YouSaid · the spoken record

Ellen MacArthur

lines on the record: 52
first: 2009-10-04
most recent: 2009-10-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'd probably choose boys of summer because it's my ultimate all time favourite song and it motivates you and I think if you're on your own on an island motivation is absolutely what you'd need.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't landed an animal and that would absolutely have been my first choice, so I chose a little purple worm that I had with me on the round the world, and I think they're called slinky worms. It was a fluffy worm like a big fluffy pipe cleaner with eyes, goggly eyes, and it made me smile and I thought this is a very light thing that I could take on the boat that will make me smile, and it did.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Final tract cold play fix you and this track normally makes me cry because we used it on a video for the Animal Cartha Trust which takes young people sailing with cancer and leukemia and I've been sailing with young people with cancer leukemia since 1999 and in 2003 we created our own charity called the Ella MacArthur Trust that did the same thing in this country my initial experience was in France and they are the most inspirational people you could ever spend time with and they have totally changed my life and this track just sums up all that we do at the trust”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still sail. I love sailing. I still sail for pleasure, I sail with our charity, the Alan Macartha Trust with kids with cancer and leukemia. But as long as this challenge is there to be communicated, then will I invest four years of my life into sailing around the world no because this new understanding for me has become far more important.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never thought that anything in my life could eclipse sailing. I didn't think it was possible These lessons, I suppose, and the more I researched into it, the more frightened I got, and that has really scared me to the point that I can't go back to sea and go around the world again because this really matters.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me and it started to make me think, and I was looking at plans for the future, and it just hit home to me that we cannot keep doing that because this world that I thought as a child was the biggest, most adventurous price you could imagine is actually not that big, and there's an awful lot of us on it, and we're not managing the resources that we have as you would on a boat because we don't have the impression that these resources are limited.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The winter after the round the world I went down to the Southern Ocean again and I went down to an island called South Georgia and I spent two months down there part of that was camping on an island and for the first time I actually stopped and I realised something for the first time that really jarred inside me and that was the fact that when you sail around the world on a boat you take with you the minimum resources and you don't waste anything you never leave a light on you never leave a computer screen on everything is looked after you only have what you have and if it doesn't last till the end you won't make it and that could be a life or it could be the fact you simply don't break the record and then whilst I was in South Georgia I realized that on land we do not do the same thing. We don't see things as precious anymore we take what we have for granted you'd never do that on the boat. If you need some kitchen roll you tear off a corner not a whole square because someone somewhere thought that perforated line is what everyone needs and it jarred inside.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. I was there for the finish of his record, and he sailed the most outstanding lap of the planet, and he deserves that record to stand for a very long time, I believe. And yes, there's a huge part of me inside that says go out and try and get that record back. And I know the team to put together, I know the boat to build, I know the designer to work with, but something stopped me doing that.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next track is Spandau Ballet, and it's a song that I really love. It's very emotional and not one of the most cheery songs, but I just love listening to it.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. You've got no bath. You've got no shower. And all your water comes through a desalinator. So you don't use that for washing. You only wash when it rains. And then in the southern ocean, of course, it's freezing cold. If you're dry, you just stay in the same clothes. But then I guess there's no one to tell you that you smell, so you get away with it.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've definitely got to bed yet. And I love the bed. And actually, when you first get in a bed after you come back from the around the world.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not all no, I love animals, I love being around animals, so I've got animals at home and it's a very normal house. It's got a slate floor, it's got wood everywhere, I like wood. Have you got a big?”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a bunk on one side of the boat, but you generally sleep outside. I had a massive great big bean bag with a net outside that water could literally flush right through, and I'd sit on the beanbag or lie on the beanbag with a little fleece blanket over me. Normally I was in my waterproof so I didn't take my waterproof off and I'd just try and doze outside.