YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Murray

lines on the record: 46
first: 2009-01-04
most recent: 2009-01-04
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

“To you, but beyond why can't I ever sat firmer? If I can have a radio, can I have a radio? Can't signal anybody on a radio?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that mean, luxury? So if I take a couple of cases of Bordeaux 1976, whatever it is, Chateau Parma, that's pretty useful. We're drinking that stuff for the can I do that?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was thinking of a Learjet, but maybe that's not allowed because that can get me off the island. A Learjet will be, would that be all right?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm going to get something that I can read again and again, and I think the cautionary tales of Hila Bellok, because they make me laugh. I learned that when I was at school they stayed in my mind that's an easy read.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Puccini and more my Italian opera, and this is the most beautiful piece of music. There's some sadness about this music as well. It's absolutely lovely. It loves OM and you'll love it”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you do understand yourself, you get a feeling of freedom, independence. I was talking earlier about getting off the path. When you get off the path, you find a little bit of space in that space. You might find yourself. I think I'm my own man. I feel I'm my own man. Quite happy with myself. Isn't that outrageous?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love being all my own. I love my family, love everybody. Got lots and lots of friends and enjoy them hugely, but I also love being on my own. That's when you get a good understanding of yourself, good understanding of how you really feel about life and things and so on. Stick me on a desert island for a few months. I'll be fine.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I felt a little bit that I'd struck a blow for the over sixties in this country where we've got a government that's trying to make us retire at sixty because we're not fit for anything. And some of the over 60s have got something to contribute. Maybe we need a few over 60s in government.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they get concerned, they get worried, they always say look, it's been great, but it's got to stop. They say the same thing to my wife, their mother, that you're getting on a bit, you know, as we approach 70, perhaps we should put the brakes on, you know, stick to walking in the park or something.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh this is Bob Mali I was introduced to Bob Mali by my daughter when she was about thirteen, I think, and my daughter my youngest daughter Christie gave it to me for Christmas. She said Dad this is your kind of music. You're going to love this. I was absolutely staggered.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's, I like it a little. Yes, of course I like a little bit of challenge when it's put in front of me. That's all about that dream stuff you dream and say why I dream and say why not. So yeah, why not?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think this is actually me. I get dragged into these things. I'm quite happy to have a relaxed life. Last year or the year before we went to the Everest camp about five of us, we're all in our sixty seven and sixty eight. It wasn't my idea. Somebody else was going, said, do you want to come? I'm going next year. We're going in September. We're going up Kilimanjaro. I haven't planned this trip. Somebody else has said, do you want to come?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't hear what. We didn't have a single crossword between us the whole way. That's a miracle in itself. I lost forty two pounds on the in weight, so great way to lose weight, obviously, but I came back looking like Ben Gunn gone mad. You could play guitar on my ribs.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very little. I think I was doing two hours a night for the first three weeks and maybe more. The noise was huge. The wind on the tent and the cold and so on. So I wasn't sleeping at all. Pen was sleeping infuriating me and snoring as well. I wasn't sleeping.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was concerned little bit that I may not make it. It is a dreadful, dreadful place described by Scott as this awful place. It's the cold which is the first strike of the enemy. Then the wind which eats into your face and everything else and the threat of crevasses if you fall down a crevass things can be quite miserable. But we would get our put our kit on, look at each other, make sure that we got no gaps showing where the frostbite could set in. And off we go.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cavalieria Rusticana Mascanier, the lovely, lovely, lovely piece of music. I took this in my iPod to the south pole and played it every night, and Pen fell in love with it as well. I finally got him off Abba and got him onto this. Beautiful, beautiful piece of music.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pan had me wandering around in the middle of the night in Dartmoor to begin with, doing all sorts of horrible things and sleeping in canvas bags in rivers or something. I mean, that sort of stuff. And then we went to the Arctic, and we spent some days in the Arctic in February, which was very cold, minus 43. That was bad and a good taste of frostbite and so on. But that gave me the feel of what's to come.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key is whether you have support or not. Support means drops or resupplies or prearranged camps on the way. And a lot of people do it like that. Unsupported, you take everything you need with you and you get nothing. So that means you've got to pull it all with you. So Penn and I had sledges which were 150 kilos, 300 pounds, over 300 pounds each.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when your wife says that to you after thirty five years of marriage at breakfast, what you do is you reach for the toast and shove it in your mouth and do a lot of chewing before you answer. The short answer was, no, I haven't, and I have no intention of walking to the goddamn South Pole. So she said, well, there's a guy called Penhadow, and he's coming to stay tomorrow. He is? He's coming to stay here. Yes, he's arriving tomorrow. And he's coming to give us advice on Antarctic conditions and snow conditions and so on. Well, that's great. So I went to pick him up at the airport. We had lunch, and after a lot of bottles of Bordeaux, Pat and I decided we're going to do the Hoshabank from the coast to the South Pole.