YouSaid · the spoken record

Monty Don

lines on the record: 35
first: 2006-07-09
most recent: 2006-07-09
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

“Again, really difficult, but in the end I think I would want a painting by Rembrandt, which is, and I'm going to pronounce this wrong, Hendrika bathing at the National Gallery, and from the moment I saw it, I remember when I first knew I took her to see this painting, because no other work that I've ever seen has such glowing love of humanity. She's not particularly beautiful, but she's bathed in beauty, and stepping into the water just lifting up her skirts, and I'd think of Sarah and I would think of that, and it would be humanity.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wanted something to remind me of Holmes. And I've gone for the collected poems of Henry Vaughn, which I know very well, but I still return to again and again all the time, and I think it is exquisitely beautiful. Writing about the Black Mountains, where I now have some land and intend to live the rest of my days, and I think is the most beautiful landscape in the world. So it would remind me of that landscape.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, I mean, this is obviously impossible. It's completely unfair, but I'll go with it. It would have to be a hard day's night, I adore the Beatles, and there is this great sense of going home, which I would want on that island as soon as possible.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I love the sort of way it's loud and it's proud and it's passionate and strong, and yet taps into the whole biblical reference which I was brought up with I really know very well and it seems to me that it's a defiant voice that could otherwise be oppressed but it's not”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably I wouldn't be talking to you now. I think that I cannot see how I would have survived. I really can't. There has never been a moment when Sarah has actually stopped me. doing myself in, but there have been lots of times when if it hadn't been for her, the world, I mean that's what that Bob Sillen song's all about. If it wasn't for her. There's not enough left Now, of course, you know, I've got my children, I've got my garden, but the problem is that when you are depressed, you don't think rationally like that. And so I think it would have been impossibly bleak. Well, this is some house I love the blues. He made this recording when he was about sixty odd, and it was made about forty years ago.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a family joke that I'm Leekenback, but I have huge optimism. I'm a real optimist, and I believe that if there's a will there probably is a way. The good thing about my life is that there is ecstasy as well as only I get huge pleasure and joy from the natural world and the world around me and my family and my friends. And maybe the price you pay for that is, you know, if you have your highs, you've got to have your lows.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, what this song is for them, really, and it's just to say that if you can make it through one day, that's enough.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because everything is done together, and our happiest times are when we're just gently working in the garden, maybe not in the same bit, but sharing the same space. And it's a flowering, it's something growing from that shared time, and other than the children, which obviously are the best thing we've ever grown It's the best thing we've ever done. Right this is a record by Nick Drake who I love his work, all of it, but I've chosen this it's a track called Road because I'm working at the project at the moment with a group of persistent offenders, most of whom are addicted to hard drugs. Getting them, growing things, working with the seasons, working with the climate and the landscape as part of a larger charity that I'm setting up.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to a garden, and when we moved there where we bought it in november ninety one and I started planting in april ninety three, and then Through that very dark period it was a very important thing sort of aspect of my life because I used to lie in bed at night. I've never been a great sleeper at the best of times and When I'm depressed, I hardly sleep at all. And so I'd lie and bake just thinking about the garden. I'd walk it in my mind. I'd plan it, and I knew it completely intimately before a single planter gone in the ground. It's highly cultivated. It's full of plants. It has a jewel garden, which we made, which is a large garden just planted in intense jewel like colours. Partly. As holding two fingers up to the sort of failure of the jewelry business, it was saying, look, we can make something out of this, that good came out of it”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a house that is anarchic and irreverent and completely funny and without any sort of stadeness or stuffiness and the whole atmosphere could not be more different than my childhood.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess so. This is my own family, my separate my non sibling family. This is remind me of my desert island, feeling very lonely of the times at home when my children, who are now all teenagers. and I and Sarah have shared our music, and some of the happiest times we have in the household are when there is music blaring out, filling the entire house that we all like, and there's just this sense of shared liberation. And this is the Libertines, and the man who would be king, which I think is a fantastic performance and piece of music.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an element of that. I mean I still really Enjoy the company and presence and contact with my brothers and sisters, and I love them unreservedly, but I see them very seldom, and our lives don't cross very much. I guess what was really important was physically leaving home. My father died in 1983, and I had only cursory contact with my mother after that, and sort of didn't feel part of her life. But there's never been any rift or falling out, and I don't feel it, you know. And I'm sure that they are as surprised as I am by what's going on.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She never made a new ceremony. She saw two of my children but didn't really have anything to do with them and never sort of visited our homes and would have liked to have done. I mean, I think she would have done if she could have done.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was very ill, and she had been very ill. and she was very ill for the last sort of ten, fifteen years of her life.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you had to pay off for a lot of money. We paid off everybody and went on paying well into sort of so-called success. It was only about the end of the 90s We pay everything off.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm eternally grateful to Richard and Judy. And I worked for them for nine years. And I like the way that my amateur hobby, I suppose, but which was an obsession, I could share. I just landed on my feet, I guess. And”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we had bought this ramshackle run down incredibly beautiful house. and it took about a year to make it habitable, it was condemned, and we moved in with all our boxes and sort of totally broke. I mean, as broke as it's possible to be and not be in prison. And the phone went for the first time. We fitted the phone in the day before or whatever. And it was someone from Granada Television, who I'd worked for a bit summer years earlier. Then would you come up tomorrow and do a live item for us? And I said, no, I can't a moving house. And they said, please, would you? And they offered to pay me, I think, a hundred pounds. So I said, yes, okay, I'll do it. And from that moment I've never been out of work.