4 out of 5 stars

People visit the countryside for a variety of different reasons, some for the pleasure of being away from a screen, some for the fresh air and others for some more serious rest and relaxation. There are plenty of guides that you can buy that suggest places to go and things to do, but there are times when some people want to find their own way and set their own agenda.

Reddy is a London based journalist who has had an unconventional and multicultural upbringing. With this outsiders perspective, she sets off on a journey to the English countryside to seek the spiritual and the magical where ever it exists. But rather than go to the classical spiritual sites of the UK , Reddy chooses to find her own paths and use her own inner compass as a guide. This personal pilgrimage had started up a mountain in the Pyrenees with a tent, nine bottles of water and, er, that was it. Alone in the tent the first night she heard a strange voice, terrified, she lay still for a couple of minutes that it lasted and it went as suddenly as it came. To this day she does not know what it was that made that sound, but it led to her wanting to know more about the spirit of the natural world.

It was the beginning of a journey that would take her all over the UK, to the far west in Cornwall, to visit a labyrinth on a farm and is soothed by the sound of birds and the sea. To High Weald in Sussex to search for the search for a spring with magical qualities and onto Herefordshire to meet a lady who has a ‘kenning’ or ‘knowing’ of the plants and animals that surround her. Lindisfarne is also on her travel list, to stay in a Christian retreat house and listen to the silence. Reddy has a passion for trees too and she arranges a trip arrange to Derwent Valley to meet a tree whisperer and she is lucky enough to get to visit the Ash Dome, a piece of living art created by the sculptor David Nash, high in the welsh hills, a place where the 22 trees have been grown together in the shape of a vortex. There is the obligatory visit to Glastonbury, a place where the magic has been expressed in retail form…

A sizeable portion of recent writing about the outdoors and landscape is about what the author can take from it, how it inspired them or was there as a crutch for their own health and wellbeing. And they are good reads, picking up on the connections that we have long lost to the natural world. A lot of this writing has been from predominately white male writers, with female authors only starting to get a look-in in the past few years. Reddy is a breath of fresh air in this camp, as she writes from a perspective from her family heritage and multicultural upbringing. She draws deep on all these facets and elements of her mother’s Hindu faith to explore the countryside in a way that I have not come across before. I really liked it because of that, she is prepared to embrace the activities that she has chosen, whilst still being a touch sceptical about it. It is also a reminder that the natural world is more than just the picturesque, there are thin places that have always had special significance to people over millennia. As an aside, it has an absolutely beautiful cover. If this sort of book interests you, I can also recommend Rising Ground by Philip Marsden, it focuses more on the spiritual legacy left behind in the landscape.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Turning a blind eye isn’t just a very British thing to do, it is a phenomenon that happens in every human culture around the world. There are famous cases where people have had terrible things happen to them, these have often been witnessed and yet those seeing it happen have either ignored the events deliberately or unconsciously.

So why do people seem to be good at recognising bad behaviour but bad at taking action against it? Pioneering psychologist Catherine Sanderson considers this in The Bystander Effect. She takes real-life examples, neuroscience and some of the classics behavioural studies on humans as well as the latest psychological studies to understand why we do this.

The consequences and risks of getting involved in disputes for a lot of people outweigh the benefits. Whilst the risk is low, tragedies do happen; Rick Best, who confronted a man who was shouting racist slurs at two Muslim women got stabbed for his efforts and died shortly after. With this in mind, Sanderson considers people that do intervene on a professional level, i.e. emergency services personnel and looks at the skills those people have. From that, she proposes practical strategies to apply to change the way that we react, by intervening or even just speaking out, to an unfolding situation.

I thought that it was a very interesting discussion of the realities of why some people help and good analysis as to why others really do not want to get involved. She has some very sensible policies that really need to be implemented in schools, partly because of bullying that can dominate a child’s life, but also because skills learnt there can have the biggest long term effect on people’s behaviour and reactions in life. Empathy needs to be taught too. I did think that is was very American centric which surprised me as the author is British!

3 out of 5 stars

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

Just over 150 years ago the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had the idea of collecting the elements together with similar properties and seeing if he could organise them in diagrammatic form. At this moment in time, only 62 elements had been discovered and no one knew if that was it if there were more to be discovered. He decided to arrange them in order by atomic number in a long line.

