Imagined islands

Each week seems to bring a new escalation in the Brexit crisis. In the past few days the Food and Drink Federation revealed it has asked for clarity about whether its members would be allowed to co-ordinate with each other over food supplies to the public if the UK leaves the EU without a deal. As it stands, they would be breaking laws that ban food suppliers and retailers from discussing supply or pricing, but they haven’t had any reply to their request made at the end of 2018.

A boss at a leading food retailer told the BBC that in “the extreme,”  people like himself with people from the government “would have to decide where lorries go to keep the food supply chain going” necessitating “work with competitors, and the government would have to suspend competition laws.” The FDF’s chief operating officer warmed that in the event of No-deal Brexit there would be “selective shortages” of food that would go on for “weeks or months.” Apparently Domino’s Pizza Group has already spent £7m stockpiling ingredients, including tomato sauce, to cover their bases so to speak.

A government spokesman has pointed out that half comes from within the UK and denied there would be any overall shortage of food.

The UK seems determined to cut itself off from mainland Europe more than it already is by its nature as an island archipelago, like the Philippines. It’s an act of imagination that precedes the political process, like an “imagined community.” The “imagined isolation” reminded me of the much-loved British radio program “Desert Island Discs.” Every week for the more than 75 years since the show began, the host invites a guest to come into the studio who must imagine they are to be cast away on a desert island, but they are allowed to choose 8 “discs,” songs or pieces of music that are important to them, and as the show progresses they explain why those tunes are so meaningful to them. In effect they provide a soundtrack of their lives and we the listeners are provided intimate insights from another person’s life.

“Sometimes I write things because I can’t write them,” shared Arundhati Roy on the programme. Stephen Hawking said he wouldn’t want to be rescued from the island if he had his two main pleasures: physics and music. A computer voiced his words for him with a weird metallic mechanical tone that doesn’t diminish the poignancy when Hawking says “the operation saved my life but took away my voice… I felt that if I could not get my voice back, it was not worth carrying on.”  He chose Mozart’s Requiem as his favorite piece of music.

As you can tell, the guests are an eclectic bunch: scientists, celebrities, journalists and entrepreneurs, athletes and poets have all been cast away, their music choices a reflection of their personalities but nonetheless often surprising.  John McEnroe wanted to be able to listen to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” and David Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” Chess champion and activist Garry Kasparov wanted the soundtrack for “The Godfather,” because “I always recommend people to read Mario Puzo if they want to understand Putin, and it’s one of my favourite movies.”

I’m not sure whether the concept would have as much resonance in the Philippines context. After all, we have so many islands it’s much less of a threat to our sense of civilisation and safety to be stuck on one of them.  Still it’s a fascinating to consider what our choices might be in such a situation and that’s surely part of the entertainment value of the program which has been voted the Best Radio Show of all Time in the UK. 

Pop superstar Ed Sheeran punched the air as soon as the theme music came on. “This is the peak of my career being here,” he exclaimed, “I listened to this every weekend since I was a kid.” He chose music that had made him want to write music. Not that he would consider it “his,” because as he put it: “My songs are not my songs as soon as they’re out there … the song may not be immortal in the public domain forever but in that one person’s mind it lives on, which I think is pretty cool.” He described himself as an unpopular child, awkward and a bit fat, with a stammer who didn’t sing particularly well. He credited rap music for helping him overcome his speech defect and he chose to bring Eminem’s “Stan,” on his desert island because learning it stopped him stammering.

Not all of the guests are so famous, but still eloquent and sometimes very moving, their stories gently coaxed from them by the excellent presenters. David Nott worked as a surgeon in war zones and spoke about the moment when, in Gaza in 2012 with Israeli shells raining down on the occupied territory, all the hospital staff were told to evacuate. But he had just prepped a little girl, who’d been eviscerated, for an operation that literally meant life or death for her. He had to decide whether to stay or leave. Speaking about it on “Desert Island Discs,” he became emotional and was clearly reliving the experience as a moment that shaped him as a person.

While listening, you can hear how music provides an emotional resonance and depth to experience: a necessary companion. The act of choosing is the act of confronting the person you are; it’s an exercise in self-knowledge in the face of possible death, that speaks of one’s particular circumstances and yet also of shared humanity.

So, what would you choose not knowing when you would be rescued, your choices would be a spiritual comfort, a reminder in the wild of the person that you are; and why?

Veronica Pedrosa is on Twitter: @vpedrosa