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One of my favourite radio shows is the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. The programme format is simple: Lauren Laverne, the Northern girl with the sweet, soothing voice, has someone stranded on a desert island. They’re allowed eight pieces of music, a book, and a luxury item.
I would love to be a guest, but I’ve not had the kind of life that Michael Palin or Sir David Attenborough have had. Goodness, I was thinking of writing to the show’s producer asking them to feature ordinary people and told them about a boy I met who was walking around Britain with his tent because he was homeless. So, unless I win the Nobel Prize for Literature, I’ll never be featured on the show.
But I have my imagination.
My choice for the luxury item would be a banjo. As you know, I play guitar, but there’s something inviting about that steel-string instrument—the rhythmic fingerpicking resonates off the metal plate like a woodpecker tapping at a Caribbean drum. It’s the child in me, the one who never received noisy toys on account of my mother’s migraines.
I’m wearing a fedora, braces, and torn jeans, like a Mark Twain character. I’m sitting on a bamboo chair on this island somewhere in the South Pacific. The lazy evening sun refuses to dip below the horizon. There’s me, a Celt from Glasgow, singing and playing the cadential 12-bar blues patterns as if I were a son of the Delta. There I’d be, lamenting lost love—a “baby who left me.”
It’s strange how these blues musicians have names that begin with adjectives: Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie McTell, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Mississippi John Hurt. I wonder what my name would be? I tried, I really tried, but this Celtic name just doesn't do it.
The banjo got a grip on me one summer in the early nineties. My daughter, who was a huge fan of musicals, wondered if it would be possible to go on the Sound of Music Tour in Austria. What a great idea!
“Can I bring my friend?” was her next question.
“Sure, why not, more friends, more fun,” we said, and started making plans.
We could book with Keycamp, stay in various campsites, and slowly make our way through England, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, before reaching Innsbruck, where we could touch base before driving into Salzburg.
A few nights before the trip, I was in a music shop in Glasgow when I heard the vibrating sound of a banjo drifting out the door and down Jamaica Street. I turned back and asked the shop assistant who was playing.
“Alison Krauss and Union Station,” he replied.
“And the album?”
So Long, So Wrong, he answered, pointing me to the CD shelf.
So, there we were, travelling one thousand miles through Europe, listening to the rib-tickling, banjo-strumming, violin-humming sound of Union Station, backing the angelic voice of Alison Krauss. Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, and Shakespears Sister remained untouched in the glove compartment as my fourteen-year-old and her friend demanded the Krauss CD repeatedly.
Some years have passed since. I’m looking at holiday snaps of these youngsters dancing and singing around the fountain in the Mirabell Gardens, where Julie Andrews once twirled and sang “Do-Re-Mi.” It’s a moment in time captured and embedded in my book of memories of all that’s good. a joyful day.
If you ask my daughter her favourite trip as a child, she’ll tell you this was one of her happiest memories.
That trip taught me one of life’s most important lessons—something psychologists are only now beginning to articulate: happiness comes from time spent with loved ones and friends. Sure, there’s a serotonin lift when you get a new iPhone or a new bedroom suite. But it’s temporary. The next day, the lift is gone. The phone sits in your bag, and the new suite no longer looks new.
But money spent on a meal with friends, a barbecue, or a visit to the beach? That’s different. Let me illustrate.
If I asked you what the capital of France was, you’d immediately say “Paris” without thinking. But if I asked about the time, we all went to see Paddington at the cinema, with snacks and drinks in hand, a film would begin to roll in your head. A film that brings that hygge feeling—and will continue to do so even when you’re my age.
That kind of happiness doesn’t come from a Black Friday shopping spree.
And so, it goes with the Sound of Music trip. It wasn’t the destination that was memorable—not as much as the four of us singing along to the music in the car.
If you don’t think that brings happiness, try going to Paddington or the beach alone.
Happiness isn’t wrapped up in material things. It’s found in the memories you make with others, with loved ones—and every time I hear the pluck of the banjo, I’m reminded of this fact.