainted to win matters mathematical. I understand equations both are simple and quadratical. About binomial theorem, I am teeming with a lot of news.

Rory Stewart8:05

With many tearful facts about the square on the hypotenuse

Rory Stewart8:10

Planet Ships about the spirit of all important planets

Rory Stewart8:16

I am very good at integral and differential calculus. I know the scientific names of beings and immalculus. In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral. I am the very model of a modern major general.

Speaker 28:22

Animal and mineral, I am the

Presenter8:32

Eric Roberts singing I am the very model of a modern major general from Pirates of Penzance with the Doilycart Opera conducted by John Price Jones. So you were thirteen, then, Rory, when you went to Eton. How was that?

Rory Stewart8:45

That was a very strange experience, because suddenly I arrived at a school where people really did care how you dressed, and the older boys were very, very cool.

Rory Stewart8:55

I think it gave me a very strong sense, which I had never had before, of what it meant to be cool, and particularly what it meant to be cool in a particularly narrow kind of English society.

Rory Stewart9:06

I think I was pretty miserable for the first few months at school. I certainly threw my whole wardrobe away in about the first two weeks and and repurchased some very eccentric clothes. At that time, because the school was acting in a time bubble, we thought it was cool still to wear drainpipe jeans and winkle pickers. I mean this is nineteen eighty six when everyone else had stopped wearing them about ten years earlier.

Presenter9:27

And you were a well connected schoolboy, I understand. Is it true that you you tutored the princes at Highgrove during the summer holidays?

Rory Stewart9:34

Um, I I did that in my gap year when I was eighteen, yeah.

Presenter9:38

Right. And so even though you felt like an outsider, there were very much these solid connections of being part of the upper strata of society.

Rory Stewart9:46

Um I don't I don't think so in my case. We're really a sort of middle class Scottish family and so my parents at that stage were living in Hong Kong, and when everyone else went on their holidays to London and went to trendy bars in Chelsea, I was getting on an aeroplane and travelling with my father in north west China and going and living in tents. So I never really participated in Smart London life.

Presenter10:09

So after Eason, you spent, was it a year in the army, the Black Watch?

Presenter10:14

Did you think that the army life might be for you permanently?

Rory Stewart10:17

At the time, definitely, I joined the army thinking that that would be my career for life. I thought it would be fun and glamorous and

Presenter10:25

Was it either of those things?

Rory Stewart10:26

It was probably less fun and less glamorous than I imagined as a schoolboy.

Presenter10:30

Right. And so you went to Oxford?

Rory Stewart10:33

I then went to Oxford, where I studied history and then philosophy, and then instead of returning into the army, the Foreign Office tempted me out of the Army. But the Army experience was very important to me because it gave me an opportunity which has been very useful in my later life to at least have an understanding of the strange sense in which the British Army has always been so international. I remember again as a schoolboy going up to the Pakistani Afghan border and seeing all the crests of the Highland regiments on the Khyber Pass.

Rory Stewart11:05

and thinking what it must have been like in eighteen forty one for a Highland villager to trek all the way from

Rory Stewart11:14

somewhere in the wilds of Perthshire, right out to the Khyber Pass, and what they would have made of the society that they saw amongst Pathan tribesmen in the North West Frontier. And that's something that means a lot to me also, because that internationalism is of course what's moulded Scotland.

Presenter11:31

Tell me about your next piece of music then.

Rory Stewart11:33

Well the next piece of music connects very closely to that, because it's a Black Watch pipe tune. It's the first tune I learnt to play myself when I learnt the pipes, so it means a lot to me there, but also a tune that I marched to when I was in the army. And it's a tune called The Barren Rocks of Aden. So it's not just a a pipe tune, it's a pipe tune about the British Army going abroad, and in this case a Scottish regiment going to the Middle East.

Presenter12:25

The Barren Rocks of Aden performed by the regimental band of the Black Watch Your Regiment, Rory Stewart. You went on then to the Foreign Office. You were well travelled, as we know, and you had a facility with languages, so probably quite an obvious thing to do. Did you enjoy it?

Rory Stewart12:42

I loved my first posting, but it was a very strange place. I was posted to Indonesia, and Indonesia then was the great success story of Asia. And suddenly this whole decadent, rapidly growing, prosperous society hit a brick wall in August of that year with a sudden economic crisis. Ninety per cent of the companies on stock exchange bankrupt overnight, the currency in free fall. I found myself looking at huge riots taking place throughout the city, the north of the city being burnt, a lot of the Chinese population being killed. Found myself standing in rioting crowds with the police opening fire on me and the students who were around me.

