4 out of 5 stars

I have been a fan of Billy Connolly for as long as I can remember and sadly never took the opportunity to go and see him live before he retired in 2018. I have seen many of his recorded performances though and I think all of his travelogues as he has been around various parts of the world.

This book is a collection of some of his best-known stories that he tells as part of his sets. He is a very human comedian, he is as happy to rip the piss out of himself as he is to call out the hypocrisy of others whilst giving you a stitch laughing about it so much.

Some of the tall tales and wee stories in here I have heard before. That doesn’t make them any less funny though. One of my favourites was his description of swimming in the North Sea as a Child! Provided you don’t mind a bit (ok a lot) of profanity then there is almost certainly something in here that will make you laugh. Great stuff and thanks for all the laughs, Billy.

3 out of 5 stars

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

Insects generally have a short life span, often measured in hours, but sometimes they can live for days. A typical fly has their whole life compressed into the days that number less than a month and this beautifully illustrated little book is the story of one fly.

He begins his life in a small pile of dachshund poo, not the most salubrious of locations, but for the fly, this is a perfect start. He emerges from his pupa after three days and with his 4000 eyes is amazed by the world around him. He finds a buzzard on a lamp post and they begin the most strange of friendships that last him his entire life…

This is quite a lot of fun to read, it has many funny moments throughout the story as well as showing the lifecycle of a fly during their brief life. The illustrations are just blue and white with line drawings and are really nicely done.

I have always thought it strange that the element that we need to live, water is also the one that can kill us really easily. We are fortunate enough to be able to get clean fresh water from the tap, but years ago finding sources of this life-sustaining liquid was a challenge. This is probably why many cultures have treated rivers and pools with reverence and awe.

This need also became had a ritual side, hence why ancient artefacts are frequently found in rivers and pools; offerings to a water deity that is almost totally forgotten. Except some of those stories can still be found in the folklore that has been passed down to us today.

In this book, Chainey and Winsham have drawn these stories from all over the world. So we can learn about the Legend of Cristalda and Pizzomunno of the coast of Puglia, Italy, fables from islands all over the world, and tales from the seven seas. There are short essays on the hidden rivers of London and the last river that some people would cross on the way to the other side, Acheron.

I was surprised how many stories had common themes, something that the authors point out in the short book. I liked this and thought that it was a good introduction to all things watery and folklore related. If you are expecting the actual stories then you might be disappointed, rather you should think of this as a springboard to use the comprehensive bibliography to read wider. It is a beautiful book too, with glorious gold detailing on the cover. I loved the artwork by Joe McLaren that is used liberally throughout the book.

4 out of 5 stars

The point about classical tales is that they are a recollection of a bygone age, telling the stories of the gods and their dealings with lesser entities and their run-ins with mere mortals. These stories have entertained and informed people for over two millennia now, but do they have any relevance to the modern age and life in the fast-paced relentless world we live in.

Someone who wants to see if their messages in the myths are still relevant today is Peter Fiennes. It is a literal and a physical journey to the beautiful country of Greece travel to the locations and walk through the beautiful land and seascapes. To help him navigate these ancient paths he refers to Pausanius’ Guide to Greece, a collection of ten volumes that was written in the second century AD. He is also in search of the best Greek salad too as he travels from Athens, across the Peloponnese, tramps around the ruins of Corinth, onto Olympia and wanders around Delphi.

It is a well-trodden path and he is following the literary footsteps of Henry Miller, Patrick Leigh Fermor and of course, Byron. As well as looking back the past 2000 years and more, Fiennes is looking at the state of the country now and considering the impact that climate change will have.

I didn’t think that it was as focused as his previous two books and it felt more whimsical, but I think that this was the effect he was going for. He recounts the dreams that he has on his travels, hoping to find that the ancient landscape has given them meaning. I must admit that I am not a huge fan of classical stories and do not know all of them. Fiennes does make them relevant though. However, I did like the travel aspect of this book a lot. The descriptions of the landscapes that he passes through on foot or by bus are quite evocative and his easy-going character brings out the best in the people he meets. Good to hear that he met up with Julian Hoffman too who takes him to some of the wildlife spots in Greece and highlights some of the impending ecological issues that the country will face. Good stuff and if you like Greece then this should be on your reading list.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Susan Ogilvy has been a botanical illustrator for the past thirty years and has exhibited around the world. But it was only recently that she has begun painting nests. One day whilst tidying up her garden she came across a strangely shaped lump of vegetation under a tree. It was only after she had brought it inside and it had dried out that she realised that it was a chaffinch nest. And it was utterly beautiful.

This soon became an obsession, and she began to collect nests that had been abandoned or friends would find them for her, in particular, Deon who works for the British Trust for Ornithology would bring her examples that he would find on his walks observing the birds of Somerset.

The result is this book full of exquisite paintings of these nests. Ogilvy carefully measured each of the nests that she obtained and these small works of art are equal to these nests that the birds create. Each of the nests has a short essay about the bird, where the nest was found and some notes on the construction method and materials used.

Ogilvy is such a talented artist and her eye for the detail of each of the nests that she draws and paints makes this an incredibly beautiful book. I really liked it.

3 out of 5 stars

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

We have just had a family stay with us for New Year’s Eve and part of that is us cooking for them and having conversations over a laden table. We have done this for over 20 years now and we have gone from being childless to five children, three of whom are adults. The act of providing food and friendship to family and friends is almost entirely opposite to the nihilistic experience which considers that everything is meaningless.

To share a table is to share a meal, but the meal goes a lot further than the physiological dimension of eating.

Esquirol has drawn from his years of work to present a reflection on the human condition that shows how intimacy and everyday acts can warm protect and guide us. He shows how we need the tangible, things we can touch away from the screen and that simplicity does not mean banality. Not every second of life is instagramable, there are moments that are better kept in the memory.

