Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My costaway this week is the rugby player and commentator Brian Moore, ferociously competitive.

As a player, he was known as the pit bull. By the time he retired he had 64

England caps to his name and had competed in three grand slams. Away from the pitch he

pursued a career in law and fun time to enjoy opera and fine wine, but he also started unpicking

his interior life, his feelings about being adopted as a baby and the unhappiness he'd experienced

as a child.

These days he writes, commentates and is a

father to his two daughters. But with his playing days firmly behind him he says,

I miss that life more than I usually admit. Whenever I meet any former teammate, it's as if our past glories

occurred only last week. And that must be quite something to deal with, Brian, where that feeling that life

as it goes from week to week is pretty bland by comparison pretty normal.

Well that's one of the difficulties, one the principal difficulties that sports people have and

when half your life or even now maybe a third of a sportsman's life only is over

they've got to come to terms of the fact that whatever they do after that it will never be the same intensity just can't be the

birth of my two daughters was very moving but it wasn't the same because it wasn't

public and that's the big element that the people who don't have that experience

don't understand that everything because it's in public because it's on view

has an extra fouscent to it and it was a perfect thing for me you know all the frustrations you could go out and legally you know

do injury to people and they were to you so when you step away from that it's it's not easy at all Indeed you've written of yourself it's not easy at all.

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