4 out of 5 stars

The British always find time to talk, and complain, mostly, about the weather it is a natural obsession. I am one of them, I find the way that the weather works around our planet endlessly fascinating. I often stop in when walking to take pictures of the beautiful cloud formations that we often get on the south coast. The weather is one of the most complex systems on our planet and it takes a supercomputer to produce a forecast for the next few days. Good as they are now, the ability for these computers to predict precisely what the weather is going to be in 4 months time in the afternoon is impossible.

I am not alone in this mild obsession, artists, writers and poets have this fascination too. J.R. Carpenter is one and this gem of a book is her response to the storms that battered the south-west in 2014. They caused catastrophic flooding in the Somerset levels and destroyed a railway line in Devon. I remember it well as it felt like it was never going to end.

This is a Picture of Wind is her response to those storms but with a focus on the wind, that movement of airs that you can feel but not see. She has mined her notebooks to find words and phrases that partially describe what is happening as we observe.

Trees grey with age. A pewter sky. Gleams light around the edges

I really liked this book, it is as simple as it is elegant with its prose. By taking the phrases that the weather forecasters use to describe what is going to happen and removing the context of when and where means that you can appreciate the beauty of each of the phrases. There are five sections to the book, The Beaufort Poems, A year at Tottenham, A Year at Sissinghurst, A Year at Sharpham and the Month Arrays. Each part reflects the dynamic ability of the weather to constantly and continually change. If you like list to the Shipping Forecast just for the pleasure of hearing the intonation of the phrases then you will probably love this. As part of the project, this is linked to a website that has live weather data here or follow  on Twitter to see regular updates.

This book is a beautiful tiny object too, and if there was one flaw, I would have liked it to be longer. For those that like watching the wind, this video of real-time wind systems across the planet is mesmerising.

5 out of 5 stars

Wizards are not known for their physical prowess, they would rather forgo exercise or similar activities for seconds and maybe even thirds at the dinner table. But if they want to keep eating, they are going to have to play a football match to ensure that the substantial financial endowment that they have from a local family continues.

They soon come to realise that the game of football played in Ankh-Morpork is pretty dangerous, two mobs swarm after the ball and there are lots of injuries and often deaths too. Worried by this, after all, you can’t eat if you’re dead, they concoct a plan with Lord Vetinari, the city tyrant and ruler, to amend the rules to make it safer for everyone. The wizards begin their training regime.

The new game of football has a lot of appeal to the people of the city and four unlikely people are pulled into the excitement surrounding the game. Mr Nutt has been employed at the Unseen University as a candle dribbler, he has always thought he was a goblin, but it turns out that he isn’t. His colleague and best friend there, Trev Likely, is the son of the Ankh-Morpork’s most famous deceased footballer, but he had promised late mum that he won’t ever play football. Also linked are Glenda and Juliet. Glenda works the night kitchen at the Unseen University and makes the very best pies on the Disc. Juliet is her glamourous assistant who has a bit of a thing for Trev and somehow ends up as a model for the latest micromail fashion.

As the two teams start to practice with the new rules and balls, everyone in the city is captivated with the match, after all, it is not just a game of football.

I am not a football fan, it really doesn’t do anything for me at all, I much prefer other sports such as cricket. Pratchett’s brilliance is taking a subject from our world and showing it a mirror. The reflection is not exactly the same, rather the traits and foibles that add to the richness of human life can all be seen in their stark and humorous shades and he has done that with this subject rather well. There are lots of other themes in here about the way humans work too that you really have to read to understand and empathise with. If there was one flaw, I thought it dragged a bit in the middle. It is not a book to be read in public as outbreaks of guffaws can happen fairly often with his prose. Very highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

Esther and Dan have taken the plunge and have moved to a disused railway station in a tiny village just south of Inverness. It is a time of change for both of them, Dan had been made redundant from his job and Esther is currently expecting their first child. They want to turn this into a business by making it into a writing retreat.

The story unfolds in their first week at the place. Their new neighbour Mike seems very friendly and even more amazingly Dan seems to be getting on with him immediately. They are beset with fog for the first few days making it very difficult to get out and about there, so Esther starts to unpack the boxes of possessions that they have bought with them. But there are strange things happening around the house, a cupboard that is jammed shut is suddenly found open and tucked at the back is a carved disc of wood with three interlinked hares. As she holds the carving, it begins to vibrate. Her dreams are very vivid and strange, she is walking through the forest that surrounds their home, but is being followed by a hunter. Each day he gets that little bit closer to her…

Esther and Dan have brought a lot of emotional baggage with them too. Esther lost her foot when she was a small girl in a car accident caused by her father who was driving whilst drunk. Dan is from a very religious family and has a very overbearing and oppressive father who they left behind in Bristol. There is also the element of trust between them, a key part of a relationship. A number of the things that Dan says and does do not add up or make sense when looked at in a rational way. She is starting to feel that things are going to be coming to a head soon with the stress of the move still affecting Esther in particular.

