4 out of 5 stars

Damascus has a lot of history. There are traces of settlements dating back to 6300bc and earlier in certain areas. By the time of the 11th-century bc, there was a city there, formed by the Aramaeans who stopped being nomads and formed larger tribes. It is possible to find the city mentioned in all the major historical periods, Greek, Roman, early Islam and all the way through to the Ottomans. It could rightly justify calling itself the oldest city in the world.

It is this city with its layers and layers of history that Thubron arrives at in the mid-1960s. The book opens with him climbing Mount Kaassioun, it afforded a good view of the city. He could see the streets that are contorted and crushed against each other, each betraying their age if you knew what to look for. He had been joined on the climb by a local who had many questions. Mostly he wanted to know where he was going after he had passed through the city. Thubron replies saying that he intends to stay several months and the man looks on in disbelief.

Sitting at a café planning where he wants to go he gets talking to two brothers. The local busses won’t take him to the orchard that he wants to see, so he suggests a horse to them, they recommend a bike which he tends to think is a better idea and they head off to a street with the strange name of Straight. With their help, he hires a bike for a tiny amount of money for a month. It is not a bad bike provided that you don’t worry about the brakes. Cycling around the city was going to be a frequently life-changing event.

He spends days moving around the city, passing along twisting passageways that he can touch both sides of. The ancient city is around fifteen feet below the surface, but if you know what you are looking for Roman pillars can be spotted as they have been absorbed into the modern city. The walls twist around places that are no longer there, just hints of what once was. It was an easy place to get lost in. Standing on a corner with various folded pages and maps of where to go would draw people to him to help. Everyone had an opinion on which direction the place he was looking for, was and he sometimes found it easier to slip away down the labyrinthine back streets.

This is not so much of a travel book, he, after all, stays in Damascus for an extended period of time. Rather this is a full immersion into the city. He reads stories and its histories, and there is a lot about the history of this ancient city and then heads out onto the streets to find where it happened to unpick the history from the myths. He grows to love the city, flaws and all and knows that it will continue to change as it has done over the past thousands of years. Thubron is one of my favourite travel writers who has a wonderful and evocative way of writing. Worth reading for a vivid image of a city that will never be this way again.

3.5 out of 5 stars

This Caribbean sun-soaked island is one of two full Communist states that are left in the world today. The other is North Korea. Unlike that closed state, Cuba is open to tourists who want to visit, though most rarely venture out of their holiday resorts to see how life is like there. I have never been but would like to visit one day. I have seen lots of photos of the place, the iconic images of the slight tired baroque architecture with 1950s American cars are quite evocative and the music as we discovered from the Bueno Vista Social Club Is quite exquisite.

Cuba has had a difficult relationship with its neighbour, America, who really didn’t like the fact that they had a full-blown communist state in its immediate vicinity. Their blockade of the island had been going on for decades and has meant that the standards of living have been driven down. The railway there was once the pride of Latin America, but now it is run down, but somehow, just still working. For little more than the price of a can of beer, a Cuban resident can travel the entire 1200 km length from Havana to Guantanamo. It is this railway that Peter Millar wants to travel along and discover the real Cuba.

He begins his journey in the capital, Havana, but first, he has to find the station. Wandering through the city, he finds the parts of it that haven’t received UNESCO money for renovation and have pretty much crumbled into rubble. It is the same with the Cadillac’s, there are less driving around now, but many more on bricks succumbing to rust. He was expecting it, but it is still a bit of a shock nonetheless. Locating the station he heads in to buy a ticket and finds that the train to Santiago leaves at eight. He asks about trains to Matanzas but is told that there is only one train and it leaves at eight. He is also informed that to get a train on a particular day he would need to buy the ticket a few days before. This is going to be much more complicated than he thought.

Seeing the train is a bit of a shock though, he has not seen that much rust on anything moving ever. It is not exactly reassuring, but he pays his fare using a CUCs, a special tourist rate that is much more than the locals have to pay. He climbs aboard and it is not long before they are moving with a worrying series of clanks and creeks. Ten seconds later they stop. This sequence repeats itself a few times and eventually, they are moving at the heady speed of 20 miles an hour. Millar is sure that it can’t safely go any faster than that. When the train stops at the platforms, people climb aboard to try and sell the passengers food, drink and anything else that they think they might need.

Waiting to be given the opportunity to buy a ticket for a train that hasn’t arrived but should have been and gone hours ago.

