YouSaid · the spoken record

Haleh Afshar

lines on the record: 47
first: 2008-12-28
most recent: 2008-12-28
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

“enough to choose eight. It would have to be the Bach, I think. I would put it on and dance around the rose bush and have a lovely time.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So hard I think I'll have a rose bush. I love the scent of roses, and I think it might start me planting a scented garden which would be a wonderful thing to do.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wind beneath my wings is an incredibly important song to me because my daughter was singing in a concert at school, and she sang this song and she began by saying that she was singing it for me and my children of course went through a teenager. I could not recognise them, and it really was to me amazing that this naughty, rude little girl who I was having so much trouble with really thought that I was the wind beneath her wing. And, I mean, I dispersed into tears because I laugh a lot like that.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to find it very, very difficult. Because I love people and I just can't imagine being without people. I think that I would probably start talking to the trees and the plants really. But I would find it very difficult.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Babies are a miracle. I mean, she arrived and she's been the center of our lives along with Ali. I mean, I always thought that they were the best things I ever did in my life, my babies. I absolutely love it.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we hadn't, I mean, I really did not want to have children. Because I had seen Ha D Skilling, motherhood was, and how difficult it was to be. And I had two younger brothers who I absolutely adored, my husband Maurice had a twin brother with lots of children. We didn't need to add to the problem. And so Molly arrived as a huge surprise. I was seven months pregnant and I didn't know that I was expecting her because she was tiny and Molly arrived. this totally unexpected sort of”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jacqueline de Pre, playing the prelude to Barg, and I must say that I came across the Chero Conchettas at universities, and of course I played it when Molly, my daughter, was having Kate, our first grandchild, and she told me later on Mother, did you realize that you were dancing around the room to Bach? And I said, it was just fantastic, so it's a music that again I have carried through my life, and it's a wonderful piece of music.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be very unwise for me to go back I miss it very much I don't think you ever forget your homeland and I think that you just accept that if you are as privileged and as happy as I am you have to have a bit of pain and you know you have to live with it”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, I'm not. I'm not. I did feel that perhaps there was a threat, but I don't feel that at all now because I think that they know my views. And I don't go back.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're probably getting a huge amount of trouble. However, there's a backstair just down the stairs. If you dash down those stairs, nobody would see you, and the choice is yours. And he ran, and the reality was that when I died, nobody answered. There was nobody coming up the stair. But anyway, I think I was convincing enough for him to run.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually became a target because I wrote a criticism of Khomeini's analysis on women by saying this is not Islamic, but which I had actually wrote as a chapter in a book I didn't expect it to get widely published, but I was sitting in my office one lunchtime in Bradford, and this young man came in and he sort of put a knife out and he said to me I have dishonored Isam, I should be ashamed of myself and it was his duty to pay back the sins that I have done. And so I sort of said to him, but you know Eastam does not allow you to become an executioner and you have to think about it. And I also then picked up the phone and undialed a number and said there's a young man in my office who seems very disturbed. Could you send a couple of people up please? And then I put the phone down and I said, look, there are a couple of people coming up and if they arrest you.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very painful because the kind of revolution that many of us were still hoping for and thinking about had not been a religious revolution, and I remember many of my colleagues and friends at the very beginning saying, oh, well, yes, we allow the religious people to just head this because we are the left, we are organized, we have all our cadre in place, and the moment that things have started, we will take over. And of course they all got killed. And I found that absolutely abominable.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was absolutely ghastly many, many of the kids that I had grown up with were actually killed afterwards because they were the establishment. And I remember after the revolution I used to get a daily paper from Iran and they used to publish the name of all the people who had been executed. And I used to just open the paper, read the names, cry, and then go to work because it was just a massacre of young, intelligent talent. I just found it.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next piece of music is the Queen of the Night, and Morris introduced me to the opera. And it was an absolute amazing revelation. I mean, I just fell for it. And the Queen of the Night was something that we always judged the singers, you know, if you really can sing those notes, you're absolutely top in our list. But also, Maurice has a tendency to try and sing, the Queen of the Night, and we never allow him to go beyond the second note, but you know, it's both a family joke, but also a song that I think is wonderful”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know because when I got married to Maurice I said to him, you know, I'm going to look for a job anywhere in the world. And he said, OK.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very old not to be married, but I was old enough to say look, I would like to have a lunch, and I would say look, you know, I'm very willing to marry you, but I would like to tell you that I have a life, and this life consists of me getting up at five o'clock in the morning, going to my office in the ministry which started at seven thirty, between two and three I'm always free for lunch, we can always have lunch, but then three o'clock I start at the newspaper, and then at the newspaper when I finish, I start doing the social rounds because I was a gossip columnist.