At its heart, this is a domestic thriller that has lies, deception and mistrust running all the way through it. Lewis builds the tension between the two main characters well as each chapter unfolds, recounting the events of that day, as well as having a subtle and unnerving creepiness that underlies it all. It didn’t feel very gothic thankfully, rather the unease is drawn from the folk horror elements that Esther experiences in her dreams and the location. I thought that this was pretty good overall, though occasionally the descriptive prose did feel like it was a little overdone occasionally. For me, the final chapter had almost too much going on and personally I would have liked more of the folk horror elements as they can make this sort of book seriously creepy.

4 out of 5 stars

I am normally late to most things, but by the time that I had noticed the buzz about the Detectorists the final series had ended. Thankfully BBC4 repeated them and recorded them to watch at some point in the future. Not sure how it happened, but I had some spare time one evening and sat down to watch the first episode from the first series and before I knew it I had watched four of them. I had finished watching them all a couple of nights later.

To say I loved it would be an understatement, Makenzie Crook has made something wonderful here about the simple complexities of human relationships and male friendships and intimacies. The plot focuses on two friends who share a passion for metal detecting, it is normally a fairly lonely hobby, but this is for them a shared hobby. This simple but beautiful comedy had great appeal to people from all walks of life.

It also tapped into various themes that many people found appealing, in particular the way people react to their local landscapes. Some just find it a pleasant place to walk, others see the landscape as a timeline of history stretching way back over millennia, that if you know where and how to look at it, the secrets can be found. These themes are picked up in the four sections of this book, Joanne Norcup considers how gender in the series relates to knowledge and expertise, Andrew Harris writes about how we look at the landscape in the search for clues. Isla Forsyth looks at how the memory works when seen in the context of place and objects and Innes M. Keighren writes about how the characters of the comedy interpret their beloved landscape.

The book is a celebration of the mundane, the items that they find are the casts offs and detritus from normal life, but it as much about the love that the two main characters have trying to read the landscape and find that elusive treasure and the boat burial. But as hopeless as these some times amusing objects are, there is still a story behind all of them. It considers just why (mostly) men would want to spend time waving an electronic device over a barren field and asks if they are there to discover the history of the place or to give some escape or breathing space in a relationship. It is also quite rare, as there is no mocking of the characters for doing what they love, rather it is an acknowledgement that people can be generous about people and their hobby.

I really liked this book, it doesn’t feel too academic in its prose either, which is a relief, as it could so easily of done so. By exploring the gentle themes from the series and expands on them, filling in the details of the character and the landscape which they are searching for objects and mostly understanding. If you liked The Detectorists, then you’ll probably like this too.

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 said that an oak grows for 300 years, lives for another 300 and then takes 300 years to die. Those, of course, are the lucky ones, most live around 150 to 200 years. The oldest oak in my part of the world, Dorset, is the Wyndham’s Oak near Gillingham and is 10m wide. I’ve not seen it yet, one day though. However, I don’t have a tree nearby that I have the same affinity with that James Canton does. but there is some tree in my locale that I take time to walk by and admire as the seasons grind past each year. I love the way that they constantly change through the days as the light transforms the way that they look.

Canton’s tree is called the Honywood Oak and is a magnificent tree. It has a girth of 28 feet and is thought to be around 800 years old. It is one of the last survivors of the 300 or so oaks that were once in the 130-acre park at the Marks Hall Estate. One of the others left has the fantastic name of the Screaming Oak. Just imagine if most of them were still there and hadn’t been cut down. He was to spend two years of his life with this tree.

Getting your head around a tree that can still be alive around at 10 times your life span takes some doing. They are almost timeless; to think at oak speed means slowing ourselves down to the speed that this tree operates at. Appreciating the imperceptible changes that take place to the tree over the year, without contemplating it in the context of minutes and seconds or the latest social media notification, takes a fair amount of self-control, but it was something that Canton managed to do. In fact, it was something that he needed to do as this oak became something of a crutch in supporting him through an emotional time dealing with a breakup.

But there is more to this than his time spent with this particular tree. It is often considered to be our national tree and it had helped shelter us, we have built boats and ships from it and even further back in our history it had a strong spiritual and ritual element especially those that had mistletoe growing in the branches. He speaks to knowledgeable people who know much more about the local woods that he could ever know and takes the time to glean details from them.

Tentatively I close my eyes.
Time passes.
A calm creeps over me as though a blanket has been wrapped around my shoulders.
A numinous peace descends.
When I open them, there is only the oak framed before me, the grey bark ridged and still, so still. I feel bewitched.

An obsession with a particular tree could be seen as being slightly dysfunctional, but in these strange times in 2020 people have been taking the time to walk out in their locality and connect with places, woodlands and people have begun to reconnect with the natural world once again. If I am looking for a particular peace then I know I will find it alongside water and in among trees. I have a particular affinity for the oak too, as my name is derived from the French for oak, le chêne. I really liked this, the writing feels natural and at other times intimate. I liked the diary format that was used in some parts of the book, it didn’t feel overbearing, just fitted right in with the wide topics that he is writing about in his exploration of oaks in our culture and folklore. If you have a thing about trees then this would be one to read.

