Hello, I'm Kesti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is a journalist and author. Since the age of 29, muscular dystrophy

has kept him in a wheelchair. Nevertheless, at the age of nearly 70, he can look back on

a life more vivid and exciting than most able-bodied men. He was sacked from Eaton and sent

down from Cambridge. He's crossed deserts and driven 24,000 miles across South America.

In between, he's worked as a gossip columnist, film critic, and perhaps most famously as

a writer on restaurants. A friend of the rich, famous, and influential, he's also been

married three times. Nothing, he says, debars a disabled person from the really important

things in life. Love, happiness, and achievement. He is Quentin Crew. In fact, you wrote that

Quentin in a letter to Christopher Reeve, who's paralyzed, of course, after a riding accident.

On the whole, it has to be said, your attitude to disabled people seems to be fairly merciless.

It's kind of put up and shut up, isn't it? Well, slightly that. It's more that I feel

that one can do everything. I mean, the thing I'd like to give to everybody was confidence,

which, of course, is a hard thing to give. I mean, I think the people who complain about

rights and all that stuff, you've just got to accept you can't do some things. I've

not got to walk along Hadrian's Wall. Nordwai wanted to be dispoiled for the disabled

but he had lost his time out road beside it. But you've got to be blessed with a certain

very positive frame of mind, a strength of character, haven't you, in order to do this?

Of course, yes. You can't just affect it, can you?

No, but I think I'd be, I mean, my parents were very austere with me about that and that

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