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My degree was in land economy, and I went back and I worked for the Ministry of Land Reforms and I became a journalist, which was something that was very close to my heart. And of course, then I had to do the marriage market. I mean, I was then 28, 29, I was a grown-up lady.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was walking down a corridor and Morris walked through a glass door, eating an apple, and I just said to him you're far too good looking to be walking on your own. Why don't you join us? And I really meant it, you know. We were already about three or four people and he joined our gang.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always I had always planned that England was going to be a prelude to a life in Iran. I was always going to return, but I had an agreement with my father that so long as I would study I didn't need to get married. And so in order to really not get married, I became much more studious than I would ever have been in my life. And so I went on studying.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, when I was doing my A-levels, we were a very funny bunch of people, including Sir Reynold Fynes and all kinds of other people who kind of, I didn't play poker with him, but I used to go on the back of his motorbike, and it was the craziest rides I've ever had. It was huge fun. But anyway, we were a kind of funny group of people who danced hard, played hard, and playing poker was amongst the things that we did. And I was incredibly good at it. And so I won these tickets, which was wonderful. And then the yellow submarine is a song that I sang to my children when they were in their bathroom. Before they realized I couldn't sing. And it's really for my son Ali, who is now playing it. And also, I remember my daughter's mother-in-law, Molly's mother-in-law, and I were dancing to it at her hen nights when we all went. So it's a rhythm through my life.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The yellow submarine is a song that goes right through our family. First of all, because I actually won a ticket to hear the Beatles in a poker game”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was really, I mean, I think that when I was appointed to the House of Lords, I wore her watch because I knew that she would really be proud of me, and I felt very much her presence that, you know, she felt she had achieved”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“62 I mean, in many ways I have always felt that I had to fulfill her destiny. She was fantastic for her time. And I look like her. I behave very much like her. I had to do what I knew she would have wanted me to do.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when I got to university, I thought, great, I'm going to cook. But of course the difficulty was I'd never ever cooked, so I had a friend who was But I did want to learn to cook, and so I remember asking a friend of mine who lived the floor below, you know, what's the simplest, simplest thing that I can cook, please? And so she said, okay, here is a little pot and here is an egg. You fill the pot up, you put it on the cooker. When it boils, you put the egg in it, you wait four minutes, you've got a boiled egg, and I thought, okay, I can do that. And then I had to go down again because I had no idea how you knew when the water is boiling. I actually learned to cook by following to the letter all the sainted Delia and her instructions.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General Catherine is actually Edith saying exactly that because I do not regret any of the decisions I made, and I went subsequently to make an equally bad decision in my family's eyes by marrying Morris. But I think I was very, very lucky. I made the right choice. And I think at the time for the right reasons, because I grew up with reason being very much part of our family discussions. And that's a shea thing. Shia say that which is reasonable is permitable and that which is permittable has to be reasonable. So although I made things that were unconventional, wrong in the eyes of many, reason one.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realized that on the next holiday when I went home, that's the point at which I decided that that was not what she would have wanted for me and is certainly not what I wanted for myself. And so I suggested to my father that he should perhaps marry and have a wife, and I suggested a name of a good friend of my mother's who just happened had just gotten divorced, and eventually they did get married and I was about to come back and study.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, and I was absolutely, I mean, I was just in pieces. And I just, I mean, you know, I sort of cried all morning. and then decided okay, you know, this is not what my mother would have wanted. I have to get myself together. I have to pull myself together. And my father came very soon after and took my two cousins and I on a kind of long holiday because actually he was worse than me. And I suddenly realized that I had to actually look after him. And so I think I suddenly grew up. in a way that I never thought I ever would. And because I look very much like my mother, I had a feeling that I had to kind of step into her shoes.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was really awful because they didn't tell me anything, and then one day they had mistress ask me to stay back, and she announced it in the morning assembly that my mother had died.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and she died in a car crash and that was the hardest thing I think I've ever experienced When I was at school I would write to her every day about everything, and she would write back every day. And I never felt that really I've left. And then suddenly she was not there anymore.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the first thing that hit me was how low the sky was. I was not used to grey skies which just hit yon the head, and it was a high uniform all the houses were, and it took me a long time to get used to the weather, but I'm in particularly delight that the light was missing. I mean once I got to school I was absolutely astounded at all the rules and regulations and the whole idea that you had to obey because you were told and my poor head mistress had a difficult time with me.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um Gulnarie singing Marobibus Marobibus is a revolutionary song, which is about someone going after their destiny, leaving where they are, but it became very popular when I was a teenager in Iran, and it became very popular as a goodbye song of lovers. And I remember my cousin and I trying to play it on the piano and singing it as a love song. And it's a song that reminds me of both my ardour and conviction that change would come, but also of the romantic side of love and everything else.