Red Széll

But actually, we touched on him very briefly last week, a nature writer, an adventurer called Robert McFarlane, whose last two books have been to places where you and I will probably never go.

Underland explores...

caves and bunkers and tunnels that have been excavated deep underground and harks back to our fascination with going underground, either thinking that we're getting closer to Hades or the afterlife.

Or for safety.

Or for safety, indeed.

You know, remember that Naples is 7000 years old and the oldest parts of Naples are the catacombs, the underground caves where people used to live.

And wow.

And and.

And Robert McFarlane is going there specifically to try and find the lost nature, the nature, the natural world that we have superimposed with our own 21st century ideals and the exploitation of natural resources.

And he's trying to go...

for a quieter, less busy life, a little bit like R.C.

Shaw, but also to see where things went wrong when we stopped believing that we were part of nature and thought that we were the lords of nature.

So, yes, I'd say he's possibly the greatest travel writer of his and our generation because he puts a new spin on an old trope.

Yeah, I mean, I love books that explore our relationship with danger, with putting yourself at risk.

And actually, this is R.C.

Shaw talks very much about this in...

the interview I've just been talking about, tells me why he goes surfing.

He explains what pushes him to go surfing.

And remember, as he says, the only people who welcome a hurricane and run into the jaws of it are surfers because it provides him with the best waves.

As you can hear in this clip.