In the pink

I wonder if Martin Carthy's mother knew Diana Wynne Jones's?

That penny has been rolling round and round the chutes and ramps for years now, and has finally dropped.  I stayed up appallingly late this morning to hear Martin on Desert Island Discs.  (Thanks, steepholm !)  Even when I realized you could download his appearance, I quixotically wanted the sense of liveness.*  Real radio.  And Martin, speaking of his mother's politics, of her "network of troublesome priests," said she used to hang out with the Red Vicar of Thaxted, with Conrad Noel.  Thaxted!  Diana remembered it as a Bedlam of incest and hanky-waving; Martin spoke fondly and soberly of Morris revival and high socialism.  One village, worlds apart:  did they intersect? 

Along with that revelation, Martin gave a lovely interview.  His childhood, thankfully, was nothing like Diana's—"tranquil and repressed"—and his travels have been his living.  He said that the harder a gig is to get to, the better he plays.  Imagine the performance he'd give, rowed to the Outer Hebrides in thunderstorm in a coracle!  He reminisced cheerfully, told a few of his best party-pieces:  how one cold January, he and Bob Dylan chopped up a piano with a samurai sword—it can't have been a real one—for firewood.

I was briefly surprised at his first two choices—Maria Callas and Edith Piaf—but of course, I thought, he'd love Women with Pipes.  And naturally, he followed them with Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy.  He had two of his old touchstones on the playlist, Sam Larner and Libba Cotten, a Basque madman and some staggering Genoese longshoremen collected by Alan Lomax.

Being assured of his canonical Bible (he was anxious that it be King James) and Shakespeare, Martin asked for a set of Dickens in one volume.  His luxury?  Necessity:  his old guitar.

Nine

*Yes, I realize it was (almost certainly) pre-recorded, but I did enjoy the occasion.  Besides, while I was waiting, I found Edmund de Waal's turn.  He came with an ivory rat in his pockets, and the woman in her bath.  A lovely playlist, as well.  Tangibles?  He wanted Wallace Stevens and coffee.  He'd leave the netsuke to his children, to go on.