3.5 out of 5 stars

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

We are fortunate that just north of us we have a designated dark skies area, Cranborne Chase where there is so little artificial light that the magnificent spectacle that is the night sky can be seen in all its glory. But knowing what each of those pinpricks of light is many lifetimes work for scientists and astronomers.

For the layperson, though it can be a bit overwhelming. The distances between each of the stars are mind-bogglingly large. I still can get my head around some of the numbers quoted from us to our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri. It is four light-years away and you can’t even see it unless you have a telescope!

To help find your way through the vastness of space, Andrew Newsam, Professor of Astronomy Education and Engagement has written this guide for those that want to know a little bit more about the heavens. He has split the book into five sections, a brief history of observation of the stars and planets, a chapter on the sun, the star that gives us heat and light and the solar system. He then moves onto other stars and then galaxies, before ending with a chapter going right back to the very beginnings of the universe when the big bang happened.

As an introduction to the sun, planets and stars that we can see from our pale blue dot, this is a great way of finding out a little bit more about them. Newsam writes in a way that is not too technical but is drawing on his experience as a Professor in the subject. If you are looking for more detail there are other books out there that will fill in the gaps. The only thing that I thought it was missing was a further reading section for those that want to use this as a stepping stone for more information about the particular astronomy subject that fascinates them.

3.5 out of 5 stars

As Terry Pratchett said, “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human” and we as a species have been telling stories for thousands of years. And until the advent of paper, these were an oral tradition, told between individuals who passed them on in turn. The stories that have come to make our own mythology have in their own way defined who we are now to an extent. In those stories, you can find dragons, giants and other creatures that have not walked these lands in millennia.

The stores that Jeffs has chosen to make up this collection have been split into four chunks, In the Beginning, where she retells the story of how Albion got its name from and the naming of the Humber and the Severn. In the prehistory section, some of the selected stories include how Conwenna saved Britain and the Dragons that Lived Under Oxford. Merlin and Arthur feature heavily in the Antiquity section and the stories in the Middle Ages section bring us right up to the Norman invasion.

I mostly liked this retelling of the myths and folklore that permeate our history. It is beautifully illustrated, and I liked that the stories had been updated to a modern language. That said, I did have a couple of problems with it, even though the stories are written in a modern language Jeffs has taken the liberty to alter some of them subtly too. I personally don’t think that this is necessary as the original stories as we know then are strange and occasionally defy explanation for a reason. The second reason was that after each story was a little vignette of her visiting the place where the events were supposed to have taken place and they felt a bit bolted on. I would have preferred them to be as part of the introduction or afterword to each chapter.

4 out of 5 stars

Unsure whether to buy a home in Norfolk, what swung it for him was the song from a Cetti’s Warbler that he heard as he stood outside the front door. Outside the back door was a patch of marshland that they wanted to make a conservation area and his wife’s careful negotiations meant that they had a home and patch of land that would not be lost to development.

They had an opportunity to buy the land from their next-door neighbour, Barry and worked with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust to ensure that it became appealing to all manner of species. He isn’t really rewilding it, just letting it get on with life and death in all its rich forms and taking time to enjoy it. For their youngest son Eddie who has Down’s syndrome, it became a place of calm, a place where he could ask any question about what he saw around him when they walked out to their bench.

Set loosely over a year, this is a book that acknowledges time passing, and yet the writing makes it feel timeless. There are moments of sheer delight, when he looks out of the window and sees a marsh harrier passing over or the hare that makes the place his home. There are times he gets furious too, not at what he has but at the way we are discarding parts of the natural world without a care for out interdependent futures. There were some great moments too, like when he opens the moth trap, a birthday gift from his wife, both him and Eddie are hooked

What you see is great, but the greater thing is being out there. Not what you look at but what you’re part of. And that is the greatest gift the marsh brings to us. We’re not the audience, we’re participants.

I thought this was really good. I liked that whilst there was participation from his family in the book, they did not overpower the narrative, the marsh and all the life that inhabits it or passes over is the focus. The other participant in the book is his son Eddie and the way that he reacts to the natural world. If you are looking for personal angst in amongst nature, then this is not the book to find it in, rather this is a more mediative book, celebrating the tiny things that happen each and every day as he looks out the window, or sits on the bench with Eddie, drinking apple juice and beer enjoying the evening sun. It is a book to savour and enjoy.