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 went to the Lake District, but I remember loving the landscapes and the hill when I was there. We never went to the Eden Valley when we were in the area either, mostly because this was the first time that I thought that I had heard of it. Or so I thought… Turns out that I had read about it before as this is the same location that my favourite artist, Andy Goldsworthy, had constructed his sheepfold art. I was now intrigued by this book.

This blend of art and landscape is a theme that runs all the way through Dick Capel’s books. He is a man who has had many jobs in the past, but in his post as Countryside Manager for the Eden Valley, he has been able to ensure that others can enjoy the landscape in many different ways now.

He begins his journey in this book at the source of the river in the wonderfully named Mallerstang where the water rises from Red Gill and State Gutter. He visits the source every year as a form of personal pilgrimage, and in that March, winter still gripped the land with snow over the moor and ice over the pools. He next heads to the place where the first of the sculptures that he commissioned, Eden Benchmarks, is located. These are by a number of different artists and were raised to celebrate the Millenium in 2000. They do function as benches, but their primary aim is art that interprets the local landscape. It was a project that was to take four years to complete and from the pictures that I have seen online, they are beautiful.

Next, he heads to Pendragon Castle, then Little Ormside, Temple Sowerby and Fiends Fell. I think these are all magnificently named places. Even though he is not particularly religious, he is often drawn to the churches along the river. They fill a spiritual hole for a lot of people like the neolithic sites that are still visible in the landscape.

I really liked this book about a tiny part of Britain that I knew almost nothing about. Capel would not be considered the most lyrical of writers, his style is more matter of fact and ensuring that all the details are covered, What is evident though is his deep love for the landscape of the place and the joy and reaction as people come and see the artworks along the valley. It does what most good books do and that is to make me want to visit the locations. Strongly recommended. You can see the places in the book here.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Living near the coast we have spent a lot of time on the beach because we can. Over the years the children have accumulated a hefty number of different sized and shaped shells that we have been laying out under the front window of our home. I knew what some of them were, in particular the limpets, oysters and the occasional razor clam. We have even found scallop shells before now, but there is a lot of shells that were acquired which I had not got a clue what they were. This book helped with identifying them.

Thankfully this book first published in 1961 has been produced in this new edition with a beautiful fold-out cover with glorious colour artwork of the shells that you can find on the UK shoreline. It is an informative and very interesting book on all manner of shells. There are lots of details about tiny shells that are only a few millimetres long that you might on come across when scouring the sands when the tide is out.

It is a perfect volume to accompany the Pebbles On the Beach by Clarence Ellis that was published a little while back and it is a worthy addition to your shelves.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

If I have a choice then I would rather spend time at the coast, walking over dunes, sitting having an ice cream or even bodyboarding. I like to go all times of the year, from the blistering hot days that we occasionally get in the summer to the windswept winter beaches where there is almost no one there.

One of the activities that we have done for the past decade, in particular at one of my favourite places, the beautiful harbour of West bay, is to go crabbing. Some of days we have caught loads, and there have been other days when we got a few pieces of seaweed. As disappointing as that is it is still good fun. When we are in Jersey we try to head out to the east coast to see what we can find in the rock pools.

Rock Pools are Heather Buttivant’s passion, so much so that she has made a career from it. Down in the beautiful county of Cornwall she takes people out on to the tidal zone to see what they can discover lurking just out of sight. The book is split into three sections, which are the upper, middle and lower intertidal zones, or as she headlines it, Life at the Extreme, Rock Pool Specialists and Gateway to the deep. In each of these sections she describes the type of animals such as the Shanny, the Dog whelk or the Squat Lobster, that you could come across if you are prepared to get a little wet when searching for them.

Understanding a sea squirt as an animal is far more challenging. It stretches the imagination beyond its twanging point.

If you are expecting a guide book for things that you might find in rock pools, this is not the best book for that. Join her as she alternately freezes and bakes in the sun exploring the rock pools that are close to her Cornish home without having to get wet and cold.  As well as spending time introducing you to the weird, wacky and seriously strange creatures you could come across whilst rootling about in a rock pool, there is a little of her life story too. No so much to distract us from her obsession, but enough to help you understand why she is doing this today. This is a joy to read as her enthusiasm is evident on every single page and you are a lover of the things in the sea then this is definitely a worthy addition to your natural history shelves.

4 out of 5 stars

There is a lot of talk about a person rights at the moment, in particular when it comes to free speech. One person’s right to express their opinion may mean that another person is offended by that opinion. We may think that we are free, but there is all manner of restrictions on what we can do and say, and it seems to be the way that our so-called freedoms are being eroded at the moment.

In his latest collection, Edward Ragg is considering what that means for us as an individual. He has lived for a while in China a country known for its poor record on human rights, mass surveillance of the population and often brutal suppression of the population.

His poetic response to this is wide-ranging there are poems on his rights, one on article 29.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, armed robbery, the reclamation of irony and even one by Trump.

The earth is suddenly bright and the rain

Reflects what light it must, is more vividly

There for the thick crusts of experience

The poems vary in length, metre and style so you go from reading a dense poem to one that does not lose any of the power in its brevity. I thought that this was definitely his best collection yet.

Three (ish) Favourite Poems

The Undetected Path

In Flight

The Question

In the Climate of Tautology

Confirm Humanity