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily it's I love people I love the simple things in life I am someone who just likes people who are real and honest and caring and like my mum and dad I guess”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit easier now. I want land a little bit more. There always has been some time for that, but when you're away at sea for six months at a time it's pretty challenging”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no money and I'd moved to the south coast on the little boat I'd sail round Britain and she's 21 feet long but her cabin is only four foot high. She's lucky I'm so small and I was living on her on the south coast and I'd got no income so I started painting these little miniatures about an inch square in tin little frames you could get from boots so I did paintings of the BT Global Challenge boats. Try to sell them.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowing that you need to find a sponsor to make that dream come true is a huge challenge. It's not something I'd come across before, after I'd sailed round Britain in this little boat, I'd save my school dinner money for. Suddenly then the stakes were higher and I needed to find funding.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dido was another track that was used in the documentary after the Vondi Globe, and there was a piece of footage of me sitting right on the bow of the boat, this tiny little figure, and the helicopter that was filming flew round the front of the boat and then up into the air with this massive great big white sail, and you could just see the size of the boat. For me it showed so much it showed me on the little boat where I'd been for months and months and that place that I had considered really my home and it just summed it up.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's why I filmed it. And it's quite a hard thing to do because the last thing you want to do in those moments where it is just going so wrong and You just spent 18 hours fixing a sail or 24 hours sailing slowly because you've just hit something and you've smashed a daggerboard to pieces. All these things go wrong. And I made the decision when I left that I would film everything. And that, for me, was...”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You take each day as it comes and it's even each hour,'cause every hour's different, every hour the weather changes, every hour something different happens. But I loved it. I loved being out there. I remember one moment when I sat back on the satellite dome at the back and I just sat there watching the sunset. And you don't often see the sun in the southern ocean. And when it's there, it's so special. The air's so clear and the colours are so strong and I just sat there thinking this is just the most amazing place to be in the world. I am so lucky to be here.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The race before one guy didn't come home and I knew him. He was an amazing person, a really nice, generous character, and they didn't understand they don't really sail, they sailed for a week a year for a few years, but they neither of them are sailors, and I can't believe how they never ever tried to say don't do it. And I don't know how they did that. I don't know how as a parent you can let your child do that”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they knew I was following my heart and that I had to do that I think they understood that, but it must have been so hard for them.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next piece of music is Thomas Newman and it reminds me so much of the first time I watched the Vondi Globe documentary and I sat in the edit studio and watched this whole story of the Vonda unfold. There were cameras that had filmed things that I didn't even know were there and one of those images was saying goodbye to my mum and my dad. There's a piece of footage where I say goodbye to them, you can see me with them and my dad kisses mummy forehead and I turn and walk away because I knew at that point I had to. I just had to go and then they looked at each other and that look was so telling it just said everything and I just thought to myself in that moment how brutally selfish it is to sail solar around the world when you're achieving your dream, but you leave others at home who can do nothing, even when things go wrong there's nothing that they can do and I thank them so much and hit home to me so hard in that moment that they just let me spread my wings and fly.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't pack it in, it was my passion. It was what I spent all my time dreaming about. I loved the adventure of it. I absolutely loved it.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started sailing I was really lucky. There's a reservoir close to where I lived and you could go and sail the boats that were owned by the Derbyshire Education Committee for free. I was desperate to try and learn a bit more, so I managed to, for my birthday, get a five-day sailing course on Rutland Reservoir. I didn't have my own boat like a lot of the kids, so I borrowed a boat from Rutland. And I must have been maybe eleven years old. I was tiny at eleven. I wasn't really heavy enough to sell the boat, and I spent more time swimming than I did sailing, and I was the only kid who was on that course who didn't have a wetsuit, so I was sailing in a tracksuit and a pack of mac. And I was cold, really cold, and frustrated that I couldn't keep the boat the right way up because it was so windy. And I was determined I made it through to the end of the week, and I learnt all I could, and there were some lovely people there who helped me and helped me dry my clothes on the radiators and things at night. But it taught me something. And I learned from that, I said, I'm not going to come back and do this again. I'm going to make sure I'm properly equipped.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the contrast with life The water where you control that little world where you kind of make all the decisions that are necessary for your survival, although it's dangerous out there and you can't control the weather, you do control everything else. On the boat you've got no newspapers, you've got no adverts, you've got no noise, you've got no radio. You don't even have a wallet or money and they mean nothing out there because what matters is managing what you have and making sure that what you have on the boat will get you to the end. And it's very, very different.