4 out of 5 stars

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

It has been a long time since I have read any fairy tales to my children, or even to myself even. I even remember reading the classic stories way way back in my childhood too. These stories are still heard and seen regularly today, they can be seen in the pantos that follow the Christmas season and the plethora of animated movies (that I must admit I haven’t seen hardly any of)

These modern retellings of the fairy tales are often a more sanitised version of these are sometimes brutal stories. Probably the most famous names associated with these tales are the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, But some of the other famous stories were collected by people whose names are not as well known. I didn’t know the authors of the famous tales Hansell and Gretel and all of the Arabian Nights stories. Tracing the origins of them will take Jubber across the northern climes and then heading through the Black Forest, onto Southern Europe before arriving in the Middle East.

Each of the chapters begins with the story which we are going to learn about. Most of them I knew, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, but there are others in here that I had not come across before, such as The Tale of All Kinds of Fur and The Tale of the Firebird. We are taken through the known history behind them and how they came to be known to a wilder world.

I thought that Jubber has written a fascinating book, his prose is engaging and you can tell that he is obviously still captivated by the stories even today. He even manages to persuade his teenage friends to go to an animated film at the Bournemouth cinema one day rather than watch an action film. He tells captivating stories on how these came to be wider known in global culture and the little know background about the people that found these stories. If you have a thing for fairy tales and have always wondered where they came from this is a good book to start with. It has also made me want to reread the fairy tales of my childhood too.

4 out of 5 stars

Sri Lanka is a pearl-shaped island just off the southern Indian coast. Traces of human life have been found going back thousands of years, and it abounds with legends from its past. The island is rich in wildlife and forest too and even has its own subspecies of the Asian elephant. They were part of the commonwealth until 1948 when they declared independence and they have had a troubled history since that point with pretty much civil war between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations.

Close to where Gimlette lives in London is a community of Tamil’s. It is thought that there are around 8000 of them, but nobody knows for certain, This is a small proportion of the number in the UK and they are a people that are fairly self-contained. Their temple looks like an art deco department store, but inside it was like stepping into Sri Lankan. He knew then it was a place that he would have to see for himself.

On arrival in Columbo, he stopped to as a man the direction to go, who by chance happened to be heading in that direction. They were soon in a three-wheeler in the chaotic traffic heading towards the temple, Gangarama. It was slowly dawning on him that something was going on and he asked to go back. They took him and asked for a huge fee for his experience, which after a few minutes of sitting around was negotiated down substantially. The first few weeks in the city, he walked everywhere though navigating was challenging as their beautiful script was incomprehensible to him. After a few weeks, it was time to leave the city and head out into the countryside.

At that point, the fireflies appeared, filling the treehouse with their twinkly light. It was like being in the cockpit of a tiny thatched jet.

Being driven was an experience, they have a very different set of safety parameters and the rules of the road are more fiction than law. The road took them to the coast, where the sea glinted its amethyst colour in the sun. Inland the landscape became harsher and drier and he saw his first signs warning about elephants. They stop and climb a small hill and there in front of them were hundreds of silvery wewas. These water channels are not natural, they are a massive civil engineering feat to bring water across the island to irrigate the land.

In places, everything had been scorched away, and pools of crimson had formed in the hollows. The thorn tresses looked as if they’d been added later in ink, they were so spare and black.

His travels take him all over the island and to some of the little islands off the coast and in each place he finds out more and more about the people and the conflict that caused so much anguish. He learns how they live with some of the horrific things that the various sides inflicted on each other and sifts through their complex and long history, finding out how they have lived under various European authorities.

Gimlette has a sharp eye for detail and a way of travelling that does not presume anything. Rather he finds interesting places to go and he waits for things to happen and then tells us about them and the people that he meets there. I am a big fan of the other books that Gimlette has written, in particular, his award-winning Wild Coast and the most recently published, The Gardens Of Mars. However, I didn’t quite connect with this one as much as those other two. I think that it was because there was a lot about the civil war in the book and it felt more like a history book rather than a travel book. I thought that it was still worth reading, though as he has a wonderful way with words. There are a few pictures from his trip in the book, but there are more here.

4 out of 5 stars

Tim Moore has a knack for selecting travel adventures that don’t really fit the norm. He has followed the route of the Tour de France on his own bike, walked with a donkey across Spain, worked his way around the streets of the Monopoly board and suffered the delights of the Eurovision Song Contest. This challenge though was slightly more sensible compared to some. He wanted to take a Model T Ford from the Atlantic and drive all the way across America to reach the pacific ocean.