The key to his breakthrough was noticing that certain elements had broadly similar properties, so he took his line and started cutting it into shorter sections to line these up. His new table had a series of elements, sodium, lithium and potassium all on the left-hand side. From this, he developed his periodic law that argued that elements with similar properties occur at regular intervals. He published it in 1869 but continued to work on it and it was this extra work that both solved the puzzle but also created more questions. He realised Arsenic was in group 13, but its properties fitted group 15 better, so he moved it along. This left gaps, but in those gaps would be other elements, but these hadn’t been discovered yet.

In 1913 Henry Moseley proved that the order of the periodic table needed to be the atomic number, not the atomic mass, this revelation led to the discovery of more gaps in the table and the only logical thing to conclude was that there were unknown elements that still hadn’t been discovered. This simple table revealed so much about each element, the groups that they occupied and the way that these interacted with each other.

Almost everybody has heard of some of the elements, but there are lots that most people would have never heard of nor were even aware that they existed. Chemists have been discovering them for years, but it is only with the help of this brilliantly conceived table that they knew where to start looking for them. In this book, Russel has ordered them in ascending atomic number and collected some of the histories behind their discovery, a small table of facts and other interesting facts, such as why some elements have an utterly different letter to their given name.

It is a nicely put together little book that gives a good overview of each one of the elements along with detail on how they were discovered and by whom, those that have changed their name, for example, one well know element used to be called wolfram. This is a good place to start, but for those that want much more information than this, I can recommend The Periodic Table by Hugh Aldersey-Williams which is much more expansive.

4 out of 5 stars

All of my career I have been an engineer, working with all sorts of materials and changing them from one form to another and making things out of them. But stone as a material has always been a mystery to me; how can people take this material from the ground, cut it, shape it and form it into beautiful buildings and art. Cutting stone with modern tools is relatively easy these days, but the art of taking a roughly shaped stone and using just hand tools and the eye of the mason to create a perfectly square and shaped block is still amazing.

People have been working stone for thousands of year in this country, though how they did it without metal tools is another mystery. Andrew Ziminski has got three decades of experience as a mason and it is with the Neolithic that he begins his journey around the South West of the country, beginning in the West Kennet Long Barrow on the festival of Samhain. He was there to see if the collapsing walls could be repaired, and it was an opportunity to see how our ancient relatives built these structures without metal tools to dress the stones.

Just over a month and a half later he is at Stonehenge for the Solstice and to follow for himself the route in his canoe, laughing Water that most think that the stones took along the Avon and up onto the site and to check for himself a new alignment that a farmer had discovered. Mostly though he wanted to study the sarsens for himself to see how these ancient craftsmen had made their monument.

Next up is a trip to Bath where he is there to help repair a tholos, but this gives him an excuse to consider the impact that Roman architecture had on the country and Bath in particular. When finished there he is back in his canoe to paddle to Bradford-on-Avon to go and see St Laurence’s Church which is a rare survival of a stone Anglo-Saxon church.

The third part of the book is concentrating on marble and he is responding to an urgent call to repair some carved corbels in the Norman church in Lullington. Carving requires more delicate tools than regular masonry and it is an opportunity to hear about the tools that he inherited from a carver from the Purbecks that are over 80 years old now. A trip to Wales to collect freestone from a quarry. After a brief interlude for the summer solstice at Stonehenge again, he is back in my part of the country for this, as the stone he needs for repairs uses the fine stone from the Purbecks.

This is a charming guide to our architecture and history. I really liked this book, as not only is it a fascinating history of how our nation has used stone to build a humble home, breath-taking palaces and places of worship over the past 5000 years, it is also a very personal history of our land seen from the perspective of the craftsmen and women who built it over thousands of years with a little bit of travel thrown in for good measure. He has a wonderful conversational style in his writing, I can imaging sitting in the garden of the Square and Compass pub listening to him tell of the places that he has worked and paddled. I liked the way he wove in the folklore alongside the Christian faith, seeing what they have given us in the way of building as their true contribution. There were a couple of tiny flaws, I would have liked a little more on the craft of masonry, it would have been nice to have some photos or diagrams of the building elements that Ziminski was talking about in the book as well as photos of the buildings that he has worked on. Thankfully he has a website with some of the images here.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Poetry is often about intimacy, those moments with someone else that will always remain a secret between the people concerned. In this shortlisted collection, Scott is prepared to reveal some of those secrets from his life in this very graphic portrait of gay love. Some of these poems are extremely explicit and his prose feels raw, but they are written by drawing from a deep vein of experience and emotion.

