Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer best known for the best-selling novel 'Chocolat', adapted into an Oscar-nominated film.
On the island
Eight records
I Can See Clearly NowFavourite
Well, this is one of my old-time feel-good songs. I associate it with the time at which my daughter was born. I was still working as a teacher, but I had a sense of the future opening up as I'd never really had before, and it still makes me feel that way.
La Ballade de la Dame du Temps Jadis
This is one of the songs of my early childhood. … my mother played the songs that she had loved when she was at home in France. … she was a great fan of Georges Brassens, and so I ended up with a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of his songs.
This is a song that I should have heard when I was 15. I didn't. I heard it when I was in my 20s because I didn't have a radio when I was growing up and I didn't discover a lot of pop music until sometime later. But this is really the story of my adolescence.
Well, this is a piece of music that reminds me of when I was in sixth-form college and I met my husband. … I noticed that there was some graffiti, it was song lyrics, on there, and I started to answer it. … little by little, week by week, we developed a kind of dialogue on this desk and eventually we met …
It takes me right back to my university years and my bass teacher who taught me all sorts of things about music and I remember sitting in a coffee shop with him and listening to this song on the radio and to me it's one of those golden uncomplicated happy memories that I carry about with me.
Well, when my daughter reached her teens she started to get a kind of interest in musical theatre, and we went to a lot of shows. And this is one of my favourite musical theatre performances and one of her favourites.
When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease
It's a beautiful song, and I love the middle section particularly because it features the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, and because I'm from Barnsley and my husband's family was from Grimethorpe, that band has been so much a part of my life and the soundtrack to my childhood.
This is one that I associate with my daughter. One of the last days before the world changed with COVID, I remember us both of us sitting in a bubble tea place in the West End and this song brings me back to that. And to me it's a portrait of her and me sitting together in a cafe on a beautiful sunny day having bubble tea.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:13Where did that fascination that you have with magic come from?
I think I've always had it. My great-grandmother, who died when I was three, was known in the village, the little French village where she lived, as a witch. And she had all sorts of spells which she would cast. And I remember them. Some of them were to do with food, some of them to do with the flowers that you were allowed to bring into the house or the ones that you weren't allowed to bring in. Some of them were little rituals about how you had to cut bread, for instance. And it must have stuck to me.
Presenter asks
5:42You've said that you yourself have a French identity and an English identity. How do they compare and how does it work shifting between them?
Well it's strange because when I was a child I didn't realize that some people didn't speak French and other people didn't speak English. Later I realised that I was a slightly different person when I was in France, when I was with my French family. I think I was more outgoing then and I was more concerned with cooking. Nowadays I tend to tell people that my French side cooks and my English side writes stories and I think that's pretty accurate actually.
Presenter asks
10:40How did [your father] mesh with his Breton in-laws? Were they welcoming to this Northerner who wanted to marry their daughter?
The keepsakes
The book
The collection of Victor Hugo's poetry
Victor Hugo
He was the first poet I knew as a child. My grandfather loved him. And the arc of his creative energy starts with the poetry of a young man. Then it goes into love and tremendous loss and pain, and then the joy and fun of being a grandfather, and so it encompasses his whole life. And that, I think, is something good to take on an island.
The luxury
I would like to take my shed. It's full of things that remind me of times and people.
Oh, they were very welcoming, but they were also very French. … My great-grandmother, La Mimie, … she had some reservations about him because she knew that her favourite granddaughter would be taken away, would have to go and live in a foreign country if she married this young man. And so she kind of laid a trap for him and invited him to dinner. … La Mimie invited him to a dinner in the evening with multiple courses, twelve courses, twelve wines, that went on for hours and hours. … And at the end of it, after midnight, when he'd managed to acquit himself reasonably well … she went into the kitchen with a gleam in her eye and said, I hope you've left some space. … And she came out with an enormous stack of Breton pancakes, slapped a dozen of them on to his plate and said, Enjoy. And I think he understood that at this point this was the crunch, this was the moment at which he would be judged worthy or not. And so he managed to eat the pancakes.
Presenter asks
16:07It's time for your next piece of music. What's it gonna be and why? [Referring to disc 4, Here Comes the Flood]
Well, this is a piece of music that reminds me of when I was in sixth-form college and I met my husband. … I noticed that there was some graffiti, it was song lyrics, on there, and I started to answer it. And so little by little, week by week, we developed a kind of dialogue on this desk and eventually we met and we met because I heard somebody playing the piano in the hall. And there was this boy sitting next to it singing along, and I just knew that it was him.
Presenter asks
18:13You became a teacher yourself. Your first job was at Leeds Grammar School for Boys, where you taught French. How did you find it?
Most of the teachers were men of a certain age, so it was quite a patriarchal environment. I was fine with the boys. With the members of staff not always quite so fine, I had some teething troubles, particularly with what I wore. … I was also pulled into the Deputy Head's office. He was horrified that I was wearing trousers. And I said, Well, what should I wear? And he said, Ladies, wear a frock or a skirt. So I thought, all right, I've got a choice here. I can either do what he's saying, or I can actually exercise a little bit of willpower. And so I came into school the next day in a red PVC mini skirt and thigh boots. … And said, I've taken on board your advice about the dress code of LGS, but actually, if you felt like modernising the dress code to include trousers, I have brought the trouser suit and I had it in a dry cleaning bag. And he looked at me with horror and said, Oh, wear the pants.
Presenter asks
25:43Last December you were diagnosed with breast cancer. … Why was it important for you to share what you were going through online?
Well, I've shared so much online and I feel so connected to the world because of the social media that I use that it seemed like a natural thing to do, partly because I knew that I would have to explain to an awful lot of people otherwise individually. … But then I realised that … there were a whole load of people who were also going through the same experience and who felt empowered by the fact that I'd come out and talked about it. … And I have been telling people on social media, don't cancel your mammogram, go for it, it could save your life, it could have saved mine.
“My mother remembers speaking to me in French as she wanted to pick me up from school, and the other mothers waiting by the gate, drawing away as if there was something that they could catch.”
“I think I was quite odd. There were lots of odd things about me. It wasn't just the fact that I was French, although I'm sure that was the main part of it. I think I was just generally quite an odd child. I was introspective, I was very imaginative, and I expected people to understand what I was talking about when I said, let's play at this game, let's do that. I expected them to share in what I was imagining, and I think probably they didn't, and they thought that I was peculiar.”
“Being both French and English, it meant that everywhere I went I was at least fifty per cent foreign.”
“I tend to process the world through colours and scents, and so they're very important to me. They tend to be the things that I notice most. For the moment I'm sitting in a studio with some red lights, and those lights smell of chocolate to me.”
“I've always felt that I was able to write myself a door into another reality. And if this reality is a bit grim, then it becomes easier for me to create another one.”