INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL
“It was all going fine until the shark came along.” Not, perhaps, a sentence one would expect to hear at the Book Festival, but clearly the beginning of a good story. Sir Robin Knox-johnston still recalls vividly the moment, during his solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1969, when he was diving to repair his boat in the Pacific and discovered he had company. I won’t spoil the story (which is in his autobiography, Running Free), but it didn’t end well for the shark.
Knox-johnston, who is now 80, has lived a life packed with stories. Not only did he become the first person to sail solo non-stop around the world without the benefits of satellite technology and (although he did not know it at the time) while suffering from a ruptured appendix, but he repeated his voyage 12 years ago, becoming the oldest person to do so. He still sails competitively and shows no signs of retiring.
An ability to focus singlemindedly on his goal was key to his success and it’s likely that his calm, business-like outlook also played a part. Fifty years ago, he said, he sailed into Falmouth after 312 days at sea thinking only of a pint of beer and a bath, to discover he was a national hero. Now he is committed to passing that can-do attitude on to others through his project Clipper Race.
Stories of a different kind were the focus for the next event in the Main Theatre, with another octogenarian, former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway .Weuse stories to explain the world to ourselves, he said, in a riveting lecture which demonstrated that he has lost none of his oratory powers. However, he said that advancing years have made him want to “reconcile the contradictory stories I live by”.