Helen Macdonald

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Presenter0:46

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were castaway to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter1:25

My castaway this week is the writer and naturalist Helen MacDonald. She came to prominence as the author of the best-selling multi-award winning H is for Hawk, written about the year she lost her father and almost lost herself, training a goshawk called Mabel. Its blend of memoir biography and a history of falconry made it hard to classify. Some booksellers complained they didn't know where to shelve it, but give a handy insight into her unconventional approach to, well, lots of things. Her own story starts with what she calls a gothic naturalist childhood on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society and an enduring affinity with birds of prey. As a child, she even tried to sleep with her arms in the position of wings, and her first job after university was rearing falcons for sheikhs in the United Arab Emirates. She says, Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically, love for the glittering world of non-human life around us. Helen MacDonald, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Helen Macdonald2:30

Thank you. It's such a joy to be here.

Presenter2:32

So Helen, you say that nature writing has traditionally been pedagogical, written by people who like to explain things to their readers, but you don't do that. What's your approach and why do you think it works?

Helen Macdonald2:43

I love being in the company of someone who'll point at a flower and say, This is this flower, aren't you lucky to have me to explain this to you? But I don't know, I j I just kind of want to bring a little bit less coldness into it. My work is quite often, there's a lot of memoir tied up in it too. So you get an eye into the natural world and you get a little look into my heart as well.

Speaker 12:59

Yeah.

Presenter2:59

Hmm.

Presenter3:05

You're also prepared to come clean when you don't know something, aren't you? That's important.

Helen Macdonald3:10

Why can't the reader know that I didn't know too? Because I think a lot of people are a little bit intimidated by natural history and they think they need to know everything to go out there and experience the natural world in the right way. And that's just not true. You just need to be curious and pay attention. And I think a lot of my books are about pleading for that to be the way we go out there and see it.

Presenter3:29

You once said, Helen, that animals always wreck your assumptions. What did you mean by that?

Helen Macdonald3:34

One of the deepest things about what I try and do with my work is to talk about the way that when we encounter the natural world, when we encounter an animal, for example, we're always bringing to it an extraordinary amount of human meaning. What I try and do is just sort of say, look, this is what we bring to animals. And if you're really lucky, if you kind of keep those meanings in your head, you try and understand what those meanings are that we've given an animal, sometimes you can look past them and see the reality of the creature that's really there, these bizarrely alien, phenomenally peculiar and beautiful creatures. And I really, really treasure those moments when they happen. And that happened to me last with an albatross. I remember looking at this albatross in New Zealand and thinking about, you know, poetry and the sea, and this albatross looked right down its squid-cutting beak at me with these amazing, dark, Madonna-like eyes. And the entire world just was made new in that moment. You know, they can be almost religious, those moments. They're phenomenal.

Presenter4:30

Let's make a start then. Disc number one. What is it and why have you chosen it today?

Helen Macdonald4:34

This is an old American folk classic called Wayfaring Stranger and it's played by the musician Rhiannon Giddens and it's been covered by so many people. You know, Burl Ives did it, Emilou Harris did it, but this particular version, it just destroys me. Every time I hear it, it reduces me to tears.

Helen Macdonald4:57

Who we fail?

Speaker 34:58

Uh Parent stranger.

Speaker 35:01

Traveling through

Speaker 35:04

This world alone

Speaker 35:07

Yeah.

Helen Macdonald5:07

There is no sink distort or danger.

Helen Macdonald5:14

Not very long.

Presenter5:23

And the

Speaker 35:24

When the whole

Presenter5:25

Uh

Speaker 35:25

Uh

Presenter5:27

Wayfaring Stranger Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Teresi. Helen Macdonald, you describe yourself as a bird nerd, and it's a fascination that dates back to your childhood. It's still just as strong today. What is it about those animals that you find so captivating, do you think?

Helen Macdonald5:44

When I was small with birds, you know, I used to have this sort of radical empathy. I'd watch them through binoculars until I sort of forgot that I existed. I really wanted to be them, really. I mean, I sort of forgot that I was human in that moment. And also, I really liked the fact that I could identify them. There's a bit of the sort of train spotter, plane spotter in me. So it was the classification? The classification was really important. So I remember we had the sort of, you know, Collins book of British Birds, and I used to I used when I was tiny to sit on the loo and and learn all the birds.