He explores many factors in this densely packed book. There are warning of the perils of navel-gazing, where nothing is to be found other than hatred, loneliness, despair rack and ruin. He explains that how we see others gives no indication as to how they feel and how looking in detail at the definition of health, asking if this means that we are all ill? Probably not but the very act of being close to someone is as useful as treating them medically. I did learn that the alternative meaning of to guard someone is to watch attentively and care for them. Equally startling to learn was that if we are to take away memory, love vanishes.

These day muttering doesn’t come from a lack of wine; in fact rather than a scarcity of anything these days, it comes from an excess of practically everything

I will be honest I have not read much philosophy in the past. And by not much, I mean none. So for me, this book at times was a struggle to read as just some of the basic concepts were challenging to say the least. That said there were elements of the book that I did like, but in particular, the discipline of really really thinking about a problem from all angles before coming to a conclusion.

4 out of 5 stars

Nathan is eking out an existence in the slums of a city that is battered by the sea. He lives with his parents and the meagre earnings go to helping buy medicine for his father. He has a knack for extracting the strange and unusual creatures from the Living Mud, some he does by using the Itch within him to draw them closer.

The family is desperate though and his mother reached the point where she has to sell him to the mysterious Master of Mordew. This man draws his power from the corpse of God that is hidden in his catacombs. But the inner strength that Nathan has is mightier than the Master’s and he is one of the few who could destroy him. The Master sees him as a threat and takes steps to betray Nathan and get the upper hand.

Darkness is all around Nathan as he begins to discover how to use his power.

I really liked it, even though the story takes you to places that you would never want to venture alone. The world that Pheby has created is quite something, it feels cohesive, magical and oh so dark, I am not going to say much more about the plot as if you like dark and immersive fantasy books then you need to read this. I was most impressed by the glossary at the back of the book, he has put so much into the back story of the place and the people of Mordew. There are two more books to come too!

4 out of 5 stars

Our brains are not wired specifically for counting. Until we are taught otherwise, the untrained maths brain will only notice up to three things, before considering any above that is just more. Instead, we have a deeply ingrained culture that tells us that maths is important and that it matters. But we all have our limits, for some, it is the GCSE, but others go on to much higher levels.

Brooks begins with arithmetic, the simplest form of maths. As a species, we have been counting for around 20,000 years and even now we can see differences in cultures in the way that people use their fingers to count. He touches on fractions and negative numbers before we arrive at geometry. For some this may bring back the horror’s of a Pi you can’t eat, but it is more straightforward than algebra where we are reminded of that moment in maths when they add the complexity of letters to maths. Who remembers the quadratic formula?
For me though, the point when my brain juddered a little was calculus. I still understand it in principle, but it has been sooooo very long since I did it and rusty is an understatement… His chapter on logarithms seems easy by comparison and for some reason, imaginary numbers for me were relatively straightforward to master. As the saying goes, there are lies, dam lies and statistics and those that have a mastery of these slippery numbers can often hold the upper edge on those that can’t.

As maths books go, this is a pretty good one. Brooks tells us about the history behind each particular subject and some of the key people who have been instrumental in making our modern world a mathematical one. It is very readable, and only occasionally veers into the realm of the formula. Should that bring back nightmares from school then that can be skipped if necessary. If the thought of maths doesn’t terrify you too much, then this is a good place to start.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

As the nights draw in after the clocks go back, stories with darker moments are what some people seek out. And the editors of this book have sought out what they think that people want to read in the depths of midwinter. The twelve selected stories are drawn from some well-known authors, like Daphne du Maurier and Muriel Spark, to others that I have never heard of.

It wouldn’t be a collection of ghost stories without a moor and the first is The Ghost at the Cross Roads and a card game with a dark stranger. There is a tense story about a séance that goes wrong and another about a man who has a dread of cats. It is not just the winter that is chilling in some of these stories…

As with any collection, there were some I liked and others that I didn’t. It leans heavily on the gothic melodrama as I was kind of expecting, but there was the odd one or two in here that I did find unsettling. Not all were as scary as I thought that they’d be, but it is a nice wintery collection of stories. A ghost story told around an open fire in a pub is going to come across very differently when told walking down a misty holloway. If you like your Christmas stories less twee, then this is a good place to start.

Three Favourite Stories
On The Northern Ice
Ganthony’s Wife
A Fall of Snow

4 out of 5 stars

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

This is a companion volume to the earlier book, Cottongrass Summer that was published in 2020 and in this book he takes us through each of the seasons with thoughts and essays on a wide variety of subjects. He has taken

The book begins, as you’d expect with Mistletoe, a plant that Dennis doesn’t see where he lives now, but always comes across when he is in Southern England in the winter. As the leaves fall away in the autumn, the heavy globes are their most visible. They had an attraction to people who used these still green plants in ritual ways, as well as being an important food for mistle thrushes who spread the sticky seeds onto other trees. He writes about a friend who has a barn owl in her shed and the alarm call of the Ptarmigan.

This was written during the first lockdown of 2020 and that world-changing event is reflected in some of the essays in here, he sees more of the comings and goings in his garden than he would have done previously and it gives him the time to track the white-tailed eagles that were released on the Isle of Wight. One of them has even been in Poole Harbour recently. It is not just about the UK though, there is an essay on the Californian condor, Rocky Mountain goats and Pears for bears in Germany.

He is a passionate writer with a series of persuasive arguments for always seeking to improve the way that we care for the natural world. The constant theme that runs through the book, is a warning that what we have now can be so easily lost and when it is gone, it is gone forever. It is not so much a timely book more of an urgent reminder to do something to change. Great stuff.