Rory Stewart13:23

And finally, the toppling of Suhato himself after thirty-five years, he went. So it was a real.

Rory Stewart13:31

Lesson in the uncertainty of the world, because nobody I worked with had actually predicted any of this.

Presenter13:37

So you decided Rory to take a sabbatical from the Foreign Office and walk six thousand miles across Asia alone. Why?

Rory Stewart13:45

I'm very, very bad at answering that question and

Rory Stewart13:50

I in the end have to say that I had a lot of romantic ideas about what walking on foot across Asia would mean.

Rory Stewart13:57

I had this image of a line of footprints stretching six thousand miles behind me.

Rory Stewart14:03

In the end what really mattered about the journey was not all these ideas about changing myself, it was the privilege of being able to meet people, because by walking only twenty, twenty five miles a day you're forced to stop in very random villages and stay the night with people. I stayed in over five hundred village houses on the walk, so I had an opportunity to sit in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, India and Nepal, night after night, hearing people talk about their lives, their religion.

Rory Stewart14:33

their views of the government, and questioning me.

Presenter14:36

And you were relying upon the unplanned hospitality of people in the countries and the countryside that you walked through?

Presenter14:43

What did you do? I mean, did you simply knock on doors?

Rory Stewart14:46

Yes, I knock on a door and I greet people very formally and very politely. So

Rory Stewart14:54

In the case of an Afghan village you would have to greet the headman and you'd have to say, Asalam alaykum, chatorostid, hubastid, baherastid, hanahariatas, jorastid, jorbashi, mananabashi, zindabashi, which is to say, Peace be with you. How is your health? How is your home? How is your family? Good health to you, long life to you, may you not be tired.

Rory Stewart15:15

And to get that kind of dialogue going is quite important. And then the second problem, of course, for me was working out how I could thank people who were often very poor for taking me in, so I often had to hide money behind a cushion in their house, because if I actually gave the money openly to them, they'd refuse it and be very offended. The sense that you have there, if you've seen a completely different world, lived with completely different people, is is unparalleled.

Presenter15:40

So this desert island that I'm going to put you onto is not going to be I mean, it's not a even a case of managing to survive. You're going to be um bored with how much you have to do. You're going to find it just another day out of the office.

Rory Stewart15:52

I I can see it as a dream. I think it's going to be one of the great pleasures of my life, this desert island.

Presenter15:58

So Rory, tell me about your next piece of music then.

Rory Stewart16:01

This was

Rory Stewart16:03

a piece of uh dub music which was very popular in Jakarta in the nightclub scene in the n late nineteen ninety seven, just before everything went wrong. So it represented for me that surreal transition from

Rory Stewart16:18

all the sort of hedonism of Indonesia in late nineteen ninety seven, just before the emergence of the riots, the chaos, the near civil war, the fights and the massacres that began to take place throughout the country.

Rory Stewart16:31

Yeah.

Presenter16:58

The dub specialists and gunman mix. So it was crucial at the time that you arrived in Afghanistan. What was happening in the country at that time?

Rory Stewart17:07

I arrived in Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban, and I'd been walking in western Nepal and it was about the eighteenth of September two thousand one and I was arrested and accused of being an Osama bin Laden activist, which was the first I really knew about September the eleventh because I hadn't heard that it had happened. It was a very interesting time to cross the country because there had been twenty five years of war, the Taliban government had fallen and the new government hadn't really started and I was walking through chains of villages which were incredibly self-reliant.

Rory Stewart17:39

People were so confident, it seemed to me, that Afghanistan was the greatest country in the world, and their village was the greatest place in the world, and that they were doing me a favour by taking me in, and that I had nothing to offer them.

Rory Stewart17:50

And that was a very um exciting experience.

Presenter17:53

I'm wondering how you looked. What were you wearing?

Rory Stewart17:57

I dress when I walking in local clothes, which in the case of Afghanistan was shaloa kameez and a floppy hat, a chitrali cap, and I covered my backpack, I was carrying a backpack, with a a rice sack that looked like I was carrying a rice sack on my back, so that from a distance if people saw me, they wouldn't immediately think this is somebody.