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife has been on one or two adventures. She's sort of flown around the world solo in a helicopter and she's done that twice and every time she gets sponsors. But sometimes the sponsors don't come up with all the grisbee and the gap is filled by me. And I think that she decided to do this trip and they were looking for support from me and the only way they thought they could get it to bring me in on the deal. So how can we get Simon involved? And one morning we're sitting in our house in the...”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would describe myself as a free man and certainly independent of my thinking. I believe in old fashioned things like loyalty and I have a mindset I do what I think is right. I think with Patton, Chris Patton, what he was doing was right and I supported him totally the consequences of that were not necessarily very good for me. But years later with the Chinese I have a wonderful relationship.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neil Diamond, I first heard this record in nineteen seventy I was at the top of a little drive going into a house that I was thinking of buying and I ultimately did buy, and a friend of mine who I had driven down with he's playing music, he said, Murray, I'm going to give you some music that will blow your skull apart. Boom, Neil Diamond, I loved it.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah yes, I did. I was very happy to get a job. I didn't have any prospects of any real sense at all. But when I came out of the Foreign Legion, another of these uncles, he had a cocktail pot in. I was invited that cocktail party and standing next to me was the managing director of Jardine Matherson, which is a trading company in Asia, Southeast Asia. And he said, my God, you know, we recruit five people a year from Oxford and Cambridge. I think we need a few outsiders. If you ever get to Singapore, come and see me. And a year later, I got to Singapore. So that was the great trading company of the Far East, the Big Hong in Hong Kong.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's I got leave after four and a half years and I was allowed to go to France and actually I slipped across to England and I met her and I was pretty cool to her cool and she was pretty cool to me but we went out to dinner and afterwards we went to a sort of nightclub and we're dancing away. By this time I was absolutely over it. But when we were in that nightclub suddenly I said goddamn it I think I'm still in love with you and she said I'm in love with you too blah blah blah very romantic stuff.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm a very gentle guy. Toughness is about resilience, not about dishing it out, but it's a hypothetical question because you say, well, what would you have been like without this? And that is impossible to answer. I think it's enabled me to have some gravitas on my feet on the ground reasonably confident in myself that I'm okay. Half the reason for going was to see if I could hack it in a tough world or something. Done.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a little bit of Chopin Chopin makes me cry. He's my musician. I play the piano a little bit, I play my ear, I can't read music, but I play and I like my Chopin music.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was another guide there, who said yes, this is so and so, this is so and so recognized. And then I threw them in the bushes. And then later we're having soup and one of the Spanish guys has got a great big cauldron of soup there and he calls the guy over whose name was Schreiber. Schreibo's a big German difficult guy and he called Schreiber over and said what about some more soup? Schreiber was over there like a rat up a drain pipe and with his soup belt hanging out and he gave him a dollar for the soup but as he did so he picked out the head out of the soup and the lights of the jeep were on we could see it and there was a sort of gasp from everybody and then roars and roars and roars of laughter so you can imagine the sort of level that we'd reached without actually realizing it.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we had come into contact with a group of Arabs which we shot, three of them, they were killed, and at that time they were deserters from the French army, so they were Algerians actually in the service of the French army, and the French were very keen to find out who these guys were and get them and so on, and these were three of them. About five miles from where that action took place, there was a group of officers and they wanted identification of these guys. So we had to carry their heads down. And the sergeant who cut the heads off. And he's Murray, you put them in your sack. So I had these two heads in my sack. Heads are quite heavy. And off we went with a five mile walk back. And I had my rations in the sack and everything else, everything I owned. My sleeping bag was all in this sack. When I got down, it was dark.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't actually drunk, I was a little bit tired. I was sent off to the barber shop. Is that the right word? Head shaved and did the plot for two hours, and then I got fifteen days breaking rocks every day and that sort of stuff. Not very nice.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't just men who made a break for it. The NCOs, the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants and the corporals dispensed, they thumped people and beat them up and so on and you were expected to stand attention and take it until you dropped. And if you did fight back, then there'd be ten of them on you. The standard punishment was called the plot. First of all, you had your head shaved, and then you had a metal helmet without the inside put on your head. You had a sack of rocks on your back with wire shoulder straps, and you had boots without laces so that you shuffled, and you would run round in a circle with a sergeant in the middle with a whistle, one blast of the whistle, forward roll, two blasts of the whistle, knees band you much and knees bend, and three you lay on your stomach and crawled. And you did that for a couple of hours, and if you slowed, got a rope's end. So you just kept going.