It is the beginning of scenarios that repeat themself as he heads across the island. Late trains, barely palatable food and night spent in bars drinking the tourist approved rum whilst talking to the locals. However, he gets a feel for the island and the people and how they are managing under a communist state. The people there are literate and educated and enjoy free healthcare, but they are restricted in many ways and very tightly controlled economic freedoms. These have been loosened a little under Raúl Castro, but people are ingenious and find ways around the system.

I liked this book, Millar shows that there is much more to the island to discover if you are prepared to get out from the all-inclusive resorts. The better parts of the book are his interactions with the people and they are sometimes really funny as he gets frustrated with a system that cannot and will not bend to the demands of an individual. Whilst I think that he has to a certain extent got under the skin of the island, there were a couple of things that did grate a little with me. One of which was constantly comparing the country to his time living behind the Iron curtain and the other was his obsession with the short-skirted girls. They are only minor gripes, it did make me want to still visit the island, especially before the American’s arrive in force. Not quite a good as Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin, but still worth reading though.

4 out of 5 stars

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

When I went to college and university I learn how to make things out of metal to greater and greater precision on a variety of tools. When I got to work we were taught how to use one of the very first CNC machines that were that old that they used punched cards to program the machine. Now days an engineer doesn’t even need to venture out onto the workshop floor to see a piece being made to very high precision.

Whilst we need high precision for some things, I can appreciate the care and attention that has gone into a hand made and beautiful object. There is something about the way that these items are crafted, that each is unique in its own special way and that there are still people with the skills to turn, wood, metal or ceramics into useful objects. Kary knows this process intimately, he began as a designer, manufacturer and supplier and now is a designer and maker of his own furniture from local hardwoods near to his home in Devon. His style has changed from what he learnt as an apprentice, rather than remove all the imperfections of the raw material he now works with the flaws to make them part of the finished piece.

His journey to find others who share his philosophy on making things with his hands will take him to basket makers, boat makers, a riddle maker, bodgers, ceramic specialists and foresters. With each of these people, he sees how they are taking the raw materials, working with those materials to transform them into something functional, useful and yet still beautiful.

Hard labour it would be, yet within it, to really make it work, there is something that transcends labour, a spirit which connects the human, the task and the transformation. There is magic here.

For a number of people the things that these artisans make, are not going to be affordable, which is why he has been involved with camps and teaching people who would not have had the opportunity to learn these crafts otherwise. Even though he is a master craftsman, he still finds techniques and skill that he has not yet come across. I really liked this book. Each chapter is preface with the beautiful illustrations of Lou Tonkin. Kary writes in a gentle and subtle way, teasing out the stories from the craftswomen and men that he meets on his journey around the country, whilst expanding on the principle, it is not what you are making, rather it is the process of making that we need. It is a similar philosophy to that of Peter Korn in his book, Why We Make Things and Why it Matter (which I can also recommend).

3 out of 5 stars

After a burglary, Tamsin Calidas and her husband decided that they had had enough of London and headed north to a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. They were turning their back on the city life and high paying careers their new home was to be a semi-derelict croft. They intended to renovate it whilst living in a small caravan.

It was idyllic at first, it is a beautiful part of the world up there. They bought some animals and made progress on the property. Their neighbours were fairly cool about them being there, implying that there had been someone else that the plot was reserved for, and rather than making friends they were having to defend their right to be there. It wasn’t the best place to be as she began to feel more and more isolated.

She longed for children and had reached to point where they needed to start the IVF treatments, quite a stressful process at the best of times, but this was enhanced given their remoteness from hospitals that could carry out those procedures. It was to be one of the things that did for her marriage too. Soon she is left alone on the island, with two broken hands after an accident and a separate incident.

All of this, as well as trying to run the croft on her own, was to push her to the very edge of the abyss.

In the current pandemic, moving to a Scottish Island well away from anyone else does have quite a lot of appeal. It is not your classic relocation book where the photogenic couple move to a beautiful part of the country, make lots of friends and reinvent their lives in a positive way and change the stresses of city life to a productive and creative life. This is very much darker, she is assaulted and subject to the overt and covert hostility of the locals to the croft that she is living in. The middle section of the book is emotionally quite raw and makes for pretty grim reading.

The final part of the book did rescue it a little, she looks to the more elemental parts of the natural world to sustain and nourish her mental health and at times her writing can be quite lyrical and poetic. However, the book has caused some controversy with the people that she shares the island with, who have a different take on the events mentioned, so I am not sure if she will be staying there much longer!