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, well here is the prince of all depression, Lena Kane, who I adore in that growly voice, you know, you've got to have with you, it's a grown-up voice. And this is a song called Anthem, which I was listening to not so very long ago, feeling very bleak. And there is this refrain, you know, that Everything that's made is broken because that's how the lights hit him. Birds they sang. The break of day. Heard them On what has passed away.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean Sarah said, and she always slightly tempered us when I replay this back to her, but what she said is I you know she can't cope with me completely collapsing and if I wasn't going to get help and I was refusing to see one or admit that I was collapsing then she would have to take the children and manage without me until such a time as I could sort of get help and so I went to the my local GP, and like all men said I have my arm hurts, my leg hurts and there was lots of anything else I said, I feel a bit glum. And of course burst into tears, inevitably, and he very, very sweetly and kindly prescribed me prozac, and put me to a counselling and all the rest of it, which I did for a number of years, and gradually I started to deal with it. But it's not something that just gets better, you know.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I blended up with my dear sweet in laws who took us in, and we were in two rooms five of us no jobs, but both of us lost our jobs, and no money, huge debts. You were thirty seven.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well Things just went terribly wrong. We bought a house in Herefordshire, and at this point we had shops and beach and place, big house in Herefordshire, house in London, leases on flats in London. And I guess sort of had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, you know, and something sort of breaks inside you, and then you have to just keep mending it. You have to keep rewiring it.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a combination of things. We were so inexperienced that we were borrowing far too much, we were borrowing on future profits. I was spending too much time gardening. and that clearly is not the right thing to do when things are going pear-shaped, and there was a crash. Better people than us went under.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two shops in 9. Beach and Place, and we had shops and offices and we sold all around the world. I think we sold to 60 different countries and business was growing and growing and growing and growing.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bruce Oldfield Costume jewelry. Yeah, it was costume jewelry, and it was about fashion. People want to dress up. They wanted to be glamorous. And we were in the right place at the right time. And for about three or four years we loved it.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a long story and I'll try and cut it short. In this time I had started to do a research degree at the London School of Economics, and to my eternal credit, after about six weeks I realized that I was faking it, and I had the guts to admit that, and it did take guts because I had to sort of backtrack like mad and admit to everybody I'd wasted their time. and Sarah was getting involved with Jury, and I said earlier that everything she did fascinated me and everything I wanted to be with her. And it was terribly interesting. And we said, okay, let's start a business, let's do it, let's be jewelers. And to our astonishment, really, it sort of happened, you know, it's like pretending to do something and someone saying, actually, yeah, you can do it.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We eloped the North Yorkshire Moors and spent a very cold, very hungry, impoverished winter there. Yeah, exciting times, but not always happy. I mean, it was very fraught. Okay this record it's Bach, the Matthew Passion which I regard as one of the great wonders of the world but what I particularly love about this bit is you have Christ. Mot reviled, abused, and this sublime music and this sort of torture, and then this choir the voices rising above it and it's this sense of humanity overcoming the worst of all conditions and it sort of combines art, beauty and an absolute faith in humanity.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and I was completely besotted by this incredibly beautiful, wonderful person who, for the first time in my life, understood what I said, and I understood what she said, and we looked at things and saw the same thing. So there was no way I could avoid that. That was just literally irresistible, and caused a lot of problems and upset the marriage and the whole thing went kafut, and that was as I was finishing Cambridge, and so we had to run away together to escape. You were like,”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you met, Sarah She was married to someone else. That was a problem, and that made life confusing, and a very nice, fine man, you know. In fact, for a year or so, it never crossed my mind that that was territory that one could enter, you know. But anyway, things happened and their marriage broke up. And I have to confess that I was sort of involved in that. It didn't just happen to break up.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to sort of tie people up and I remember putting nettles down, the girls' knickers and sort of, but I was just rumbustu. Right, well the next record takes me to Cambridge because this is Haydn Symphony number twenty two de Philosoph and I used to put this on in my rooms in Cambridge and there was not a second I was there when I didn't feel privileged I just felt completely blessed to be there I loved working and even it always just triggers that sense of purpose and quiet determination with knowing that I'm on the right track”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but you see, I mean, I was. There's no question about that. What did you do that was a naughty boy and I was always being sent home from parties or”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's fair. I think my mother did, well, I'm certain she loved all of us, but she found it hard to show it sometimes. You know, I don't remember being cuddled much or anything like that or played with. I remember her saying to me that she wished that once children reached about five she'd see them again when they were about twenty. We were complicated and she didn't like complicated things.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argue, yeah, all the time. It was odd because you have this Middle England family, very sort of god fearing. It was a strict household by any standards, but at the same time it was incredibly passionate and there was lots of emotion.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, pretty much so. My father was a very strong figure, both physically and mentally, and I now know that he was a profoundly depressed man. You know, and that hung over the house.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If she hadn't, my mother didn't really understand money and got cross whenever we talked about it. There was a trust fund that my grandfather left that put us all five of us through private education. And occasionally what would happen you come home from school and find the bare space in the wall where a picture had been sold to pay for something or a piece of furniture or whatever.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, and I think that it was I don't even know if that exists anymore. I mean, Orwell wrote about it very well, that this display is this impoverishment that came with a sort of very well educated, well heeled background. Both my parents were only children, and they grew up in what I now know to be sort of very comfortable middle class circumstances. My mother inherited sort of comfortably large house with cottages and sort of five acres of gardens and stuff, but my father never really earned any money to speak of.”
2006-07-09 · Desert Island Discs · Monty Don · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source