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is a little song from the Legion The Legion doesn't, I mean, it's not a huge part of my life in terms of length, five years, but it's a formation part of my life. And good memories, bad memories, whatever, I should have something on my island about the Legion. Legion of good singers, you know, rough legionnaires, you think, well, they don't sing. You listen to this. This legionnaire's singing in a bar.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may well be that's slightly different. I think the driving force was, you know, I felt I was in a box. If you're born in Boston and your father's a multibillionaire, this is the path of your life. You're going to Princeton, you're going to marry somebody inside, or you're going to become chairman of the family company, and you're going to retire, play golf and die. That's the deal. If you're born in Africa, 75% of the village have got AIDS. This is the path you're on. So I felt a little bit, I'm in a box. This is it, and I've got to get off the path.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very true. That's very true. My mother I did not have what I would call a fantastic relationship I had an elder brother, and maybe I thought he was a little bit closer to the deal than me, that sort of stuff. Do I have a chip off my shelter? No, but I don't think I owe anybody anything.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was twenty six, so I never met him, to my knowledge, because he was gone before my eyes were open, and I was going round Sweden using a post restaurant as my address, and I was used to picking up envelopes with lots and lots of writing on the front, forward, please, forward, please, forward. I opened this envelope one evening, and I looked at the envelope, and I saw PAG Murray, my father's initials, Care of Warrenmeth and Foster and Swan WC one. And I realized that he's still alive, so I found him. I had lunch with him, and he told me the story of his life. I was not emotional. I wasn't, you know, my God, here's my father in it wonderful. It was more curiosity than anything else. And three months later I got a telegram saying he's dead. So was as brief as that.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“cried Stubborn, quite resilient and tough. She came from a tiny little house in Nottinghamshire. I think when she married into this sector of society she was totally out of her depth, but having had a really good four years with my father, where they had everything, travelling around the world, all this sort of stuff, suddenly she's absolutely penniless in rags. And this is something like Oliver Twist. It's that bad”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps I think I'm reasonably self reliant, and my mother didn't have any money and arrived at my great uncle's house one day after the war with me and my brother in rags, apparently, and they sent us to school. I don't remember this.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I think we've got a little bit of pavarotti here. I love Pavarotti. I love Italy for that matter. But Avicello is absolutely beautiful. It is not very well known, but I love it. I think I was on a desert island. I'd like to wake up with this.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No a friend of mine said I should be in a psychoanalyzed every day and should be terribly better and rebellious. I'm not very relaxed about it.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother died about twenty years ago, but I was having lunch the other day at the RIT with my mother's sister. And I said, you know, I can't remember any Christmases for the first 10 years of my life. Only one, I think I remember standing on a bridge, I think it was 1947. But I don't remember any other Christmases. And she said, oh, well, you were never there. You were always sent away for Christmases because there wasn't enough room in the flat. There had a one room basement flat in Robert Adam Street. Don't you?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a sort of question that I might ask her, but she's long gone. My father was quite a wealthy guy. His parents were dead, and my father was bought up by his grandparents after his mother died. She died quite early, alcohol got in the way, and racing, driving and alcohol and that stuff doesn't probably mix very well. So my father came under the parental care of his grandparents who lived in separate hotels. My great grandfather lived at the Conort, and my great grandmother lived at Claridge's, and then her daughter, my grandmother, lived with her at Claridge's.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that he has had any influence on me at all. My parents were divorced more or less, I think, as I was born, and I never saw him and never heard from him. In fact, I didn't even know he was alive until years later. When I was born just at the beginning of the war, and we were evacuated pretty soon there afterwards and we were in Wales. We were really sort of orphans, not much more. My mother was in the fire brigade in London. I think we saw her once a year or something.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've chosen Y by Annie Lennox. I remember when I first heard it, it just struck me an absolutely lovely piece of music. I find it very moving and lovely, and I think if I was lying on an island for a long time, Desert Island, I think there's daily I could do this. I could take it. I wouldn't throw it out.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think every young man certainly in those days had read Beaujest. I think hundreds of people think about the Foreign Legion, and they don't actually make it.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I originally went to Paris. I had the idea I'm going to join the Foreign Legion, and there was this great big fort sign up saying open day and night, twenty four hours a day. And I went in and I met a sergeant who looked me up and down, and I think he thought I was probably not foreign legion material. He said, you guys from England, you come over here, you think it's all camels and boges and all that sort of stuff. It is not. But he said.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ship Jennifer is my second cousin once removed, and I met her in London Zoo on an elephant. I was on the trunk. She was with a bunch of kids on the back. How?”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a little bit of competition in that. All my family say I'm very competitive. I'm actually not competitive at all. But between my wife and I, I like to think that I am not competitive, but there's a little bit there that I see and has sometimes.”
2009-01-04 · Desert Island Discs · Simon Murray · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source