Presenter18:18

I mean

Rory Stewart18:18

I mean

Presenter18:19

Your clothes today, they're not dandish, but you wouldn't be out of place walking down Savile Row. I mean, you're incredibly smart in what looks to me to be a bespoke suit and a wonderful

Presenter18:28

A flamboyant shirt and your silver cufflings. Out which outfit do you feel most at home in?

Rory Stewart18:33

I think that you owe it to any society you're in to try to um fit in. And I think people forget in the developing world that these are often very polite, well-mannered societies where people care about dress and cleanliness. So I sometimes have uh run-ins with some of the people who work for me in Kabul who think that because they're in Afghanistan and because they're in a war zone it's all right to just go around in T shirts and jeans.

Presenter19:01

You say that you didn't even have an awareness that September eleventh had happened. What were communications like with with home, indeed with your mother and father? How often were you speaking to them on your travels?

Rory Stewart19:11

Well, during the journey across Afghanistan, which was from Herat to Kabul, I think was forty days and forty nights of journey, there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul and no telephone lines, and I of course don't carry a a telephone or any modern communications. So

Rory Stewart19:27

There was no way during that forty day period to communicate with anybody.

Presenter19:30

Interestingly, that you say, I, of course, don't carry any form of modern communication. I mean, that is clearly a very conscious choice. Why don't you?

Rory Stewart19:38

Oh well, maybe I was overstating it. I don't carry because firstly, the point of the journey is for me to get away, and secondly, because I was worried that people would mistake me for a spy. Uh for that reason I also didn't carry maps or any fancy navigational equipment. I thought it was important for me to travel as simply as possible with as little as possible so people would understand that I was as I presented myself.

Rory Stewart20:06

A single man traveling alone.

Presenter20:08

I asked you a few minutes ago why you did it, and you were saying that that is a very understandably a complicated and almost impossible question to answer. At the end of your journey, did you have much of a sense

Presenter20:20

A concrete sense of how you had been changed by it.

Rory Stewart20:24

I think it was very important for me. I think I was a pretty obnoxious person who was pretty full of himself, and to spend twenty, twenty one months alone, travelling through rural Asia and spend those five hundred nights in village houses gave me a sense of perspective.

Rory Stewart20:45

I suppose it turned round my vision of what it meant to live a meaningful life, turned it away from thinking that it was all about getting things done and grand achievements and recognition, to understanding that

Rory Stewart20:59

People in very remote areas where they've never been more than three hours walk from their village in their lives and where they have no concept of the outside world still live.

Rory Stewart21:08

Very fulfilling and serious and meaningful lives.

Presenter21:11

Are you someone who feels the weight of your privilege?

Rory Stewart21:15

Yes, certainly I feel that the only

Rory Stewart21:18

Thing to be done is to

Rory Stewart21:21

Serve and to work and to justify it.

Rory Stewart21:24

Uh you can't justify it, actually. That's the wrong word. But

Rory Stewart21:28

to use it and to pay back all the luck and all the fortune I've been given by working hard and

Rory Stewart21:36

and trying to serve my country.

Presenter21:40

Let's take a break for some music, what's your next disc?

Rory Stewart21:43

The Next Disc is a poem which was important to me because as I was walking one of the things I did was to memorize poetry and I actually memorized uh this poem by T. S. Eliot called The Four Quartets and one section of it I'd read and memorized at school and that's the section that we're about to hear and it's about

Rory Stewart22:04

beginnings and ends, but it's also T. S. Eliot who was an American, but also an Anglican Christian, trying to relate to questions of how one might find meaning in time and how history and identity, in other words, things which are specific to our culture, can shape the choices we make and can in fact give a shape or a meaning to our life.

Speaker 122:08

Okay.

Speaker 222:31

We are born with the dead.

Speaker 222:34

See, they return and bring us with them.

Speaker 222:37

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration.

Speaker 222:44

A people without history is not redeemed from time.

Speaker 222:48

For history is a pattern of timeless moments.

Speaker 222:52

So, while the light fails on a winter's afternoon, In a secluded chapel history is now and England.

Presenter23:02

TED HUGE was reading Little Gidding from TS Eliot's Four Quartets. So it was in the autumn of two thousand three that you flew to Jordan. You took a taxi to Baghdad. What did you feel that you could offer to the reconstruction effort?

Rory Stewart23:16

I went to Iraq because having served in the Balkans and in Indonesia and Afghanistan, I'd convinced myself that interventions could be helpful.

Rory Stewart23:29

That it would be possible to leave Iraq.

Rory Stewart23:33

more prosperous, stable, and humane than it had been under Saddam.

