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 probably all have that one friend who if it wasn’t for bad luck, wouldn’t have any luck at all. And we have all had those situations where you are genuinely trying to be helpful and manage to put your foot right in it or say the wrong thing. One embarrassing moment was when we were out for dinner with friends and they happened to mention that they thought there was live music there sometimes. We said the last time we were there, there was this accordion player and were quite glad he wasn’t there tonight. Turn’s out that accordion player was her dad…

Keggie Carew is one of those people who has a natural ability to put her foot in it or more by chance to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This collection is her recollection of the most cringeworthy and embarrassing moment of her life. There is the story of the time when a purse went missing from her home when someone else was looking after it, a dinner party where she was completely oblivious to that fact she was sitting to a Hollywood film star, thinking it was his brother, Nigel. She learns that she is not cut out to be a waitress, mumbles her way through the Latin gardening terms and fails abysmally at matchmaking and camping in a VW Beetle in California.

These stories that Carew has recounted are always awkward, often funny, sometimes hilarious and occasionally terrifying. It shows the strength of her true character too, as what each story shows is her tenacity to keep going no matter how cringe-worthy or embarrassing they are to her. A nice light-hearted read.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Of all the creatures on this planet, humanity is the one that has been able to change the very face of the earth in a way that no other animal is able to. We can raze the densest forests, cut holes through rock, change the course of rivers and obliterate mountains. The only other thing that has this ability to change the very landscape is the earth-changing events of volcanos, earthquake and tsunamis or the out of this world asteroids.

Hoffman heads all over the world from his home in Greece to find these places that are right at the very end of their existence. He visits Kansas to watch the mating ritual of the leks or prairie chickens on the Konza prairie. This place has been under threat since the 1800s as the European settlers saw that the land was rich and put it under the plough. There is almost none (around 0.1%) of the original grasslands left.

We hear a lot about the tropical jungles, how it is being devastated by logging and agriculture. Hoffman travels to the northeasternmost state of India, Arunachal Pradesh where he is there to see the landscape of the Himalayan flood plain. The people here, the Nyishs, have managed to co-exist in this landscape with tigers and elephants for years. But it is only in the past few years that the realisation that the elephants have started to raid crops so they have reluctantly retreated from their rice paddies and plots. Their state bird is the hornbill, a species that is essential to their identity, customs and beliefs. This bird has a casque on its bill and it is this part of the bird that is used on the headdress of the tribe. The bird is under threat though and the Nyish tribe are looking at other ways of replicating this part of the dress.

It is not just exotic places that are under threat, closer to home we have woodlands in the UK that have been in existence for hundreds of years.  The British have a deep love for woodlands, as was seen when the government a few years ago thought it was a good idea to privatise the Forestry Commission. The backlash from the public forced a U-turn and a backtrack on this. The woodland he visits is just outside Sheffield and has been in existence since the 100’s. It was split in two after the M1 carved its way through it, and has recently been suffering because of those that go there for their leisure activity or riding through it with quad bikes. It is under threat again and local residents have formed groups to resist this, applying for village green status to protect what is left. Sitting with his back resting on an old oak watching the breeze ripple the bluebells is a perfect way to spend the evening.

Stories about these and the other places strongly underline the main argument of the book that all of these places are utterly Irreplaceable. With wholesale destruction of these places comes the loss of habitats. Even if you were to plant the same species of trees in a field a couple of miles up the road in Sheffield, you can’t replicate an ancient woodland. The myriad species and underground mycelia that live in it along with the complex interactions that have developed over the past 400 or 500 years cannot just be reproduced.  These unique ecosystems are disappearing under the machines of mankind and when they are gone, that is it, finito, no more.

Hoffman has written an eloquent series of essays taken from his first-hand experience of seeing places that are under threat from human activity. It is partly a celebration of our diverse world but is also a call to arms for those that care about this planet. He shows how local people are fighting back against the things that are happening to their area. Most importantly, it is a book that needs to be read and more importantly a stepping stone to inspire us to action and to pressurise our political leaders into doing something when the places we live are threatened.

4 out of 5 stars

Regardless of what happens in the world, the seasons come and go without fail. The seasons may be stretched a little, especially with the effects of climate change at the moment as they seem to blend into each other more and more. With spring the main moment for me is when we reach the equinox, that day when the night and day are exactly the same length; 12 hours. This year that day was the 20th March and that seemed to me to be the best time to start this book by Crumley.

Spring in Scotland often begins with snow on the ground and in his first chapter of the book he is watching a kestrel over a landscape that is scattered with small patches of snow. She drops from the twig into the wind and begins to hunt. They keep pace with each other at a distance and just as he reached some newly planted native trees, she turns and rushes away downwind. Soon after he hears a mistle thrush singing as the urge to find a mate becomes all-consuming. These are what he considers the first syllables of spring.

Following the traces of spring around Scotland will take him up in the Highlands, and to the islands of Mull, Iona, Lismore and he even ventures out of Scotland to visit Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. If feels like you are alongside him as he is watching the antics of Sea Eagles or spotting an unusual encounter between a fox and a pine marten or being a handful of yards away from a grey coated roebuck.