There was a twist though, he was doing it to see if he could get a greater understanding of why this country had voted for the orange glowing businessman. His route would take him from the gentle landscape of Virginia to the place where his car, was made, Detroit, before heading south to Texas.

After experiencing the deep south, he turns north to head up through the towns of the flyover states in the state that voted for Trump, staying in slightly seedy motels and occasionally people’s homes. The beautiful car he is driving is very different to anything he has experienced before, and he knows that he has to learn the starting ritual otherwise he isn’t going to be getting anywhere on his first sol day. Oh, and being utterly mechanically inept isn’t going to help his cause either…

But first, he has to get the 160 miles from where he bought the car, that he christens Mike, to the coast. Driving these old Models T’s is utterly unlike driving a modern car, there are no creature comforts, air-con or soundproofing. The pedal configuration is different to modern cars, there are three pedals, still, the right-hand pedal is the brake, the left hand is the clutch and gear selector with a choice of high and low gears and the centre pedal selects reverse. Somehow he makes it and collects a bottle full of Atlantic seawater with the hope of being able to tip it into the Pacific.

The other issue with these cars is they need constant tinkering and maintenance to keep going. Fine for those that have some technical competence, but for Moore, this is quite challenging. But slowly he gets used to doing the things that he needs to do each day to keep it going. It does break down. Quite a lot. And almost everywhere he stopped, there would be someone who knew someone who had one of these and was willing to help him get back running again. In fact, Mike would need an awful lot of TLC all the way up to open-heart surgery to get him to the other side of America.

I am a big fan of Tim Moore’s books and I liked this a lot. His travels are always slightly outlandish, and mostly mad and he has a knack for extracting humour from a lot of the situations he encounters. He learnt a lot about America under Trump, how it had become more polarised with people’s political opinions. However, even in the flyover states, there was still a willingness to help a mechanically inept Englishman who had a wildly different opinion to most of those helping him. It is not as funny as some of his other books though, however, there are moments of hilarity, such as when some guys had helped him put it all back together and could not get it to start at all, then Moore remembered that he hadn’t turned the fuel back on…

4 out of 5 stars

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

There have been lots of books written about the fine architecture of our towns and cities, but there are fewer books about the homes that people lived and worked in our countryside. After World War 2, Geoffrey Grigson along with the photographer Percy Hennel was invited by the artist John Piper to look at the English Farmhouse. This was to more than an architectural study, rather it would be a consideration of post-war agriculture and contemplation of the state of rural England.

Rather than select a farmhouse in a known village, Grigson has used a lot of artistic licences and imagined one called Ashton Farm in the village called Netton. Neither of these places can be found on a map, but he makes it clear that the one that was chosen does exist. Or at least it did exist as even after the book was written the buildings had reached the point where they actually collapsed. And with that destruction, the link between the buildings and the landscape was gone forever. The structures that would come to replace them were anonymous steel framed and would come to be found all over the country in the end.

First, though he has to set the context, The farm that he describes throughout the book is nestled in the chalk of Wessex. It sits on the escarpment using the land above for crops and the lands below for grazing and hay. The farm has existed in one form or other since the Saxon times and there are very few metaled roads, but lots of paths and trackways.

Each chapter looks at a particular detail of the farm, from the sarsen stones that are used in conjunction with the chalk both of which need skilled craftsmen to cut and dress the stone. Where bricks have been used in the buildings, they can be dated by looking at their size. Pictures of walls made from chalk and brick are included to show construction methods.

Roofing materials were originally thatch, but some of the buildings on the farm use slate and there are instances of corrugated iron being used under rotting thatch to prolong the life of a roof. Timber was used extensively and there are some magnificent shots of the inside of barns showing the construction methods used. There is also a chapter on how the poorly maintained buildings are slowly crumbling and collapsing.

Believe it or not, this is the first book that I have read by Geoffrey Grigson, having only read books by his wife and daughter before this. Having got an interest in architecture, I did like this, especially the forensic detail that he goes into about the buildings. I did have the odd problem with it though, for me the thing that was lacking was not having a known place that he was referring to in each of the chapters. I get why he may have done it with privacy issues in mind, as the farm buildings that he refers to did seem to be very much a real place. That said I did enjoy this a lot. He has a wonderful way with words and a deep love of the place where these villages and farms can be found on the chalk downs. I bought another of his books recently, Country Writings, that I am going to move up the TBR.