5 out of 5 stars

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

Undertaking training to become a doctor is around seven years of your life, or longer depending on your specialism. To take the decision to pause when you are a junior doctor and cycle around the world is not a light decision. He had the idea from Langer’s lines, the topological lines that are drawn on the body and show the natural orientation of the collagen fibres. He sat down with an atlas and drew lines across each of the seven continents of a possible route. His mum pointed out that Antarctica might be a bit chilly, so he decided on six continents. The travel bug was in his blood though, as a teenager he would often be found standing on a road holding a sign to ‘Anywhere’. This would be the ultimate way of getting it out of his system.

He departed from St Thomas’s Hospital where he had been working and a few of his friends there had gathered to see him off and even managed to find a piece of tape for him to cross. Being January it was a bit chilly and was soon going to get much colder. Before departing he had volunteered to be examined medically before the trip to see what the effects of cycling that far around the world would have on his body, though perhaps agreeing to be checked for anything was not the wisest decision. He hadn’t done much training for the trip, reasoning that it was going to be tough, so why add extra months of toughness. He did rue his decision a little, as he struggled to overtake a jogger on his fully loaded bike… He did 14 miles on his first day and slept in a guesthouse in Bexleyheath and woke the following morning to snow.

It was to get much colder as he cycled through France and up into the Alps and sleeping in a tent he would wake up to find everything frozen solid. Sitting hunched over a cup of coffee in a café desperately trying to get warm he makes the decision to head to Nice and the warmth of the French riviera. He was eating lots and the city boy blubber was beginning to drop away. He had filled one of his front panniers with biscuits. More worryingly was a pain in one of his knees, and being a doctor he had a mental list of what it could be, and none of the prognosis was good. Surgery was needed and it would be three months before he could resume.

But he did. He was reunited with his bike in Istanbul and the continent of Africa beckoned. His plan was to head down the eastern side and then halfway down, head across to the western side heading towards South Africa. He was joined by Nyomi, a former flatmate from London for this part of the trip. All the way through, children were fascinated by them, they would wake up, open the tent to find an audience of twenty looking at them. They found that they were pretty good shots with the slings that they used too. To understand the place though he felt that he had to see its hinterland and to do this he offered to help at the hospital in Lodwar. It makes him think about the reason that people become ill; in the UK it is a combination of factors, but in that part of Africa it is almost always down to the crushing poverty.

They reached Cape town and Nyomi returned home. He headed to the airport to get a flight to Ushuaia for the South American leg of his trip. He had set himself the target of reaching Alaska in 20 months, ensuring that when he got there he was cycling during the summer, and not freezing his arse off again… As he cycled north through Chile, the volcano Puyehue which had been dormant for 50 years had exploded leaving a six-mile by three-mile gash in the surface and covering everything in a good layer of dust for good measure. As he headed north, climbing the mountains was making him suffer from altitude sickness, he lived for each descent. But it is an encounter at gunpoint that changes him on this continent, and every time he has tomato soup, he remembers that moment.

Filling out the form for the entry into the USA brought back memories of childhood where the excitement of American culture seeped into ours and seemed shinier and better. Sitting outside a bar called Kansas City Barbeque, where a scene from Top Gun was filmed, he strikes up a conversation with the waitress and manages to get a place to sleep for free. He contemplates staying a little longer, but Highway One beckons so he heads off. It is the least eventful part of his trip and he crosses the Arctic Circle to reach his final destination in North America, Deadhorse. Next stop, Australia.

He had messaged, Claire, an on and off girlfriend, and she had agreed to cycle across Australia with him and they met up in Sydney. It was fairly uneventful, apart from Claire being bitten by a huntsman spider which thankfully wasn’t serious. They were soon across the country and on their way to Timor. Asia is another level of intensity to his ride, the traffic was much busier, Jakarta was almost permanent gridlock which made for stressful cycling. It was in Singapore that Claire decided that she wanted to go to Japan, alone. They parted company and he headed for Malaysia, where he was to acquire dengue fever…

He spent a few days off fromcycling in Bangkok, planning the next stage and took up the invitation to join a medical team in Cambodia who were visiting people who lived in floating villages on the Tonle Sap River. He had a brief excursion into Myanmar and then reached India. He heads north again, passing through one of the wettest places in the world, Cherrapunjee, which receives 12m (yes that is metres) of rain a year and was even too wet for Welsh missionaries. A visit to a clinic that is treating mental health patients is eye-opening, most of the time in India, these sort of health problems are suppressed. The visa for Pakistan was proving problematic, so he booked a flight to Hong Kong.

China was going to be an experience, the guidebook he had found only had a slim phrasebook and it didn’t have the words for rice and noodles but he could learn how to ask to buy a padlock. He hooks up with a couple of Chinese cycle tourers, which makes it a little less daunting. Mongolia and the steppe was approaching rapidly. It was bitterly cold up there, so much so that he ends up using socks in more than one place to keep appendages warm… He passes back through China and is then passing through the ‘stans, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan with a brief but nerve-wracking trip into Afghanistan. Next would be Georgia and then he was almost at the edge of Europe and the final leg of his epic journey.