the moon bleeds 

light onto the black ash

every branch

in this dismal canopy

rasps indifference

In these very personal poems, run themes of love and sex and it is these encounters, some of which are occasionally disturbing, that have formed his character. I can’t say the subject matter was particularly to my taste, very much not my usual reading material. However, I do need to read out of my comfort zones every now and again. My favourite poem was health and for me, this showed the potential that Scott has as a poet and the power of his language to explore almost any other subjects though his poems.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Families have a way of generating their own traditions and occasionally legends and Nicholas Royle’s family is no exception. His parents were introduced by a man called Peter Townend. He had been social editor of the Tatler and was far more used to moving in much elevated circles in British society. Royle’s father worked for him at Burkes Peerage and he was responsible for introducing Maxwell Royle and Kathleen McAdam. He still has no idea to this day how Townend knew his mother.

Kathleen was Scottish and Maxwell was English and they had fairly comfortable upbringings and their relationship blossomed and they were soon married and before long had two sons, Nicholas and Simon. Kathleen worked as a nurse before the boys were born and carried on after they had arrived. They were a comfortable post-war middle-class family and the boys were allowed a certain amount of freedom that other children weren’t necessarily afforded.

This book by Royle is his kaleidoscope of memories of her and family life in short essays. We read of her sitting in the kitchen doing a Times or Telegraph crossword, the tidy house that was so very different to his cousins home. The brothers would spend hours wandering the countryside, birdwatching and searching for dead animals joy of the family Sunday roast. She would read voraciously, a habit and pleasure that she passed onto Royle, but she could be utterly scathing about the books that she didn’t like, dismissing one classic as drivel!

But in amongst all the happy times were moments of tragedy, he lost his brother to cancer when he was in his twenties, and you can sense that every time he talks about him, that it is still raw even now. The book opens too with Kathleen saying that she ‘is losing her marbles’ and he effectively lost her twice, once to dementia and finally when she passed.

I really enjoyed this as it is a touching book about a normal family growing up in a time that seems to be in a different world to today’s relentless pace of life. I liked that these fragments of his memories did not fit a regular timeline, it felt like someone sifting through a box of photos and the snap found would trigger the memories of a favourite holiday, reminders about other members of the wider family or the time when his brother kept raptors and his father working at Burkes Peerage. A detail mentioned in an earlier essay is expanded on in another before being concluded in yet another. He does not try to make you like her, rather he presents her to us just as she was and tells us he loved her then and still does now.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Mortiz had not really had the easiest of upbringings, he had a tumultuous relationship with his tyrannical and extremely wealthy father, he saw combat in World War Two serving as a bombardier, farmed in California and at the age of 44 volunteered to join the Peace Corps and went to Ecuador where he was an agricultural expert in the small fishing town of Green River. He left the Corps after four years but was to remain in the country for 35 years.

He bought a farm with a man called Ramon which was hard manual work scratching a living out of the land and dealing with neighbours who would use his land as their own. In his early sixties Ramon expelled him from the farm and he was at a loss as to what to do. He decides to indulge in what is called the saddest of pleasures – travel – and decides to take a trip to Brazil and voyage up the mighty Amazon River.

However, there is much more depth to this that of his journey, that is almost an aside to his forensic examination of his past life as he relives the pain of the battles that he had with his father, who considered him a communist and refused to fund him in his ventures. He spends time considering his time spent on the farm and the relationship he had with Ramon and the way that it deteriorated up until the crux point. He is reflective and angry, considering a lot of what he has done in his life has been a failure.

He has a piercing gaze at the things that he sees on his travels, the injustice against the Amazonian Indians as the modern world squeezes their lands in the search for resources, the whores who are waiting for customers and those that are trying to make a life out of the scant luck that life has thrown at them.

Standing on the deck I wait in the darkness for the first light. It comes slowly, leaking weakly out of the east as though there were not enough light pouring in from below the horizon to fill the immense sky and the dimly felt, flat land below it, half underwater and flowing away on every side in a staggering monotony.

I must admit it is not the most cheerful of travel books, he is quite introspective and frankly can be quite depressing at times. However can forgive him for that, as he is an excellent writer, something that he struggled with as he never even considered himself a writer. His descriptions of the tiny details from other peoples lives as he observes them, a man inspecting a mango that has just fallen from a tree or watching two fishermen in a small boat showing their mastery of the river and driving through garua in the dark. Personally I would have liked more on his travels in Brazil as he is such a perceptive and intense writer.