Presenter6:06

The classification was really important.

Presenter6:15

There was a particularly magical encounter with a goshawk in Uzbekistan many years ago. What do you remember about that day?

Helen Macdonald6:22

That was the strangest experience. I was out there in a sort of forest by the Sudaria River and it was a very kind of weird morning in fall, in autumn. There was a lot of migrating birds moving through, and it was tamarisk bushes everywhere, so everything was kind of silvered and covered in foggy.

Helen Macdonald6:44

Mist, and I looked up and I was convinced that I saw a man standing in a tree. You know, and I did a double take and realized it wasn't a man, it was a goshawk. There's a sort of incredibly long tradition in myth and in many cultures of birds representing the souls of the dead, particularly hawks. And that moment of irresolution when I didn't know whether it was a person or a hawk really, really astonished me. And as I watched it, it was like a man putting on a coat. It opens its wings and flew away. And we saw it later, it flew right through the camp and tried to catch a jay right above my head. And I just remember thinking that it was like a coin falling through water, this silver and grey bird just tumbling through the leaves. And that, I think, planted a thing about goshawks that reappeared a little later in my life. Helen.

Presenter7:32

You achieved your childhood ambition of becoming a trained falconer at a very young age. You say falconry is one of the most enlightened relationships possible between a wild animal and a human being. I wonder what developing that skills taught you about yourself.

Helen Macdonald7:47

Oh, an awful lot. I was a bit clueless as a child. I sort of thought everyone was like me. I later discovered that people aren't all the same. But I think Fulcru taught me a lot about agency and about respecting other minds. So, you know, when you're sitting there with a hawk that is very distrustful of you, sitting on your hand, you have to really get inside their head and understand that the way they see the world is not the way you see the world and what they want is not what you want. And that, I think, was a very important lesson in really dealing with everyone. But I learnt it first from hawks, which is a bit backwards. Most people do it the other way around.

Presenter8:22

Helen, we've got to make time for the music. It's your second choice today. What have you gone for, and why?

Helen Macdonald8:27

I've gone for this wonderful bit of French Baroque, Prelude de la Nui, by Jean-Baptiste Lully, which I discovered a few years ago. This track is from a ballet he wrote in 1681 called The Triumph of Love, and it's the most grave and beautiful piece of music. And whenever I want to write, it's one of those songs that always puts me in the mood to start conjuring words.

Presenter9:42

Prelude Paula Nui, composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully and performed by the Capriccio Extravagante Orchestra.

Presenter9:49

Helen MacDonald, you were born in Surrey in nineteen seventy and you are a twin, but tragically your your brother died at birth. I know that you didn't find out about that until much later, but you do describe this sense of searching for a missing half when you were small. Yes, it was I mean, obviously

Helen Macdonald10:07

horrendously traumatic for my mum and dad and it was something that was very hard to talk about and I found out many many years later and you know my response was like oh of course

Helen Macdonald10:17

I spent my childhood vaguely feeling that half of me was gone. I think it really did was part of my the reason I got into being a naturalist. You know, I'd go out and look for creatures and I was always searching for something that wasn't quite, it was always just a little bit over the horizon, but I never knew it might turn up. But on the way, I discovered this sort of world of thriving, beautiful things.

Speaker 110:35

Uh

Presenter10:35

Yeah, I never

Presenter10:42

Your father was a photojournalist for the Daily Mirror. Tell me a little bit more about him. What kind of man was he?

Helen Macdonald10:49

Oh, he was great, you know. We talk about him with such love and fondness. My father, for example, wore a suit and tie perpetually. I mean, sometimes he'd take a tie off if he was doing the gardening. And, you know, we used to sort of gently tease him and say, you know, what are you doing? And he used to say, you know, you never know who you're going to meet, which is, of course, why he wore a suit and tie as a photojournalist. And I think one of his most famous pictures I think everyone has seen is the one of Prince Charles and Princess Diana kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after they got married. And I remember vividly that, you know, he stood in the same place. He got there really early and stood in the same place for an extraordinary number of hours to get that picture. And he didn't eat and he didn't pee. And, you know, he just, he was really rough when he got home. You know, mum was really worried about him. But he was like, I got the picture.

