3 out of 5 stars

Grief is an intensely personal thing that people cope with, in their own way. When Charlie Corbett lost his mother after a short but aggressive cancer he began to realise that his perspective on life was slipping away.

He had gone out alone with no real purpose in mind and found himself lying on a hill in the rain. His mind was full of dark thoughts and he couldn’t see the point in carrying on anymore. When he heard the song of a skylark above. It was a timely distraction. It was listening to that bird that changed his outlook on life.

He has chosen twelve birds that anyone can see with a little bit of effort and explains why and how they have helped him recover to the point where he has been able to cope with the stress and strains of normal life once again. In amongst that recovery, is the wider story of his mother and his family history and an acknowledgement that his childhood made him who he is today.

There is a strong natural history element to this book, but be aware that the central theme is about him dealing with the grief following the loss of his mother. Nature and birds, in particular, are his way of coping with all the trauma. What it does show though is how life can be improved and in certain circumstances saved by immersing yourself in the natural world. He is not a bad writer either and this is an engaging book.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The world population is just shy of 8 billion and is the largest it has ever been and shows no signs of slowing anytime soon. Or does it? The factors that have brought us to this point in the global population are changing and the demographic will be utterly different in the coming decades.

In Tomorrow’s People, Paul Morland takes ten numbers that show different ways that it is changing and speculates on the way that the global population will differ in the future. Beginning with the number 10, the current infant mortality rate in Peru per 1000 births, he shows how the advent of medicine and better healthcare means that they have been able to halve the rate in only 25 years. This doesn’t’ mean that they will have a population boom though, as people who lose fewer children have fewer babies in the end.

His next number is 4 billion, this is the current population of Africa, and as he says, it is this figure that will change global politics in so many ways. This continent is growing so fast as it has a high birth rate and there is improving infant mortality. Not only will the population head out from there but there is massive internal migration too with a whole series of factors behind it. Just over a century ago there were about a dozen cities with a population of over one million people. Now China alone has 121 cities that have a population that size. India has over forty now and most people couldn’t name hardly any of them. In this chapter, he explains how the urban environment sucks in people and resources and how they will set the trends for the population in future

The figure that is needed to maintain a steady population is about 2.1 children. In Singapore, though the fertility rate is 1. We are beginning to think that overpopulation of the world might not be a problem as many countries are now showing these low rates for a raft of reasons, which he goes into in this chapter. This coupled with ageing populations, the median age in Catalonia is now 43 and in other countries is higher still is also adding to the decline in some countries’ populations.

I thought the concept behind this book really worked well. Morland takes the way that the world is changing by exploring ten numbers from populations and countries around the world and expanding them in detail. Not only is it a way of understanding how we have got to where we are at the moment, but it is a good way of seeing the way that the world is heading in the short and medium-term. For me this book worked really well, I liked the way that a simple statistic can explain so much about the world in the past and the way that it is going to be shaped tomorrow.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Every human needs water to survive and in the modern world, I can turn on a tap and have more than enough to drink. Go back several hundred years though, and it was a much tougher proposition. In hamlets and small communities, it is relatively easy to source from a well or river. When you get into towns getting water to people is much harder. For a city like London, the story of its water and how it got to people is a fascinating story.

In this book, the story begins in 1478 when a man called William Campion was convicted of stealing water from the public conduit near his house in Fleet Street. His punishment was suitable public and damp. Most people, including children, drank their water in the form of beer, the brewing process made it much safer to drink. These conduits brought water into the city from outside the walls and it was in short supply and could still be tainted with all manner of pollutants.

In 1613 though the way that water was supplied to the capital changed forever. A new venture called the New River Company was formed and they built a new aqueduct into the city. This company was a new type of business and the King himself had a financial interest in it. Water was originally supplied water in bored out trunks of trees that leaked terribly, and they began to develop new pipes to stop the leaking. They were innovators in many things, using the latest technologies to get water into the capital and new filtration systems to ensure that the water was potable. In fact, these were so good that they are still used today to purify two-thirds of London’s drinking water.

It was also a licence to print money too, this business made so much money that others wanted a piece of the action too. Because there was no overall plan for the infrastructures then it was a bit of a free for all. Each water company wanted to supply water to their customer and would spend a lot of time digging up roads to lays pipes. They would also engage in nefarious activities such as cutting people off with no notice and switching customers without their permission.

I thought this was a fascinating account of the history of water in London, I learnt a lot of things reading this. Higham has a way of explaining the details of the way these companies operated that is very relatable to the general reader. Should you wish to delve into more academic papers then there are references in the back of the book. It does feel that we have gone full circle with private companies in charge of our water once again who only care about profit and avoiding tax through horrendously complex convoluted ownership structures. And the quality is heading south too with water companies being given tacit approval by the government to fill the rivers with crap once again.

5 out of 5 stars

People have different views as to the role of the state in people’s lives, I tend to think that when a population reaches a particular size then the state is an essential thing that actually can be a great benefit to the people that it serves. Those of a more right-wing bent, tend to think that too much state is a bad thing and that private enterprise is the way to ensure a smooth-running society.

The answer is somewhere in the middle. Companies are very good at doing some things well and there are other things that the state is much much better at doing. Maconie is one of those advocating for stronger state institutions in people’s lives and in this book he is putting forward his point of view by taking us through how the state has been there throughout his life since birth.

According to this book, he was the 8,047,970th baby born since the NHS was started in 1945. How he found that out, I have no idea! His first few days were spent in the hospital under the care of the nurses. This free healthcare meant that his parents didn’t have to pay money for a midwife to come to their house to help deliver him. The NHS was there to ensure that he had the inoculations he needed to ensure that he had the best start in life.

