Author: Paul (Page 9 of 182)

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for The Volunteers by Carol Donaldson and published by Summersdale.

About the Book

When Carol’s world suddenly unravels, leaving her single and jobless, she stumbles upon an unexpected opportunity: leading a ragtag team of countryside conservation volunteers. At first glance, the prospect of nurturing Britain’s diverse wildlife in the great outdoors seems like a dream come true. However, reality paints a different picture: her office is a ramshackle porta- cabin overrun with mice and plagued by leaky ceilings, and the volunteers are far from impressed with her lack of practical skills.
Despite this rocky beginning, Carol gradually earns the respect of her eclectic group of volunteers, forging a tight-knit community that will grow to become essential to each member. This diverse group spans generations, from twenty-somethings to septuagenarians, with each of them looking to get something different out of volunteering, whether it’s a sense of purpose, a fresh start in life or a tick on their community service form. They also bring their unique quirks and life experiences to the mix.
Volunteer days soon evolve into the highlight of Carol’s week, as they bond over their love of nature, mental health battles, and the desire for companionship. As they work together outdoors, the team discover a simple yet powerful recipe for self-confidence, improved well- being and a newfound perspective on life’s challenges. This journey not only brings solace and new joys to Carol’s weeks, but eventually it helps her move on with her life, too.
The Volunteers is a heartwarming tale that celebrates the redemptive force of the woods and wildlife. It underscores the universal need for belonging and illustrates how, even in the most unexpected places, we can find a community to call our own.

About the Author

Carol Donaldson is a writer and naturalist. Originally from Essex, she has worked for many of Britain’s best wildlife charities and currently works as a freelance ecologist advising farmers across Kent and Essex to restore wetlands and rivers and manage land for waders. Her first book, On the Marshes, was published by Little Toller in 2017. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian travel pages and was BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Travel Writer of the Year in 2011. Carol lives in a very old and slightly crumbling house in Kent and enjoys wild swimming and dancing the Argentine Tango.

My Review

Donaldson’s plans had come to an abrupt end one Christmas Eve when she found out about her partner’s affair. He unkindly told her that it had been over for ages, but didn’t even think that it might have been the right thing to do and mention it to her before…

To add to her woes was her employment situation. It was a massive blow to her self-confidence and she was unsure of the route to take. She was sitting counting geese, a little freelance work that she had picked up, when her phone rang, It was the guy who had interviewed her last week and her was offering her the job. The money wasn’t what she was hoping for, but he wasn’t going to budge on that, but it was something. She accepted.

Her main task in the new position would be to manage the volunteers for the Kingsdown Partnership. The people would be looking after the habitats on council-owned land. She would be working out of a pretty dilapidated set of portacabins that leaked a lot and had a bit of a problem with mice.

The people that she was responsible for were a motley crew. They came from a range of different backgrounds. A lot of them were troubled in some way or other, with their own backstories and often a lot of baggage. However, this new role was a steep learning curve.

But they were a good bunch and mostly all seemed to get along. They could teach her as much as she could teach them. They didn’t take long to accept her. They had particular skills they were good at and she had to learn who was best at doing what task. That balance of skills and working with each other’s strengths and weaknesses meant they grew stronger and could support each other through the ups and downs of modern life.

What wasn’t helping her was her new boss… He wants her to clear her to-do list each month but is continually adding things to it without caring how long things take and not realising that it is an almost impossible task to do everything. As the portacabin collapses around them, it all comes to a head one day and she is signed off for two weeks.

Donaldson doesn’t know if she will have a job at the end. And if she doesn’t she is really going to miss her team of volunteers.

This is a touching story of a bunch of people from a diverse range of backgrounds coming together for society and the natural world and most importantly for each other. It is a story about friendships, companionship and mutual support and is full of life’s joys and tragedies. It will make you smile and maybe cry a little as you read it. I really liked it and can thoroughly recommend it.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne of Random Things Tours for the copy of the book to read.

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for All Boats are Sinking by Hannah Pierce and published by Summersdale.

About the Book

All Boats Are Sinking is a memoir of love, life and chaos on a narrowboat, perfect for fans of Dolly Alderton, Helen Fielding and Phoebe Waller-Bridge

“All boats are sinking, Hannah, just at different rates.”

After a break-up, some hit the gym; some cut their hair; others have a one-night stand. In the aftermath of her break-up, Hannah bought a narrowboat.

Newly single and plunged into life on the water, Hannah had to learn quickly how to grapple with exploding toilets, disappearing hulls, and the curious glances and questions from pedestrians on the towpath. But when career burn-out, a global pandemic and an ill-advised rebound relationship threatened to sink her, Hannah felt the need to escape. In a bid to let go of the past and restore her sense of self-worth, she embarked on a narrowboat odyssey which took her from the bustling streets of London to the tranquil yet dramatic waterways of West Yorkshire.