Presenter11:35

And he was the one that you got the collecting gene from, I think.

Helen Macdonald11:38

Yeah, he used to glory about this lovely word anorak. He used to say, you know, me and my daughter are both anoraks. And we used to go off and, you know, we'd go for walks when I was small and, you know, me and him and, you know, sometimes me and him and my brother or me and him and my mum and brother. And we'd sort of collect things and bring them back and identify them on the table, you know, go through all the field guides and look at leaves and stones. And it was this really lovely, lovely, lovely man.

Presenter12:01

Your mother Barbara was at that time a journalist on the local newspaper too. Tell me about her.

Helen Macdonald12:07

It was absolutely terrible, of course,'cause you want to kind of be cool and you want to get on with your own thing. And mum knew everyone, including all the teachers, so you know, I could never get it.

Helen Macdonald12:18

But, you know, it is great.

Presenter12:20

Both parents are journalists. Were were deadlines important? Would they be rushing off to cover stories and file copy and all that kind of thing?

Helen Macdonald12:27

The most comforting sound still for me is the sound of a distant typewriter. My brother and I'd be upstairs in bed and my mum would be working to deadline downstairs with the yellow copy paper and the yellow slips and she'd probably be smoking Benson and Hedges she smoked back then and it was this sort of weird aura of cigarette smoke and distant typewriter keys. Just yeah, instantly. I should really make a tape or something like that. I'd probably use it to fall asleep on. Like a white noise. Yeah, yeah, really lovely.

Presenter12:51

Like a white noise kind of

Presenter12:55

It's time for some more music, Helen. What's next?

Helen Macdonald12:58

Yeah, I was into birds, birds, nature, birds, nature birds, and then I hit teenage years and I got really into the 1960s. I mean, really seriously, obsessively into it. I used to sort of wear the clothes and flowery shirts and things. And there was a lot of eye makeup, a lot of straight hair. And I was bullied horrendously at school because of this. You know, I went straight from being bullied about being a nature nerd to bullied for being a 60s person. It's hysterical looking back on it. But I loved the music and I loved the optimism and sort of thrill of this era. And there's a particular track by a band that is very little known called The 23rd Turn Off. It's basically about someone realizing that no matter how hard they work and how hard they try, they're never going to be a genius. They're never going to be Michelangelo.

Speaker 313:43

I read the book such a wonderful book Which moved me so much that I undertook To live my life like remain in the book

Speaker 313:57

Becky

Speaker 113:57

I'm working on

Speaker 313:59

Uh I'm waking, I'm waking.

Speaker 114:00

My pleasures

Speaker 314:01

Twenty banana

Helen Macdonald14:03

Thank you.

Helen Macdonald14:05

Waking, I'm waking, I'm waking, I'm waking But only in sleep did I see it come true

Presenter14:12

Michelangelo by the 23rd turn off. Why wasn't that a hit, Alan McDonnell? That's one for the ages, isn't it? It's a mis

Helen Macdonald14:20

Mystery. It's a mystery. It's such a great song.

Presenter14:23

So Helen, when you were five, your parents bought a house in Camberley, and that was on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society. So the society is a religious movement that I think combines elements of Hinduism with Buddhism. But your your parents didn't move there for the belief system, did they?

Helen Macdonald14:38

No, no, they were both hard-bitten agnostic journalists. We didn't fit in.

Helen Macdonald14:43

Oh my god.

Presenter14:43

How did they end up there? Why?

Helen Macdonald14:43

Uh

Helen Macdonald14:45

The society had began selling off a few of the houses on this estate and my parents moved in and it was this you know really lovely environment very safe for for children it was all kind of it had fences all round it this is sort of 50 acres of gardens and forest you know I remember the first week we were there or the first day we were there and legend has it that someone wandered down the street to post a letter and wearing very little indeed and my mum and dad looked at each other and they're like, oh, this is not like Walton-on-Thames where we've moved from. But I think eccentricity is such a great thing. The people around were mainly elderly ladies who were theosophists and they had luminous pasts. There were people who had fled from Nazi Germany because theosophy was banned there. There were ex-concert pianists. There was another one who was in the SOE who famously sort of apparently she had cyanide pills in her cabinet just in case the Germans came back. I mean they really were marvellous and I you know they really did teach me as a child that I didn't really need to conform to the the script that society had given me.