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next track is Manu Chao and it's a song which in two thousand one after the Vondi Globe really cheered me up and it was a difficult year having just finished the Vond. But I went to sail with a French team called Foncia and I did a lot of training on Trim Rans, which is what helped me make the decision to go solo non stop round the world. And in a way getting back on the water was the best thing that I could have done because it was where I felt safest, it's where I felt in control and they were an amazing team and this track was being played a lot that summer.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was pretty sad. Now I'm much more social, and I love spending time with friends and going for walks with friends or going out to the pub for a drink. I'm someone who likes being around people.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't necessarily think they'd think I was obsessive but I was the girl who was reading sailing books, and I'd go in the library at break times and lunchtimes and I'd read sailing books, I'd sit there with my back on the radiator in the winter and look at sailing books. I loved that. I was just desperate to learn. I was just someone who was focused.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly that dream had become a reality, and I remember going with mum and dad and seeing this little blue, tiny little boat, and feeling so excited that adventures could happen, and before I knew it was there, it was in the garden I'd put the mast in, got all the sails, and I was sitting there in my buoyancy in the garden with a little pet chicken, sat on the boom. It was just amazing, really amazing. But the sea wasn't there, and what I realised then was, although I'd saved up for a boat, it cost money to put it on a reservoir, and I didn't have that money, so I just had to make do with playing in the garden until the week of every summer when we'd go sailing.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I obviously grew up in the countryside and there wasn't really anywhere to go and work and I didn't get pocket money as a kid. None of us did. So for me, if I was going to try and save money to buy a boat, and we're talking about a little eight-foot dinghy, I needed to get the money from somewhere and the only income I had was school dinner money. So I would save all the school dinner money change that I possibly could. And that meant when I was at secondary school, I would have either no lunch or I would have mashed potato and baked beans every day. And mash was four pence. Beans was four pence and gravy was free, and I consumed an awful lot of gravy in the school. I would fill the plate to the meniscus. I think the dinner ladies thought I was mad, but the rest of the change that I saved would go into my pocket, and then when I got home I would pile it on the top of my money box every time that pile of change got to a pound I'd drop it in the money box and cross off one of the hundred squares I'd drawn on a piece of graph paper and when I got to a hundred I'd go to the building society and put it in.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just things I'd made or boating things, or I was always making things, I was always using my mum's old sewing machine to make things, and I made my first set of sailing trousers, which I've still got”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, that was me being a bit different. I chose to move my bed. I did have a bed, but my bedroom was tiny. You could put your arms out and touch both walls. And I didn't have enough space to make things or store sailing kit or whatever it might be. So where mum and dad went out one day, I dismantled the bed and put it in the barn. And I thought if I do this all And get rid of it before they come back it'll be okay, and after that for years I just slept on the floor on a sleeping bag.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I grew up in the countryside and lots of other young people around me were growing up in exactly the same way. You know, they had dogs or animals or it wasn't a kind of city existence.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next track is Phil Collins and I wish it would rain down and this reminds me so much of a school trip I went on when I was thirteen. We went on a coach to Paris for three days and I sat next to my friend Rosalind Acon's and she had the Phil Collins tape.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I first sailed when I was four, and I'll never forget rowing out in the little dinghy to go and climb onto this boat that was my auntie Theirs boat, with my brother and my nan we went down there for a week. And I remember I looked down into this little cabin and it was a tiny cabin, but I remember seeing this little kitchen, this little chart table, these two little bunks, and I remember thinking this boat would take us anywhere in the world. It was just unbelievable it was freedom, that's what I felt.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never They never said that they never tried to change the path of what we did. They never ever tried to stop me. They never said don't do that, not even when I sail around Britain at eighteen years old, having never sailed solo before in my life, they came and they saw me off and they wished me well. It's quite interesting in my life. My mum and dad both went to university and my mum's mum, my nan had always wanted to go to university, and she won a scholarship when she was very young, and her father forbade her from going because she came from a very poor family in Bradford. So she went out to work. She then got married, had three children, one of whom was my mum, one of whom was my Auntie Thea, who taught me to sell when I was a kid. And she made sure her three children went to university, but then when she retired she came to Derbyshire, and then she came to our school. She went on school bus in the morning with us and would sit in the canteen, having lunch with us, and then she enrolled in a degree course at Derby University, and she had always wanted to achieve that for a whole life, and she managed that three months before.