Rory Stewart23:38

So I arrived in Iraq thinking that

Rory Stewart23:42

We could have a good result, and it was just a question of working hard, getting our tactics right, and we would succeed.

Presenter23:51

So you were twenty nine and you were appointed, as I've mentioned, the deputy, then the acting governor of this Iraqi province, and you had these ideals which were born of experience and not just of ideology. Um what did you manage to achieve?

Rory Stewart24:07

We achieved very little. The invasion was a mistake and a failure, and I was completely wrong to believe what I believed, because I realized on the ground and we were working hard, we restored two hundred and forty out of four hundred schools in the province, all the hospitals and clinics, created large job schemes, held elections, dealt with minor outbreaks of civil war. But ultimately none of it really mattered because the Iraqi people in the end did not want us. The Shia population in the south, by and large, were not prepared to actively support us and a powerful effective minority wanted to kill us.

Presenter24:51

Rory, it is quite something to hear somebody of your experience and with your passion say that we did the wrong thing. It's all very well to hear pundits sitting in comfy, air-conditioned studios, whether it be in Washington or London, having that opinion. It's very unusual to hear somebody who actually went there, rolled up their sleeves and put their life in danger, to say we were wrong, to even turn up.

Rory Stewart25:14

It's been a strange experience for me because most of my colleagues disagree with me. Most of the people I work with still tend to think, well the problem is we didn't quite do it right. My belief, which is that actually the thing was misconceived and the mission was impossible, is not something that most of the people I worked with want to agree with. They want to say the mission was fine, it was just a problem with how we did it rather than that we did it.

Presenter25:42

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Rory Stewart25:45

The next piece of music is a piece of music that I played when we were under siege in Iraq to try to cheer people up. It's a song which my father used to sing with his brother. And for me this is very moving because they both joined the same regiment in the army, having shared a room at prep school, shared a room at secondary school, gone to the same college in Oxford, joined the same regiment in the army, and then my uncle was killed fighting with the Blackwatch by the Germans, whom he loved so much and whose songs he used to sing.

Speaker 126:13

Yeah.

Speaker 226:22

I'd make a hand that was before.

Speaker 226:27

Yeah.

Presenter26:27

No.

Speaker 226:28

On a side f

Speaker 226:31

I'm sorry.

Presenter26:31

I am Tong Pong.

Presenter26:34

Uh

Presenter26:35

Since

Speaker 226:36

Yeah.

Rory Stewart26:36

Yeah.

Presenter26:37

Uh Uh

Presenter26:38

Yeah.

Speaker 226:38

Spit the fish

Presenter26:47

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 226:48

But

Speaker 226:55

I fishermen

Speaker 226:58

Uh the boss.

Presenter26:59

Yeah. Oh, what's

Speaker 226:59

Uh

Presenter27:00

Sas with hunt and blood, and fisich das vischline wait, so land them for sarn, so that the nichter brisht, so thanked and evolved.

Rory Stewart27:12

Ready for the signal

Presenter27:16

So f

Presenter27:18

Pretty far.

Presenter27:19

Pizza sinana.

Speaker 227:20

I

Presenter27:22

Schubert's The Trout, sung by Dietrich Fischer Descale with Gerald Moore on piano. A little more then on Iraq, Rory, as I say you have uh written a very, very well regarded book that is untypically honest of your time in Iraq and highly critical of the work that was done there, four hundred and fifty billion dollars and many thousands of lives later.

Presenter27:45

Looking at things, what do you think?

Presenter27:47

We, Britain and America, could have, should have done differently.

Rory Stewart27:52

I think we should never have invaded Iraq, and I think once we had realized our mistake we should have got out much sooner.

Rory Stewart28:00

In a sense, I think we've tended to criticise Bush and Blair for the wrong thing. We've criticised them for going in. Well, they were wrong to do so, but I think it's difficult to predict the future. But what we should criticise them for is that they failed to recognise, failed to acknowledge that it wasn't working, and failed to get out once that was clear.

Presenter28:23

And so you left, and for the last two years you've been living in Kabul. What took you there?

Rory Stewart28:30

I came to Afghanistan to set up a charity. When I turned up in Afghanistan at the end of two thousand five and found that the Afghan government was planning to demolish a section of the historic city of Kabul and that the traditional crafts of Afghanistan, particularly the woodwork and the ceramics, were dying out, I thought I could bring those two things together and to create in the centre of Kabul an area which would be good for the community, but also an area that was beautiful, which involved restoring historic buildings and creating a school to train traditional craftsmen and pass on the skills of what are now very old men to a younger generation.