Presenter15:45

So obviously that environment kick-started your love of nature. What were you looking for and how did that take shape when you were small?

Helen Macdonald15:54

I was just running riot, really. I climbed trees, I caught snakes, I brought snakes home, I got told to put the snakes out again. There was this extraordinarily lovely meadow where I could bury my face in the grass and look into the sort of tangle of stems and see insects the size of a punctuation mark crawling around. Then I could sort of, you know, lie on my back and look up at the sky and see these sort of oceanic clouds drifting over. And I think it was the first intimation that the world was not just a human place, it was a place that was shared with all these other minds. It was really eye-opening.

Presenter16:28

Helen, it's time for some more music. This is your fourth choice today. What is it and why are you taking it with you?

Helen Macdonald16:34

Well, this is another song from my teenage years, my 60s obsession years, and this one stayed with me. It's a live recording of Ocean by the Velvet Underground. It's such a raw and sexy and strange and elemental song, and there are many different versions of it, but this one I love in particular because it's got Mo Tucker, the drummer, doing these immense percussive waves, and Lou Reed's voice is just right on the edge here. It's just marvellous.

Speaker 317:06

Down by the shoe

Helen Macdonald17:12

Washing the eye

Helen Macdonald17:16

I go like

Helen Macdonald17:20

That has

Speaker 317:21

As you live down by the sea

Presenter17:29

The Velvet Underground and Ocean. Helen MacDonald, you've told us about childhood spent happily in meadows and fields. What about school? How did you get on when you were confined to the classroom? Were you a good student?

Helen Macdonald17:43

good when I did it, shall we say. I I never did my homework. I was in constant trouble right the way through school and universities for never never getting anything done. But it turns out there was a reason for that. It wasn't just that I was a terrible person, which I believed at the time.

Presenter17:54

Wasn't too

Presenter17:57

Yes, so you you as an adult were diagnosed with A D D?

Presenter18:02

How did it feel to get that diagnosis?

Helen Macdonald18:05

Well, I kind of thought that it might be the case for a long while. When I'm writing a book, it's really funny. I'm either in the place where I can't finish a sentence or I can't finish a, you know, I've got to do something else, I've got to make some toast, I've got to have a bath, I've got to clean this thing. Why am I in the kitchen with my toothbrush? What's happening? It's that sort of scenario. Or I'm in this hyper-focused state where I'll work for seven hours without even noticing time going past. And there seems to be no for me, no middle ground. And then I got this diagnosis and realizing that it's not anything other than just the way my brain is made.

Speaker 318:21

Yeah.

Presenter18:40

I think you were twelve when you got your first talk, Amy. How did she come into your life?

Helen Macdonald18:46

My parents, bless them, used to take me at weekends to a falconry centre at Way Hill in Hampshire and I used to do things like clean out aviaries and prepare food and scrub out ponds and there was a rescue kestrel, a kestrel that I called Amy and she'd been kept by a man in a birdcage and the man had died and she was a real mess. And I basically sort of got her flying and I trained her and I used to fly her to the lure on my school sports field. She was wonderful. So that was my first hawk and all I wanted to do was be a falconer at that point. I think my parents a couple of times said wouldn't you rather be a lawyer or a doctor and I was like nah.

Helen Macdonald19:23

Alan you

Presenter19:24

You read English at Cambridge University, so it was obviously your love of literature winning out there. But after graduating, you went went straight back to the birds. You got a job at the National Avian Research Centre. What did that involve?

Helen Macdonald19:37

That was really fascinating. So that was partly living in Wales, in rural Wales, and partly working in the United Arab Emirates on falconry and conservation. So sometimes we would hand rear birds for artificial insemination, and those birds were basically thought they were people. So I'd come in the office and there'd be a peregrine falcon flat on my keyboard, fast asleep, and I'd have to sort of pick it up and it would be squeaking at me, you know, and then I'd play with them. I'd throw paper balls to them and they'd run across the floor. And there's this great bit with baby peregrines where they've got these huge feet but they don't really work properly and they kind of trip over them. They're the most I mean I think pretty much all my maternal instincts might actually have just been snagged by baby peregrines because they're just the cutest things in the world.

