Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Prize-winning nature writer and teacher, best known for books including The Lost Words and Underland, exploring landscape, language, and the hidden world.
On the island
Eight records
I guess I am a bit of a Nature Boy, but I also think it's just utterly gorgeous, that voice of his, that famous voice of his. And lyrically, I think it's one of the most perfect songs I know. It's about this sad boy who travels melancholy and bittersweet very far, very far. But he learns one thing. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. And that seems to me an unforgettable truth.
Ghost of O'DonoghueFavourite
It's my walking song. I know Johnny now. I write music with him now. But I knew this song long before I knew Johnny. And I don't think I could ever out-listen it, really. I know every note of every song of Johnny's music, I think, but this is the one. And it's the one I've set my pace to in the mountains on the long paths. And Johnny's voice is just it's like this kind of weathered rock, really. It's wise before its time.
John Phillips and Michelle Phillips
This track always reminds me of my dad getting over the border into Scotland, having driven up from Nottingham where we were living on the way to the Cairngorms. And we'd get to the shores of Loch Lomond, and we'd have been going for five or six or seven hours. And he would pull the car over and leap out of the car and strip down to his pants or his swimming costume and leap into Loch Lomond and just sluice off the journey and be joyful at being back in Scotland.
John Linnell and John Flansburgh
This is for my partner, Juliet. We've been married nearly 21 years and we met at university. And she's my rock. She's my anchor. She's my inspiration. ... she's this one's for her because it was the song I was listening to when I was trying to work out how to make her date me. Yeah, I wanted to be, as the lyrics say, the only bee in her bonnet and for her to make a little birdhouse in her soul for me.
It arises from this. It's not the wild wood of the lost words, but it's the birds that flew from the topmost branches of the wild wood. It's a song called The Blessing that was written by some extraordinary musicians that Jackie and I came to work with, and they produced a set of spell songs, and they were very free adaptations often. And The Blessing is the last of those. It takes its inspiration from the Gallic naming or a psalmic tradition of praise songs.
This is for my students really. This is just to thank them for introducing me to new ideas, new texts and new music. And it's I wouldn't have come across this without my students. It's called Four Ethers. It's by Serpent with Feet. It's lush, it's Baroque, it's deeply strange. And I have no idea what the Four Ethers are, but I love this song.
This is for my children, and it's for my friend Roger, Roger Deacon, who died in 2006, far too young, of a brain tumour. And he and my children, in that decade, the 2000s, they changed the way I see the world. They pulled the scale back. ... Roger and my children just helped me see what was right to hand, right in front of my nose.
Quatuor pour la fin du temps: III. Abîme des oiseaux
Messien was in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag, and he managed to get paper and pencil off a guard. And he wrote this extraordinary piece of music, a multi-movement piece of music for him and his fellow prisoner musicians, one of whom was a clarinetist. And it was premiered in 1941 in the camp. 400 fellow prisoners and camp guards were there. And I get a tingle just thinking of that performance.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:52When you began working on Mountains of the Mind, what was it exactly that you wanted to explore?
Mountains just seized me. They were where I wanted to be. For a year or two, they were where I thought I would die. And that was stupid of me. But that was the force with which they had my heart and my mind. And that became a puzzle to me a little bit later in my early twenties. I suddenly thought, gosh, what is this strange dance that I'm doing? This absurd, odd compulsion that I'm subject to. And I realized that I wanted to understand that, even as I was stepping away from it, and that to understand that, I needed to go hundreds of years back in history, because that is where the forces began that now draw so many of us up to the summit.
Presenter asks
2:47Do you need a devil may care streak [to climb mountains] and has that always been present in you?
I never think of myself as a devil may care, but perhaps as a climber at times I have been. There is a selfishness in extreme climbing, and there's a selfishness in that summit selfie, as it were, that draws people at risk of their lives to the summit of Everest every year to get that ultimate summit selfie. So there is a selfishness and a solipsism to it, but there's also a self-abolition. I mean, mountains, they melt us because they exist, they live in deep time in ways that absolutely dissolve human units of being.
The keepsakes
The book
Gerard Manley Hopkins
they are springful of life and eye sharpening vision and detail.
The luxury
Particularly when climbing, they are my go to pick me up, and the capsaicin rush on the top of a cold mountain, or indeed in the depths of a blue sea level, I love.
Presenter asks
What's your take on that phenomenon [of people finding solace in the natural world during the pandemic]?
I think it's a huge opportunity. People who, in a way, who'd never noticed the need for nature, for nearby nature, found it there for them, giving anchor points, giving orientation, perspective, consolation, tiny moments of wonder and joy. And that's thrilling. And even those who drink deep of the natural world, I think, drank deeper.
Presenter asks
19:42How have the demands of social distancing during the past year affected how you teach?
In one sense, awfully, so much of it has had to go online. But i in other ways, when it's been possible, it's forced wonderful improvisation. So in back in the autumn, I basically set up an outdoor teaching space under a tree, sort of slung a tarpaulin, got a couple of chairs, and I would I would see the students there and I w and then I would also walk and teach when I was seeing students one-on-one PhD students or undergraduates.
Presenter asks
22:25Was there a point where you regretted having the idea [for Underland]?
Well, as someone who loves mountaintops, it's an odd choice to make. A book is a relationship. I spend so long making sure it's right because the way I do it, it means it's something you're going to live with and in for five to ten years. So I never regretted it because I was committed to the project and I knew there was a mystery there, an immense mystery, which I was never going to fathom fully, but even fathoming kind of shallowly would involve an extraordinary journey.
“There is a selfishness in extreme climbing, and there's a selfishness in that summit selfie, as it were, that draws people at risk of their lives to the summit of Everest every year to get that ultimate summit selfie. So there is a selfishness and a solipsism to it, but there's also a self-abolition. I mean, mountains, they melt us because they exist, they live in deep time in ways that absolutely dissolve human units of being.”
“We've been reminded of how deeply spiritually we are made and remade and recreated and sustained and healed by the natural world. But it needs our help too.”
“I sometimes say I write about landscape because I think of landscape as a verb, or at least a noun that hides a verb, that's scaping. It absolutely escapes and shapes and sculpts us, and it's an infinite terrain of interest.”