Rather than go back the same way through Europe as he came out he headed home via Austria and Germany where he caught up with a man called Heinz Stücke. He had spent 51 years cycling around the world and had wracked up a total of 650,000 kilometres in total. It was an eye-opening evening. He then found one of the worst countries to cycle through, the Netherlands, not because of the car drivers, rather other cyclists who paid little or no attention to anyone else on the cycle path. Soon enough he was departing the ferry at Dover for the run back into London.

I have read a fair number of round the world cycling trips. There is Mark Beaumont’s book of his round the world races where he is against the clock, Sean Conway’s ride started off as a race around the world, but just became the ride of a lifetime after an accident. Alastair Humphries is another who has followed a similar journey and who wrote about it in two books. If you’re going to spend six years doing something, a trip like this seems to be the best way of seeing our planet and Stephen Fables journey around the world is a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf of these sorts of trips. He is a passionate cyclist and keen observers of human life, but what makes this a little bit different is his medical training. He thinks nothing of taking time out to visit medical centres to help others who are tending to the sick and needy. He brings his knowledge to them, they in turn teach him a little bit of humility and humanity. Occasionally, it felt a little rushed, you would pass through some countries in the blink of an eye, but to condense six years worth of memories into just four hundred pages cannot have been easy. Apart from that, this is an excellent travelogue and account of a world tour by bicycle. Very highly recommended.

3 out of 5 stars

Both of Alice Vincent’s grandfathers liked to garden, and she loved to spend time in their gardens, in particular, the greenhouse. Having gone through Newcastle University, she made a name for herself writing about bands, concerts and festivals. But what she really liked to do was head home to her flat in London and potter about on the tiny garden that she had on her balcony.

She had been with Josh for a number of years and was very settled, as she puts it, their lives had folded into each other and they knew precisely how each other ticked. They had been in a position to buy a small flat in London, unlike most of their generation who were reliant on rented rooms and crap landlords. The favourite part of the flat for her was the balcony.

It was here on this 4m by 1m space that she started to grow little pots of herbs that suffered somewhat at her hands. More plants were acquired from the Columbia Road Flower Market as well as bargains from supermarkets. Some of them died, others drowned in her enthusiasm for watering. But every now and again, a plant would thrive. She had begun to rediscover her gardening genes.

She volunteers at the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses. It is hard work removing the bindweed and couch grass but by the time she left at the end of the day she was grubby and really happy. Mostly she loved working in the huge greenhouses there, they are full of huge tropical plants and row upon row of pots of seedlings.

Most of her friends weren’t interested in plants at all, they were often too busy working and playing hard, constantly attached to screens that demanded more attention every day. Life was good. Then one day her relationship with Josh came to a sudden end; as he put it, he was falling out of love with her. Later that day he packed a small suitcase and left for a friends sofa. Waking up alone in the bed was almost too much to bear.

What kept her going in the days soon after was the tiny balcony and the plants she had filled it with. Arriving home one wet day soon after she saw that two poppies have bloomed. They didn’t care how she was feeling, they just needed a little care. She wasn’t going to garden her way to happiness, but it gave her hope that there was a way through this.

They decide to share time at the flat, each spending a month there until they can decide what to do with it, so some of the time she is staying with friends and counting down the days until she can get back to her balcony. But things change and she finds someone else who she gets along with, but the rawness from her breakup holds her back from making a commitment immediately. It takes a little time apart when she visits Japan for her to know what she wants.

This is very much a memoir about the life of a millennial. Her love of gardening is there, but it feels either side of the path that she is walking rather than central to the book. A sizable chunk of the book is about her relationships and life in general. She talks about her family and memories of childhood too. Also tangled in are snippets of the botanical history of the part of London where she lives and the discovery of tiny patched of London that has been cared for by others with green fingers.

On balance, I did like this book, Vincent writes with an economical style, probably because of her background as a journalist, but intermingled with them are passages of beautiful writing, like finding an unexpected flower in a hedgerow. However, I personally would have liked to have had more about the gardening, but others may disagree.

4 out of 5 stars

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

It is thought that the last beaver in the UK died in the early 1500s. These large mammals were popular for their fur and for castoreum, a secretion of its scent gland. As we do with a lot of these large creatures, we hunted them to extinction. They were even technically a fish according to catholic decree so they could be eaten on a Friday. But if you go far enough back you will find people who revered them, the beaver can be traced in all manner of place names should you know where to look.

