Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week are cast away of the novelist Dorothy Dunnet.

Mrs Dunnet, could you endure loneliness for a long time?

Oh yes, I love it.

A kind of silence and time to think is something I don't have very much of and I would prize it.

Yes, is music important in your life? Yes it is. Yes, I work to it all the time.

While you're writing. Well, it is musical wallpaper, it's dreadful. Have you musicals killed yourself? I did study singing for quite a long time. I'm the proud owner of half an L-R-A-M. I never got's ever paid

nobody's ever paid me for it no I did not appear on

on platforms yes yes to everyone's misery, I'm sure, but very little, far too little in fact to overcome

frightful nerves which absolutely screw me up before I start singing and I go half a tone sharp and everything that's awful

happened so I got all my theory all my harmony all my melody examinations but

not the other half.

Oh dear well there's time half. Oh dear.

Well there's time yet.

Now, you have eight records to choose for your island.

Did you find that a very difficult task?

Yes, it was.

I've got quite a lot at home. I play them all the time. What occurred to me first was I should choose something really very difficult that I don't like particularly just now and spend the time on my island learning how to like it.

But I didn't think really I could manage a bit of stock housing or a burg, so I thought something I really genuinely liked just now.

What's the first one?

Well the first one was a nice antiseptic kind of antidote to a lush tropical island.

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