Presenter20:17

Uh

Presenter20:18

Alan, it's time for your next track. What are we going to hear and why have you chosen it today?

Helen Macdonald20:22

It evokes a particular time in my undergraduate life frighteningly well actually. Listening to it, I can still kind of almost hear the rain on the windows. And this is a piece by Rachmaninoff, and it's variations on a theme by Karelli, and it's uh played by the great Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter21:42

Part of Rachmaninoff's Kirelli variations performed by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter21:48

Saul, Helen MacDonald, that track takes you back to a time in your life that wasn't altogether happy for you. Why not?

Helen Macdonald21:55

I I felt very out of place at Cambridge. You know, I was a comprehensive school kid and I was the first person in my family to go to university and there I was suddenly in this place that was full of people who knew exactly what they were doing and who they were and how important they were. And I mean I remember at the time, I remember, you know, even my voice became a lot posher. I can still do the posh voice now. It was sort of camouflage and I just felt really dislocated. And you know, I loved the libraries. I mean, I used to seek refuge there and I'd go for walks and but it was tough feeling very, very different there.

Presenter22:31

Yeah.

Presenter22:32

You did go back though. By 2007, you'd return to academia as a research fellow at Cambridge. But it was then that you got the terrible news that your father had suffered a heart attack and died suddenly. In the grip of your grief, you bought a goshawk who you called Mabel, and that became for you a way to a way through the trauma that you were experiencing.

Helen Macdonald22:56

Absolutely, yeah. I did decide, you know, to deal with this in this very unusual way, which was to lose myself in the process, in this ancient process of training a goshawk. I don't recommend training any hawk, but goshawks in particular, they're kind of the Christopher Watkins of the bird world. They've they're sort of renowned as being these sort of merciless psychotic killers.

Presenter23:16

Don't start there. It's not a gateway hole.

Helen Macdonald23:16

Yeah, it's not a gateway hawk. It's not a gateway hawk. But basically, yeah, so I basically sort of shut myself away in my house with this bird and it was just me and her and I was terrified of getting stuff wrong and I had this weird feral existence where I would just go out and fly and hunt with this bird and you know I had no money at the time really so you know we were sort of sharing the rabbits she caught you know obviously I cooked my half but it was a dark time within that relationship

Presenter23:43

Between you and Mabel.

Presenter23:46

How would you describe it now? How do you look back at it now?

Presenter23:50

Yeah.

Helen Macdonald23:50

I think I did a good job with the taming, and I think we built a very strong relationship. But I didn't do myself any favours, I think. It sort of pushed me very, very fast towards a point where I was scouring away everything that was human inside me in favour of this image I had of what it would like to be a hawk. So I wanted to be this ferocious, fierce, bloodthirsty, rage-filled creature. And of course, you know. Why is that? Because they're not sad? Because they lived in the present. You know, there was no past, there was no future for that bird. She lived always in this eternal present. You know, she was full of life for me. She didn't even represent death. She sort of felt like she was boiling with life. But she really, I think, represented all the rage that's in grief. For me, there are many different ways it can manifest itself. And one of the ways it did for me was rage. But I didn't want to feel it myself. I was leaving myself feel it through the hawk. So I was using her in a way. And I think that really was the great sadness of that experience, was there's a recognition, eventually I realized that I was using the hawk to be me. And I wanted to be a hawk. I wanted to swap ourselves out. And that was really messed up. And actually, she was this bird and didn't really deserve any of this kind of metaphorical stuff laden on her. No. You described that.

Speaker 124:41

Yeah.

Speaker 324:41

Yeah.

Speaker 124:41

Yeah.

Presenter25:09

year as you know, the year I fell off the world with this bird. How did you find your purchase again? What did recovering and returning to the

Helen Macdonald25:19

human world look like. Going to my father's memorial service, I gave a eulogy and I looked out over the people, all of whom had known and loved dad, and realized that I'd been an absolute idiot, that basically human hands are for other hands to hold, so they're not just purchase for hawks. And I realized also at that point that I was actually deeply depressed. I just hadn't noticed it. I went to my doctor's and I started taking antidepressants and very slowly, you know, I think both the antidepressants and that revelation, I began to crawl back into a world that had, you know, it wasn't just branches and rain and mud and blood and death. It had a lot of love and newness in it. And the hawk stayed with me.