Suffering from an apparent magnetism to drama but buoyed by her brilliant friends, Hannah tells of the challenges of off-grid life as a single 30-something on the water. All this as she tries to balance the tension between owning her singledom and giving in to a deep desire to find love.

Peppered with lists, recipes, maps, footnotes and diagrams, and spanning hundreds of miles of the British waterways, it’s an uplifting and often hilarious story of adventure and personal growth, and of a woman trying to keep her boat and life afloat. And to answer that perennial yes, it’s cold on the boat in winter.

About the Author

Hannah Pierce has worked as an actor, pub manager, events promoter and live music programmer. She wrote, produced and performed in several theatre shows for young people and adults. Her one-woman theatre show on the valiant adventures of an online dater received critical acclaim. This is her first book.

My Review

Her relationship had been unravelling for a while and now it was finished. When there was no more to say, she stood up and left the flat. It was over and untangling thier lives would take time, but in this exact moment, she had nowhere to live. It was time to call on some friends for help.

Piece knew that she would never be able to afford to live in London by herself. Just a flat in certain areas of London costs at least £1200 a month, well beyond her means. Then she remembered her friend, Megan. She had started a theatre company with her a while ago, and while that had now finished, they remained friends, but Megan was living in London on a narrow boat. Perhaps that was an affordable option and a way of staying in London?

She mentioned it to her mum who is slightly aghast at the thought of it. After a little while they come around to the idea, so much so that her dad is doing all sorts of research on narrow boats. The hunt for a suitable boat begins and they find one that looks ideal. So she is the proud owner of Argie Bargie.

Living on a narrow boat brings a lot of delights and an equal number of challenges. One of the conditions of living on the London waterways is that you have to move every fortnight to a new mooring and it has to be a minimum distance away from the previous mooring. She had to do regular maintenance on the vessel, ensure that the prop was clear, learn how to steer the boat and to operate the locks on the canals.

She begins to fall in love with the way of life on the canals. Not only is it a low-cost way of living in the capital, but she starts to form meaningful friendships with other narrowboat owners. Romance is again in the air, as she begins to get involved with one of her managers at work. Life was very much on the up compared to a few months ago.

But life has a way of throwing curve balls. This curveball was one that was going to affect the entire planet. The pandemic had arrived…

The lockdown that was imposed on the country meant that movements on the canal were suspended, she could only move to get waste and dispose of waste. This meant that she could get to know her nautical neighbours so much better. They had each other’s back too, helping where they could in this uncertain time. She was made redundant from her job, but that was then revoked as the company furloughed the staff instead, Life was suddenly very different for her.

Having this extra time gave her time to think about and reconsider lots of things going on in her life. She wanted to head out of London on the canals and go north to visit her brother and his family. She also had to consider her current relationship as the guy she had hooked up with sounded an unpleasant type who was using his senior position to exploit her and others.

I thought that this was an enjoyable book full of Pierce’s watery escapades. Not everything that she does goes smoothly, and that makes for entertaining reading, but she does convey just how much fun it can be on a narrowboat. If you like travel books with more of an emphasis on the people and their relationships and interactions then this book is going to be right up your canal…

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the copy of the book to read.

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Teatime at Peggy’s by Clare Jenkins and Stephen McClarence and published by Journey Books (Bradt).

About the Book

A warm, humorous and evocative celebration of the eccentric, time-warped and fast-disappearing Alice in Wonderland world of one of India’s most endangered communities: the 150,000-strong Anglo-Indians (mostly descendants of British men and Indian women).

For 15 years, award-winning travel writer Stephen McClarence and his BBC Radio journalist wife Clare Jenkins regularly visited Jhansi, the railway town in Uttar Pradesh that inspired Bhowani Junction, John Masters’ classic 1954 tale of Anglo-Indian life during Partition. There they spent hours ‘down the rabbit hole’ with Peggy Cantem – ‘Aunty Peggy’ as she was known throughout the town, daughter and widow of railwaymen, overseer of the European cemetery with its 66 Mutiny graves and ‘dancing and prancing peacocks’ – and with her great friend Captain Royston (Roy) Abbott, ‘The Rajah of Jhansi’, possibly India’s last British landowner and ‘more British than the Brits’.

In Peggy’s tiny, crowded ground-floor flat, she and her friends would reflect on Anglo-Indian life then and now: the dances (waltzes, foxtrot, jive), amateur dramatics, May Queen balls (Anglo-Indian women were famed for their beauty), meals of Mulligatawny soup, toad-in-the-hole and ‘railway lamb curry’.

Those friends included the ladylike Gwen, scooter-riding Buddie, Cheryl with her ‘hotchpotch’ ancestry, Winston Churchill-reciting Pastor Rao, Peggy’s tiny and impoverished maid May, her cook Sheela and auto-rickshaw driver Anish. Conversations covered Monsoon Toad Balls (to find ‘the most hideous-looking man’), moonlight picnics in the jungle, pet mongooses, the British Royal Family… They also covered the history of the minority Anglo-Indian community, once designated an OBC (Other Backward Caste).

