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.

The The The My castaway this week is the Woodsman Ray Meers, a traveler to the world's remotest corners and a renowned expert in bushcraft, wild cooking and survival techniques.

He's one of my very few guests I imagine who would genuinely relish the challenges of a desert

island.

Those of us not possessed of his spirit and skill can live vicariously through his exploits on

TV and through his survival handbooks.

In lightning and entertaining the sofa-bound masses is, however, only one strand on his hand-wittled bow.

Among many other things, he's trained elite troops in the British Army and in 2010 he was called

upon by police to help them track the fugitive killer Raoul Moze. It was survival skills of a different type he

needed when he lost his first wife Rachel to cancer. He met his second wife Ruth at a book signing

and the attraction was apparently instant. They share not just a love of each other but also luckily of the great outdoors he says of the wild I can see nature I feel it intuitive, and I can understand what can't be written.

Let's try to talk then for just a moment, Ray Meers, about what can't be written.

When you are out there immersed in nature, what is it you feel?

It's hard to explain you feel totally alive.

If you take the time to understand how things fit together,

the uses and the meanings of the things around you. It's like you

plug into nature in a very deep and profound way.

And how do you think that affects you as a person?

I think it's very good for you. I think we have a lot of latent abilities that our evolution has provided us.

...