Presenter29:11

Do you have any idea what they make of you?

Rory Stewart29:14

That's a difficult question.

Rory Stewart29:17

I think they like the fact that this is a project which is quite practical. What they make of my motivations, I don't think they make very much of it, and they probably don't think very much about that.

Presenter29:28

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Rory Stewart29:31

This is

Rory Stewart29:33

A piece of music in the Afghan tradition.

Rory Stewart29:36

It's played on an instrument called rhubab, which is a very ancient Afghan instrument, and it's associated in fact with Rumi, who's the great Afghan poet of the twelfth century, whose anniversary was last year. He was born eight hundred years ago.

Presenter30:22

Uzdad Rahim Kushnawaz and Gahad Mohammed with Jami Narinjee. I wonder if real life seems well, the real life for most people, the London life, the city life.

Presenter30:33

Seems very boring for you when you come back.

Rory Stewart30:36

No, it doesn't seem boring, it seems puzzling.

Rory Stewart30:39

I'm still trying to adjust to it and understand it fully, which is why I want to come home. I want to come home to Scotland, I want to spend some time travelling around Britain, I want to understand more about Britain, because the real question is what happens to societies like Britain in the future? Where do we go? How do we find meaning?

Rory Stewart31:02

In some ways I'm quite relaxed about Afghanistan. I think that Afghans are very entrepreneurial, very resilient.

Rory Stewart31:08

and development for them.

Rory Stewart31:11

Is a relatively concrete and tangible process, but the question of

Rory Stewart31:15

How we make sense of the kind of lives we're now living in Britain is something that I think is much more difficult and much more elusive and is what I really would like to dedicate myself to.

Presenter31:26

You've spoken very powerfully, as I have talked to you, about this father to son tradition of passing on skills and knowledge, and clearly in your own relationship with your father it's something that runs very deep through your life and through your soul. Do do you see yourself building a family as somebody who's spent thousands of miles and many hundreds of hours alone in life?

Rory Stewart31:48

I'd like to, but I've never really worked out how to do that. I haven't had a proper relationship for over seven years now.

Rory Stewart31:57

So I think perhaps coming back to Britain might help me to try to normalize myself.

Presenter32:02

So that would be part of your future, you hope?

Rory Stewart32:05

I'd hope so. I I'd hope, if I'm planting all these trees in Scotland, particularly the oaks, that there's someone around to see them actually when they're mature.

Presenter32:15

Tell me about your final piece of music, then.

Rory Stewart32:18

Well this is a a piece of nostalgia. This is a piece of music from a movie by Werner Herzog called Grizzlyman, which is about a man called Timothy Treadwell who set off to northern Alaska to go and live with the Grizzly Bears and filmed himself for ten years living in the Alaskan wilderness, communing with the Grizzly Bears until eventually they ate him and his girlfriend.

Speaker 132:40

To a tale of the old days.

Speaker 132:44

When the country was wild all around

Rory Stewart32:47

Yeah.

Rory Stewart32:49

Sit out under the stars of the Milky Way

Rory Stewart32:54

Listen while the kyoles howl

Rory Stewart32:59

There you go. Woo, you

Speaker 133:00

Ooh yep.

Presenter33:08

DON EDWARDS AND COYOTE. So as we've established, Rory, this desert island will be a complete breeze for you, given what you've gone through. But I am going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you're allowed to take one other book. What will your book be?

Rory Stewart33:20

I'd like to take a book that was very important to me when I was walking, which is the Bhagavad Gita, which is the great Hindu religious text.

Presenter33:28

And a luxury too.

Rory Stewart33:31

As a luxury I'd like to take a istalafi bowl, which is a piece of blue ceramics made by the Potters an hour north of Kabul on this very beautiful high ridge line of the Hindu Kush with the snow mountains behind. It would be a blue turquoise bowl, and it represents a four hundred year old unbroken tradition, and I think there on the island, surrounded by sand and with your palm tree waving, to hold a really beautiful ceramics bowl and to look at that Afghan design would be a great consolation.

Presenter34:03

And which one record would you save?

Rory Stewart34:07

I think if I had to choose one, I'd

Rory Stewart34:10

Probably take the Schubert.

Presenter34:13

Rory Stewart, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you very much.

Presenter34:24

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