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 1979, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. Our castaway this week is a journalist and editor. One of the publications he

controlled is the celebrated Guinness Book of Records. It's Norris MacWerta.

Norris I know you're a student of islands particularly those forming the

British Isles. Yes I am. It all began actually when I had a phone call from a

journalist in Brussels who said how many British Isles are there?

And I was absolutely stumped.

So I rang up the Ordnance Survey and various other learned bodies and I was amazed to find that nobody knew the answer. So I thought

that the only way to do it was to research it myself and that was four years ago and

I've discovered there's a thousand and 40 of them that's round Great Britain

excluding the Irish ones and there's no checklist so I've had great fun in

reconstructing it. Yes. There's a definition they must be big enough to have the summer pasturage of at least one sheep,

otherwise they don't qualify, and that was a definition made in 1861.

Where would you like your desert island to be?

Well of all the islands I visited, the ones I like best of the Hawaiian islands.

I think I'd choose one of the obscure ones of them.

Now, Macquirta, a good Scottish name, were you born in Scotland?

No, I wasn't because my father, like so many Scots in the interwar years, took a one-way ticket to London,

that my ancestry is 100% Scottish.

Yes, your father of of course, was a newspaper editor and proprietor.

You were one of a pair of identical twins, and sadly your twin brother Ross is no longer

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