As soon as he was old enough he went to school, another service provided by the state. He started at St Joseph’s a catholic primary school and soon after they were moved to a new part of the town and a new school, called St Jude’s. HE was of the age just before they moved from the eleven plus to comprehensive education and was lucky enough to pass and go to the local grammar school. He never really thought about the direction of his life if he hadn’t made it. This also gives him an opportunity to talk about private schools and the massive disproportionate influence that they have over life in our country today.

There is a whole chapter on libraries, one of the public services that I think should be much better funded than they currently are. It was one of his favourite things to do on a regular basis and he is not alone in seeing how the benefits that they bring to society are deep and long-lasting. But, the deep and long cuts that they have suffered have had an impact. This was just one of the services that are provided by local councils, the other being leisure facilities, in particular parks and swimming pools. It brought back memories of going to the pool in Woking that the council thought would best built in the centre of a roundabout…

He has a particular gripe about the state of our transport systems. The long-held aim to privatise everything has meant that the current rail and bus services are not cheap, frequent or reliable, however, the shareholders and directors have made a tidy sum from it, so that’s ok then. Maconie has been a radio presenter on the BBC for many years now, so I would expect some positive bias towards his employer. However, he does make some good points as to the continuation of this national institution, even though it has a raft of issues to deal with I still manage to broadcast a range of quality programmes for people of all walks of life.

I thought that this was excellent. Maconie has a distinctive voice that comes through strongly in this book and he is not afraid to put forward his point of view about the failing of the current government and those that have gone before. It is more than a middle-aged guy having a rant too. He looks back at the way that the state enabled him to be able to participate in society by having a properly funded education and health system and he is seething that those opportunities have been successively taken away by Tory governments over the years.

3 out of 5 stars

I have long had a fascination with some of the most ancient elements of our landscapes. Why people chose to move huge stones from one place to another that had special significance and raise them up in a particular way is something that we may never be able to answer.

We supposedly have more prehistoric monuments than any other country in Europe, the most famous is of course, Stonehenge, but how many know of the others around the country. In Mysterious Britain, Homer Sykes has travelled all over the UK from the far north in Orkney to the very southern point of Cornwall to record images of 110 of these places.

It is not a bad book overall and is a good companion volume to another book I have called, The Modern Antiquarian by Julian Cope. Some of the pictures in here are pretty good, but others I think were taken when the light wasn’t quite right and are a bit flat. It does have a great bibliography too.

4 out of 5 stars

The first book I read about someone buying and doing up a house in another country was A Year in Provence. I thought it was a wonderful book and I fell in love with travel writing at that moment. It has been repeated in many different ways by authors in many different countries with often predictable results. Patricia Clough, a former foreign correspondent, wanted to buy a house in Umbria, but this book is not about the delights and pitfalls of doing that, rather it is the story of the place that she has chosen to make her home.

I remember Antonio Carluccio calling it the belly button of Italy on one of his tv food programmes and it is one of those places that has recently been in the shadow of Tuscany. However, in this book, Clough wants to set the record straight about the region. She has chapters on the people the food and how sometime sit is shaken to it very core as it sits on a fault line. We are led by her through the history of the place and how the poor were ruled by the elite and church, but also how they have begun to flourish under the more liberal modern governments.

It is a place that I have been fortunate to visit and I really liked this gentle introduction to Umbria. Her writing is precise and measured as I’d expect from a journalist. But in that sparse prose, she gives a full account of living in this wonderful part of Italy. I was kind of expecting a Grand Designs with olives, but this is not a blow by blow account of her buying a house and doing it up, though it is mentioned at the end as she imparts her advice of what to look for and do should this be a burning desire. Rather this is an evocative meander through the history and people of Umbria and it bought back happy memories of visiting there.

2.5 out of 5 stars

I have never lived in a city, just small to medium towns, but the thing that I like about them is they have layers and layers of history provided you know where to look. Brito is one of those that can trace its roots back to prehistory and the opening chapter in this book starts with the traces that the people of that time left behind.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t a city back then, but when the Romans arrived they saw the strategic advantage of the place and left remnants of their villas for use to find a couple of thousand years later. There was probably a lot happening in the dark ages, but as very few people wrote it down, not much is known about it. But with the Normans arrival, the historical record gets a lot better.

It is known as a trading city and parts of the book explore the things that were imported in and exported from the docks. The money that was made by the merchants of the city was not always from ethical sources, hence the rightful removal of that statue a little while back. There were some things in here that I knew, but there was a number that I didn’t. One was finding out that the third largest set of standing stones in the UK is in Bristol!

I haven’t been to Bristol that often, but a couple of years ago a relative moved there and we thought we would be visiting more often. The pandemic put paid to that… But this is a useful little guide to some of the places in Bristol that are worth a look next time I am there.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Her family have always worked with the forest originally by logging parts of it and sending the vast trunks downriver. She joined the forest service and it was there that she first noticed that some trees that had been planned were really not doing well at all. She checked them and they had been planted to the specification laid out, these had been drawn up to ensure even growth of the trees, but they were dying. Yet nearby were trees in a patch of ground that was in rude health. What was going on?

In other parts of the forest, she would find seedlings growing happily under larger trees that seemed to be existing on almost no water, and yet elsewhere on new plantations, small trees were not getting the water and nutrients that they needed. She did not know how this was happening and working out why they were dying would consume her completely.

This book is the journey of that discovery, how she used radioactive carbon isotopes to see how water and nutrients were passed between trees in a healthy forest and what place the networks of mycelium played in the process.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir

I thought that this was very good indeed. She is a brilliant scientist and a good communicator. The work that she has done in investigating the way that mycelium connects between the same species of trees and very different species helps them both to live better. But tangled in this book is the story of her life and her battle with cancer and the fight she had with the forestry establishment and vested interests to get her research taken seriously. It is a seriously good read.