Helen Macdonald26:04

Alan, I'll see you your next piece of music.

Presenter26:06

It's number six today. What have you chosen?

Helen Macdonald26:10

Well this is the summation I think of those times. If I had to pick one track that really sort of tastes and smells and feels like that time did, it's this great track by my latest novel called When We Were Wolves. I listened to this a lot at the time. It still gives me chills. It's such a howling marvel, this song.

Presenter26:16

Prozo.

Speaker 126:56

And we hide in the light misery

Presenter26:59

My latest novel and When We Were Wolves. Helen MacDonald, you left it five years after your father's death, before you started writing H's for Hawk, and I know that at first you didn't think anyone would read it. Why not?

Helen Macdonald27:15

It was so weird and miserable. I remember when I finished it, it was about a week before I had the courage to actually send it to my editor because I was convinced it was content free and there was nothing in it. I mean it's a weird book. It's not just a memoir of that time. It's also, you know, nature writing. But it's also the imaginative biography of the writer T. H. White and his own attempts to train a goshawk in the 1930s that went terribly wrong. And I knew I wanted his book.

Speaker 127:31

Yeah.

Helen Macdonald27:43

In my book, As I Wrote It.

Presenter27:45

But readers loved your book, although I think there were some quite surprising interpretations.

Helen Macdonald27:50

So my favourite ever reading of HS for Hawke, you know, in terms of just giving me a sort of infinite wellspring of joy was I was in Washington, D.C. giving a talk on the book there in a wonderful bookstore. And afterwards, this young man in a suit, this very urgent young man, came up to me and he said, I know what your book's really about. And I sort of looked at him and said, do you? And he went, yeah. And I said, well, what's it really about? And he said, international diplomacy. And of course, I just thought this was adorable. I said, you know, do you work in international diplomacy? And he said, yes, I do, ma'am. But looking at it, I can completely see that. You know, here we have a situation where this book is about negotiations between two extraordinarily different minds trying to find common ground. And I can completely see how this international diplomacy chap thought that was what the book was about.

Presenter28:36

And then obviously it it more directly just opened up all these conversations about grief and people's experiences of that. I wonder what that was like for you. Did you sometimes feel the burden of other people's pain and their stories that they were sharing with you?

Helen Macdonald28:51

I've heard stories from people of losses and darknesses and terrible things of a level so much greater than mine. And I got advice from a vicar who said, you know, it's very important. You need to learn to listen and to take all of it in and really, really hear it. But you cannot let it weigh on you. You have to let it go. And that was a very helpful thing to hear. But the whole experience of meeting people, you know, it's really changed the way I look at people. You know, I guess I hadn't quite, because I'm a complete doofus, I hadn't quite realized that absolutely everyone goes through these terrible times in their lives. We just don't talk about it. I was an ignorant idiot, really. So meeting...

Speaker 129:00

You know what?

Presenter29:14

But yeah.

Speaker 129:14

Yeah.

Helen Macdonald29:31

It's made me a lot softer. Yeah, and I I love people a lot more now. I mean, I always love people, but I was a bit scared of people, but now I'm just like, No, we're all just thrashing around and doing our best, aren't we, really?

Presenter29:33

Yeah.

Presenter29:41

Helen, it must be such a kind of poignant idea to to sit with that your your dad never got to see your success. What do you think he would have

Helen Macdonald29:50

I think he would have been really quite proud. You know, he always thought I was a bit quirky in the same way I think that he thought he was a bit quirky and I think he would have been quite pleased that I found a place in the world.

Presenter30:03

It's time for more music, Helen. Number seven today, your penultimate disc. What's next?

Helen Macdonald30:08

Well, for 18 years I lived with a small green parrot called Birdool. This phenomenal creature, absolutely lovely, lovely bird, who died in my hands last January and I wept for weeks. I still miss him to bits. I've got two new parrots now called the Bugs, but they're not the same. But anyway, Birdool loved music and he used to dance up and down the table yelling to it and then when the music finished he used to run back and demand me to put it on again. And this is his favorite track actually. It's by Cornelius, the great Japanese musician, and it's called Point of View Point.

