Like Robinson Crusoe – Titty’s dream of being shipwrecked on a desert island is captured in song

Duncan Hall of the Arthur Ransome Group suggested this song by The Divine Comedy describes Titty’s character rather well.

Please click her for a recording on Youtube

(Ignore the incongruous photo of office politics – I could provide them another)

Duncan adds, ‘Neil Hannon of the excellent Divine Comedy – wrote all the songs/music for the Swallows and Amazons musical. Piano and vocal versions were included as bonus tracks on the deluxe version. The Amazon Pirates song is very funny!

I have written about becoming Robinson Crusoe in an earlier post here.

What hadn’t occurred to me was that, as Catherine Lamont points out, ‘Titty frequently invokes roles or role models to help her (or Roger) overcome anxiety.’ Does she imagine herself as Robinson Crusoe to avoid being frightened about being left alone on Wild Cat Island, or is she longing to experience what it would feel like to be a shipwrecked sailor?

She cast her mother as Man Friday, which is quite amusing. You can find more behind-the-scenes photos of Dame Virginia McKenna in this guise here

I did love finding this cartoon by Lee Healey on Twitter recently.

Although the original novel was written over three hundred years ago, there are a number of versions of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ on Amazon Prime, along with ‘The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’. Wouldn’t Titty like that?

Robinson Crusoe has been re-published a thousand times. Being a child of the 1960s, I grew up with this theme tune:

You can find different versions of the true story. This is the story of the castaway Alexander Selkirk who was abandoned on a remote Pacific island off the coast of Chile, who hunted feral goats, was once attacked by rats and befriended wild cats but was rescued after four and a half years by The Duke. He ended up robbing Spanish ladies and becoming a circumnavigator.

The video below, tells another version of Alexander Selkirk’s story but concludes that the novel Robinson Crusoe was more likely to have been based on Henry Pitman’s adventures in the Caribbean in the late 1680s. It was he who met Man Friday and ate a roast tortoise:

There are a few more castaways clad in goatskins detailed here