Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Traveller, author and former diplomat who walked alone across Afghanistan in winter and endured a siege in post-war Iraq.
On the island
Eight records
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...
I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General
Eric Roberts with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
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.
The Regimental Band of the Black Watch
...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.
This was 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.
Little Gidding (from Four Quartets)
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...
Die Forelle (The Trout)Favourite
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore
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.
Ustad Rahim Khushnawaz and Gada Mohammad
This is a piece of music in the Afghan tradition. It's played on an instrument called rhubab, which is a very ancient Afghan instrument...
Well this is a a piece of nostalgia. This is a piece of music from a movie by Werner Herzog called Grizzlyman...
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:12On that day in May 2004 when your compound [in Iraq] 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?
It was a very worrying situation because I had then about twenty civilian staff in the building. … 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.
Presenter asks
3:02Where does that spirit of adventure come from?
A lot of it, I think, comes from my father. … 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.
Presenter asks
13:37Why did you decide to take a sabbatical from the Foreign Office and walk six thousand miles across Asia alone?
I'm very, very bad at answering that question and … in the end have to say that I had a lot of romantic ideas about what walking on foot across Asia would mean. … 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...
The keepsakes
The book
Vyasa
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.
The luxury
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.
Presenter asks
20:08At the end of your journey, did you have much of a concrete sense of how you had been changed by it?
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. I suppose it turned round my vision of what it meant to live a meaningful life...
Presenter asks
27:47What do you think we, Britain and America, could have, should have done differently [in Iraq]?
I think we should never have invaded Iraq, and I think once we had realized our mistake we should have got out much sooner. … 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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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... But ultimately none of it really mattered because the Iraqi people in the end did not want us.”