This is the BBC.

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.

For more information about the program,

please visit BBC.co.uk.

slash Radio 4. And the My castaway this week is the designer and businesswoman Emma Bridgewater, you may know and love her eponymous

sprawling range of homewear but whatever you do don't call her a potter she's not

she's a grubby industrialist her words and the company she founded 30 years ago manufacturing

in Stocon Trent has succeeded in condensing a well-made and gently witty version of

Britishness into mugs, teapots, milk jugs and dishes.

From its beginnings, the company's designs embodied notions of quality and comfort at once,

nostalgic and yet also somehow, entirely of the moment. We have in no small part her mother to thank.

The crowded dresser in the family kitchen in Oxford was a blueprint for how to fashion a harmonious

hole from mismatched dissonident pieces. So it was with her crockery but also

with her life. My castaway grew up in a liberal slightly chaotic home, enjoying a bohemian

childhood of abundant siblings, wild swimming and

colourful lodgers. She says, instead of smooth sailing on a sunny day it seems

as if I've been frantically trying to learn to sail a boat that I built in my sleep.

Then in a moment of delirium boarded and set out on a round-the-world trip with no map or oil skins or even much of a picnic.

A better description of being a human being I cannot find Emma Bridgewater.

Were you talking there exclusively about your business life or about the business of life in general?

...