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncertainly very romantic. I always felt that what I had was not a fair share, and if I had gone down the kind of route that was planned for me I would have married an affluent person and done the same thing and replicated it, and I just felt that if I wanted to do anything to change things, the first thing was to be able to stand up on my own feet.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know any English. The only words I knew was the words of a song called Kiss Me Honey Honey, which wasn't really much.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I mean I was fourteen and there was this young woman who loses everything and she is able to cope first of all with the hardships at boarding school and then to just stand on her own feet and I just thought you know if I wanted to do anything you know if I wanted to get up I need my nanny to dress me so you know how would I ever be able to do something like that and it actually made me decide to come to England and I knew not a word of English and my father did something that he had never done before he actually took two months leave and we drove from Tehran to London talking all the way about what a bad decision it was or you know maybe I should change my mind and eventually when we got to England it was obvious I wasn't going to change my mind so then they put me in a school where I Supposed to learn English.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Jatandre is a song that my mother used to sing when I was very, very little when we were in France, and she, unlike me, could really sing. And very sadly I lost my mother when I was fourteen. And this song which is about waiting and thinking just makes me think of her.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was a piece. I mean, my mother was, and she remains really an icon in my life. She was fantastic because she was exactly the opposite to my Brattish existence. She pursued her politics by always the most sociable way giving the very best dinner parties, inviting the right people. So she could function within a system fantastically effectively. And then she's produced this brat.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very spoiled. I mean, I was a very difficult child. I really was very difficult, and my family would say I was a brat. I riled against all the rules and regulations that demanded that you behaved in particular ways. I'm not very good at behaving in particular ways.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you had as a tiny child Normal race that one could buy in the markets there. Well, I'm afraid it is true. I mean, my rice came in the diplomatic bag, and I would only eat it if my mother cooked it.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a whole lot of things happened. I think part of the kind of personal reason was that I had a baby brother who died and I was very upset about that. Part of it was that it was the late forties and there were all kind of negotiations about international politics and my father had done comparative law and the Iranian government was very keen to have someone who would actually be able to give advice and present the Iranian position and safeguard our position. And so we lived there for about two years.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, the friends that I knew well did, first of all the family was enormous, so all around were my uncles and my cousins, and so we actually were like a sort of great big army of kids, so most of my friends were from there.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm wondering about the house itself, what sort of home was it? We had a beautiful house which my parents had built and it kind of had the Courisier turn because they had just come back from France and we had this fabulous staircase on which my brother and I didn't behave at all with the kind of necessary decorum we used to slide down and jump up and down. And, you know, we were only four. So there were always more people working, looking after us than there were us because there was a gardener and a driver and a cook and a cleaner. And there was an army of people looking after us.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky. I mean, my parents were both very, very active and busy, but also incredibly loving. And really in my childhood, I never had to do anything at all for myself. I mean, when I was 14 years old, my nanny would bath me, she would undress me, she would put me to bed, she would be there in the morning, she would dress me, my mother would comb my hair, and it was just completely accepted that this is how it is.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barumbarune is a song about the arrival of the rain, and it's sung by Shusha Gabi, who is a wonderful singer for whom I have a lot of admiration because she was one of the first Iranian women to come in the west and she was Bohemian and a singer and loved and I absolutely adored her. And it's also the celebration of rain. When I was little, we used to sort of sing barum barun when it was raining. We all used to rush out and dance in the rain because it was such a wonderful gift.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were all told to choose between our identities as Moslems and our identities as British. And, you know, I am what I am. And, you know, why should I choose when other people don't have to?”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think that Marxism is certainly changed over time, I became a Marxist, I think, when I was about 11 or 12 because my cousin was a Marxist. And I remember writing slogans on the wall of our garden. And my father took me to one side and said, were you writing these slogans on the wall? And I said, well, how do you know I'm writing them? He said, because nobody else would write at knee level. But I think that my Marxism has been tempered by life and our experiences. So in all of these characteristics, it's difficult to say because I am a feminist, and I think that that's at the core of everything that I do. I am also born in Iran and I remained Iranian. But of course, after nine eleven, I then became a British Moslem, because that was an identity which was regarded as problematic.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I never, I mean it really was always Western when I was growing up. It was never any question of anything else. And I would find it very difficult to cover because for three generations we've actually insisted on not covering.”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh I should know the exact date, but I don't. But it was in the mid twenties that they actually removed the veil. But my maternal grandmother was very clear that she really was not to be hidden anywhere”
2008-12-28 · Desert Island Discs · Baroness Haleh Afshar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source