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.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the crossword compiler John Graham. Now age 90 he works under the name

Aracaria and for more than 50 years has infuriated, intrigued and entertained

a puzzle-hungry public with fiendish clues and mind-tisting anagrams.

His interest in crosswords sprang from a rather cloister

childhood. His father was a clergyman and growing up in a large family entertainment was found

inside the home and was of a rather old-fashioned variety.

He's pretty dismissive of his time as a navigator in the RAF

and of the weeks spent hiding behind enemy lines in Italy. After the war he studied theology and like

his father became a vicar but when divorce forced him to leave the church crosswords

provided an unlikely source of revenue. He says the crossword is an

art form which has no independent value apart from the esteem of the public. Is that the clue then John Graham that actually this is

about an element of intellectual jousting with strangers? That's the pleasure of it is it?

Yes I think that's pretty fair description. I haven't thought of it myself, but yes, I think that's good.

I hope that it also equips one for life in the sense that it makes one think more clearly

and can only be good.

And also you've got to, presumably, because it is for so many people, there are

their ritualistic daily activity, you've got to leave people wanting to come back

for more the next day as well.

Yes, though I don't know that one consciously does anything about that, but that's true certainly, yes.

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