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's just fantastic. She's very artistic, and I guess I've inherited some of that because I loved spending time painting, whether I used to do quite a lot of that as a kid. And mum is the most caring person you could ever imagine. Very special.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't have a sending, I was a bit of a tomboy. I loved animals, for me being outside in the country with animals was what made me happy, and I'd always have a knife in my pocket and I'd be whittling a bit of wood or making something, that was me.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dad's always been someone who makes things, who fixes things himself, who grows his own veg, always having tools around, always having something going on. It was just fantastic, and I'm so grateful for my parents for bringing me up in that way, because as a family we all in that way, two brothers are a younger and an elder brother, and we'd make go-karts to go around the garden out of an old lawnmower and atco lawnmower and put little wheels on the back of it, all sorts of things. It was just good fun, said.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next track is my favourite track of all time, and it's Don Henley Boys of Summer, and I just love it. There's no reason other than I think it's a really powerful piece of music. It makes me feel happy and I find it quite inspirational.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it difficult to be around. You are full of adrenaline. You've finished. There's an amazing feeling of achievement that you share with the team. For the first few weeks you're just that adrenaline really does something to you. The hardest point is very”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not properly, I've got an intolerance to it because I've eaten freeze-dried for well over 10 years, for months and months at a time.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never felt hungry. I didn't feel hungry because I was nervous all the time, and you eat because you have to. Eat Eat freeze dried food, which is a bit like pot noodles, so you literally boil a kettle. That's the only cooking facility you have is a light kettle on the smallest camping gas stove known to man. You have just a few gas cylinders enough just to heat the water twice a day, and you boil the kettle you pour in the water and you wait ten minutes, and it's fuel, literally it's fuel.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always been someone who loves learning, but also I've always been someone that's quite good at a lot of things but not really brilliant at anything. And I think that's a skill that's worked quite well in sailing because when you are on the boat, as you say, you have to manage this little world that is where you're living and you have to charge the batteries, you have to fix the engine, you have to make sure the sails aren't chafing, you have to check everything all the time, check yourself, make sure you're eating, all these different things. It's like a rotor that doesn't stop for 71 days. What do you mean?”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, Dan. I played music the first time round the world in the Vonde, but the second time I was so stressed and so tense the whole time that I actually couldn't listen to music because it was a distraction and with a boat flying through the water as fast as she was, you actually couldn't switch a brain off and you mustn't switch a brain off.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First track is outcast, and this track's a team track, because when we were preparing the vote, Moby down in New Zealand and Australia, and it was really hard at the time because we were working seven days a week on the boat. On those late evenings when you're still on the boat, still trying to finish a job, you'd put this on and everyone would smile, and it was really, really positive.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that's hard is the fact that the moment you step off that boat you are in a world of madness at that one time in your life when all you crave is normality. All you want to do is go home, eat some flapjack, have a cup of tea, sit down with mum and dad, and talk about life. It's not there.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that are strange I remember, coming back from the first round the world of Vonday Globe, and the finish was just unbelievable there were hundreds of thousands of people there, it was just the most extraordinary experience to go from being totally alone to having lots of people there and remember going up this pontoon with hundreds of people on it. It was crammed, it was sinking. And I remember saying, I really need to go to the Lou. And I went into this porter cabin where the toilets were, and I remember so clearly sitting on a toilet seat because you don't have a toilet on the boat and actually sitting in this little room amongst this madness around this building, just sitting on the toilet seat, I remember that feels so different.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was on my own, in the dark with nothing around me at all other than one little boat came out with a TV camera I had no idea it was life CV at all. Then about twenty minutes later another boat came out and it was a little tiny boat. It was pitch black. I could just see this tiny little light coming out the darkness with the team on board and they're all in survival suits and the guys one by one scrambled up over the back of the boat and to be able to just look someone in the eyes and hug someone and actually physically share it that was so so special and that's when the pleasure came, that's when the feeling that we done it came because we'd done it together and alone it just meant nothing.”
2009-10-04 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Ellen MacArthur · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source