The only community in India with the word ‘Indian’ in its name, it’s now in danger of dying out. There are only 30 Anglo-Indian families left in Jhansi, many officially below the poverty line. Their first language is English, they often dress Western-style and their homes could be in the 1950s Home Counties, were it not for the mounted tiger heads alongside the Sacred Heart fridge magnets, the aviaries of parakeets outside, the three plaster flying ducks inside, the pictures of Buckingham Palace embroidered on the antimacassars. Teatime at Peggy’s is a valuable addition to the history & literature of this fast-dwindling community.

About the Authors

Stephen McClarence is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Daily and Sunday Express, Yorkshire Post, National Geographic Traveler and DestinAsian magazine. A finalist in (and winner of) numerous travel writing awards, he won the major National Daily Travel Writer of the Year award for a Times article about Ramji, a rickshaw driver he met in Varanasi. He has also reviewed books for The Times and been an exhibiting photographer.

Clare Jenkins has been a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, including reporting on women’s lives in India. She has also made hundreds of features and documentaries for BBC Radio, including some from India, latterly via her production company, Pennine Productions.  These include a half-hour programme about Jhansi’s Anglo-Indians, broadcast in 2015 and also called Teatime at Peggy’s – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpwc7

She has previously published books about women’s relationships with Roman Catholic priests, and people’s experiences of bereavement, and is a member of the Oral History Society.

Teatime at Peggy’s is a joint project, although the narrative is written in Stephen’s voice. The couple, who have visited India regularly for over 20 years, are now working on a sequel, about their encounters with other people in India who have British connections.

My Review

Auntie Peggy was the President of Jhansi’s Anglo-Indian Association. She was the nerve centre of this vast number of people and kept the community together, and even attracted attention from literary luminaries such as Sir Mark Tully and William Dalrymple. Her house was a jumble of things she had accumulated over the years, but it was a warm and welcoming home.

The area has a lot of ghostly echoes of the past, no one at the hotel they were staying at knew what ‘Cheese Gatwick’ was as no one had ordered it in living memory. They visit one of the last British residents in the area, a Captain N.R Abbot. He is one of the last of the Raj that is still left, a tiny part of the past still going in the modern age. He loved living in India and was heavily involved in the community, supporting them in all sorts of projects and on a personal level.

It would be another year before they saw Abbot again, bringing with them some of his favourite Cracker Barrell cheese. They describe the pain and delights of the Indian railway system that they have to negotiate each time they visit the country. It makes our train system seem punctual… They had the full tour of his house and a trip to one of the 800 or so European (i.e. mostly British) cemeteries in the country before setting off on a five-hour journey to his farm.

Abbott had lived in India all his life apart from a brief period in the 1970s, but he found Britain too cold so moved back. He preferred the lifestyle in India and felt that living in the UK would give him less autonomy. He runs his farm and household with military efficiency, micro-managing every detail and being involved with every decision. The discipline is rigid, but he does look after his staff very well, paying for schools and other community projects.

Jenkins and McClarence return time and time again visiting Peggy and Roy, as they come to call him. They become friends but they never really feel that they know him completely.

On a later trip, they spend more time with Peggy. She is quite a character, full of in-depth knowledge about the Anglo-Indian community. Strangely though, here own family history is a little sketchy, she didn’t even know the names of all her siblings. She introduces them to Cheryl, another larger-than-life character with a mixed family history, and this is something that her own children have continued with their own cultural hotchpotch going on.

They become tourists for a bit in Orchha, a place favoured by hippies but is now inundated by coaches of tourists. They are soon back in Jhansi and are invited to an inauguration ceremony, but it isn’t until they get there and are seated in the front row, that they realise that they are the VIP guests.

On each of the trips back to the region, they learn that the Anglo-Indian community is slowly diminishing and they are integrated into the wider Indian population. They have never really fitted in, and have always been considered one of the lower castes. But the change isn’t all bad, it is just bringing different opportunities and challenges.

On their frequent trips to India they take the time to visit other parts of the country and in one of the places they visit, Anand, they learn about the ritual of ‘cowdust time’. Each trip always ends up in Jhansi and time to catch up with Roy and Peggy. Every time they see them they are a little more frail and showing their age.

I really liked this book. It has a certain charm, helped greatly by the main people that the book focuses on, Peggy and Roy. Jenkins and McClarence have captured their personalities really well as well as the delights and frustrations of India, from the trains, the squalor and the consistent exuberance of the locals. Like all good travel books that I have ever read, this captures the spirit of the place exceptionally well. I felt that I have learnt a little more of the real India in this briefest of glimpses.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for the copy of the book to read.