Speaker 330:45

Yeah.

Presenter30:45

Let's ride up my

Helen Macdonald30:49

Yeah.

Speaker 330:49

Yeah.

Presenter30:49

Let's try not to

Helen Macdonald30:52

Yeah.

Presenter30:53

Let's write that.

Speaker 330:54

Yeah.

Presenter31:13

Point of View Point by Cornelius. Which it strikes me, Helen MacDonald, is very definitely parrot music.

Helen Macdonald31:19

It does seem really strange hearing it without birds' shrieks in the middle of it, to be honest, but it's great to hear it again.

Presenter31:24

I think they would have just sat within that perfectly. I totally get it.

Presenter31:29

Um so Helen MacDonald, earlier this year you came out as non-binary. Why was it the right time for you to do that?

Helen Macdonald31:37

I just, I don't know, I just thought it was time. You know, and it's such a, it's weird, it's just such not a big deal in some way to me because, of course, I've felt like that my entire life. You know, as a child, you know, I was climbing trees and doing all sorts of boy things and also feeling fine about being a girl at the same time and realized, you know, very, very long time ago that I was both inside my soul. And then as I got older, the sort of available ways to sort of present myself got kind of cannalized into I had to kind of dress up in a certain way or do this sort of certain way. And there was a sort of sense that there's a kind of performativeness to that that always felt a little bit off. Naming it has actually made things really settle down inside myself, saying, look, this is who I am. This is how I'm going to present myself. There's no mismatch at all anymore. There's no sense that I have to perform a role. It's just me. And that's so relaxing. I'm happy as a clam.

Presenter32:26

Helen, of course we're about to cast you away. I'm sending you to your island. I wonder if there's anything you look forward to about it. There will be lots of bird life there, hopefully.

Helen Macdonald32:35

I'll know all these birds. I've got my marine birds down pat, so I'll feel quite happy. They'll be sort of com not companions, but at least I'll know what they are. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, seeing some sea birds.

Presenter32:45

Well, one more trek before you go, Helen. What's it gonna be?

Helen Macdonald32:48

It's the great Hans Zimmer, and it's the big track from the film Inception, which is a film very dear to me for numerous reasons. This piece is one of those pieces of music that will ground me and slow me down. It will always put me in a better place if I'm feeling antsy or anxious or unmoored. It's just magnificent.

Presenter33:28

Time, Hans Zimmer from the soundtrack to the film Inception. So, Helen MacDonald, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'm giving you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to accompany you. You can also take a book of your choice. What would you like?

Helen Macdonald33:42

I'm just beaming here. It's just heaven, isn't it? A load of books, sitting on an island watching birds. I would like to take the Smiley books by John LaCaray. I've been known to lie in the bath and read them out loud with all the voices. The way those books fit together, their mechanisms are like Swiss watches. I adore them, and they will be the ones for me.

Presenter34:03

The Carla trilogy by John LeCarre, Tinker Taylor, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. Yours. And what about a luxury item? What'd you fancy?

Helen Macdonald34:11

I have this thing about luxury sheets and duvet covers and blankets and things like that. So, this all started years ago when I went into a discount store that I shan't name and I picked up a duvet cover that was reduced from £2,000 to £50 and I started laughing and I'm like, who pays that much for a duvet cover? And then I brought it home and I slept under it. I'm like, oh. So, yeah, really luxury bedding is my luxury choice. It's yours.

Presenter34:36

And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves if you had to do so?

Helen Macdonald34:44

It's really strange considering that this is a track that I've already said reminds me of a very miserable time in my life, but it's the Rachmaninoff. I have that as an earworm so often it's like part of my brain architecture and that's the one I think I would save.

Presenter35:00

Helen MacDonald, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Helen Macdonald35:05

Binajoy

Presenter35:06

Thanks.

Presenter35:28

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Helen. I'm sure she'll be training bird life on the island in no time. We've cast many other nature writers away, including Robert McFarlane, Richard Mabey, and the conservationist Isabella Tree. You can find their episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sands. Next time, my guest will be the screenwriter, Jack Thorne. I do hope you'll join us.