For me, it is common sense that an animal that once used to be here and was an integral part of our ecosystems should be re-introduced, but there are others who do not want to see them on rivers and wetlands. Anglers say that they will eat the fish and their dams will stop the migration of salmon and trout. Farmers claim that they are diseased and landowners want to see a pristine landscape devoid of life. It is all nonsense, of course, the ponds they create actually help the fish, they are very rarely diseased, and while they do change the landscape, helps all sorts of other wildlife and also helps us as their dams slow floodwaters down enough to stop the build-up of larger floods further downstream. It is for the better.

In Bringing Back the Beaver (No sniggering at the back), Gow tells of his often frustrating story is, at last, starting to pay dividends. He has been an advocate for wildlife and conservation ever since a trip to the Durrell foundation in Jersey. He has been responsible for increasing numbers of water voles, storks and as well as beavers is also helping with a scheme for wildcats. It has been a long struggle at times. Yes, he is a bit of a maverick, but I would much rather have people like him deciding our wildlife policy against some anonymous civil servant who wants to delay and defy these sorts of decisions.

One thing that you can say about Derek Gow is that he is livid about the obstacles placed in the way to stop the reintroduction of beavers, one of our native animals. He has been involved in many schemes that move from the feasibility stage to local consultation and before you know it, the vested interests of landowners and others work their magic in the clubs and bars and the scheme is kicked into touch.

It did make me laugh how one civil servant came and made all the usual noises about it couldn’t possibly happen and then accidentally left his briefcase there. If seemed foolish not to have a quick shufti at the contents and then he realises that they legally had no jurisdiction, it was all bluff. Something that would prove useful when Jeremy Paxton wanted to introduce beavers on his property. When challenged by DEFRA, he said that he knew that their legal team had advised that they had no authority to do what they were doing and they didn’t have a leg to stand on. The beavers stayed.

Gow is not a natural author, his writing is crisp, almost to the point of terseness, and matter of fact. He does not suffer fools, either. Thankfully there is humour in the prose too; the stories that he tells of his escapades trying to reintroduce these aquatic creatures are hilarious. The main reason behind writing this book is to reach a wider audience and to talk about the passion he has for these large rodents. He wants to see our land and riverscapes returned to the way they used to look when the beaver was a native of this country. We need more people like Derek Gow.

4 out of 5 stars

Prospect Cottage is a tiny place on the barren and windswept coastal headland of Dungeness. It is an unlikely place to want to live, mostly because of not one but two sodding great nuclear power stations. If it feels an unlikely place to live, then it is an even more unlikely place to create a garden. But that is just what Derek Jarman did.

He made that decision to create something beautiful on this headland in 1986 after he found out that he was HIV positive. At the time if you had HIV and the AIDS virus that it would almost certainly turn into there was nothing that doctors could do, apart from managing your symptoms. there was no cure and still isn’t but medicines are available to allow people to live with some dignity now.

He had bought the cottage on a whim having inherited some money from his father. This book is a diary of the time he spent working in this garden, battling against the elements to try to create something beautiful and finding the plants that could survive. He collected some of the driftwood and other objects that he found on the beaches to decorate the garden with. The gardeners’ Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd stumbled across it one summer and it became much better known.

His diary is also a nostalgic romp through his past life as a gay man. He was sent to public schools, places that had no humanity where older boys would torment the younger boys, mostly because they had had it happen to them and it was supposedly character building. There are details of his first experiences with other boys at school, fumbles in the grounds of the schools, that they would inevitably get caught at, and it would become another reason for the beatings. It didn’t stop him though. He remembers being presented with the bills for his education at Canford School, on the occasion of his 21st birthday; a hideously expensive school that is only a 10-minute walk from my home.

At the end of his life, he found love with HB, but his younger days had been a succession of encounters and lovers, often mentioned in detail in the diaries, as well as the trip he made to his studio flat in London and the 3 am walks out onto Hampstead Heath, and the police raids that he managed to avoid. There are lots of nostalgic entries about his life working in film and his support of the arts as well as moments spent in the garden alone and with visitors. The later part of the book is about his illness and time spent in hospital as TB in conjunction with the AIDS-ravaged his health.

He was to live another four years after the last entry in the book, before succumbing to his illness. I did like this book, the way he writes, you can sense his passion for the garden his friends and all the mini-projects that he has on the go. The later part of the book makes for fairly uncomfortable reading as he talks openly about his health and the opportunities that he may never get to take. Well worth reading for a very different view of life from my usual perspective.