As with his other books in the series, this is another brilliant book from Crumley. He is passionate about his subjects too; his eye for the details of the way that the creatures behave, coupled with the descriptions of the landscape make this such a good book. He is not afraid to use the book as a soapbox either, putting forward solid arguments on a variety of subjects that he cares about. This is the third in the series so far, and there is just the final book, The Nature of Summer, to look forward to.

Other books on Spring that I can recommend:

In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas

Walking through Spring: An English Journey by Graham Hoyland

Spring: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons by Melissa Harrison (Editor)

The Long Spring: Tracking the Arrival of Spring Through Europe by Laurence Rose

4.5 out of 5 stars

Near me are landscapes that have hundreds and hundreds of years of history draped across them, if you know what to look for and where to look it is fairly straight forward to find Roman or Bronze Age features in the landscape. Things do disappear though given enough time, either by erosion or human influence. Cities though are another matter, things can change in less that a generation, buildings are knocked down and replaced with another badly designed eyesore.

But if you know where to look in a city, especially one that you grew up in, a form of your past life can be found. Even though it may have been a while since you last walked down them, a walk down a little-used back alley that you last saw 20 years ago can fire those memory neurons in the brain in unexpected ways. Jeff Young’s stamping grounds as a child were the streets of Liverpool and in Ghost Town (does anyone hear the song that The Specials sung with those two words?). Beginning with a pile of photos that are spread out over the kitchen table, of his past life, he sees faded images of buildings that might still be there and smiling relatives who almost certainly aren’t now.

It brings back memories of sitting in his grandparents home, seeing the Christmas decorations around a room with no ceiling, but it was hardly surprising because the house was more or less derelict. His grandfather was a butcher by trade and one of those hard men who had spent a lifetime with horses and lived by his own rules. Just thinking of him bought back happy memories of sitting in the kitchen learning swear words.

He talks of the time he fell off his bike and on arriving home, was not allowed in the house as his dad had had an accident. He could still remember finding dead animals, playing truant and days spent down by the canal after they had moved from the city to Maghull. By the age of 16, he had flunked school and ended up as a packer in a warehouse. He manages to avoid the casual violent episodes that were taking place, drinking in back street pubs and wandering the streets supposedly delivering post to other offices.

Returning to those streets many years and a lifetime of experience later brings all these fragments of his past back, but time is messing with his memory and the significant events were blurring and moving on the timeline. He walks the streets of his past with Horatio Clare, fighting the bitter wind by fortifying themselves with rum and Guinness trying to locate the ghostly presence of Thomas de Quincey.

The cobbled streets still framed the emptiness, but there was no one left to walk through the flames, no photographer to capture the city as it once was. Just grandad walking through a city that is no longer there.

I am slightly ashamed to say that Liverpool is a city that I have been past many times and not ever visited. Yet from the beautiful prose in Young’s book it sounds a really dynamic place, that oozes history from every crack. His memories of past events are quite distinctive and in his writing, they have retained their sharpness without being softened by time nor coloured by nostalgia. It was seeing the photos that prompted Young to go out and walk around the streets of Liverpool that meant so much as he was growing up. The book does jump back and forwards in time, as he stands in front of a building in the present day he is immediately taken back to a memory from three decades ago in the same spot, and he doe it in a way that you don’t feel disjointed. The buildings in Liverpool are quite spectacular, and the photos in the book add to the atmosphere of the place.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Living in Gaza is just like living in a prison. On one side is the blockade that stops almost all people getting in or out, and there is a sea blockade in place that stops boats for venturing from the shore too far. It is not a place that is high on most people wish list for visiting, but spare a thought for the people that have to live there. Getting in was not going to be easy, but Dervla Murphy is tenacious. The regular route was shut down and then she had an opportunity to get in via Egypt, took it and got in.

This wasn’t going to be a fleeting visit like a lot of reporters either, she was intending to stay a whole month and get to know the people and see how they coped with day to day basic living in their prison. The media portrays the Palestinians as a radicalised people fighting and who are prepared to go to any lengths to strike terror against the state of Israel. What she finds there is utterly different to what she was expecting.

Yes, there are radical young men and women there who have no other channels to direct their anger, but there is also a population who are doing their very best to just get on with life, who have had enough of the fighting and pain and loss of loved ones. A people who long for a peace process that would mean they could get back on with their lives.

Puzzled by my lack of journalistic equipment: no camera, no tape recorder, not even a notebook and pencil. I explained that I don’t like interviewing people, I just like talking with them.

Murphy is prepared to go out and talk to people about how they feel and understand just how incredibly difficult struggle daily life is. She hears about the random attached that just happen with little or almost no warning, attacks that seem to be designed with the maximum amount of cruelty. She tries to think rationally about the situation and circumstances that they are under, as well as spending time question the motives and processes behind each sides actions. Seeing the evidence around her each day makes her think about the slender hopes for peace and the utter pain that she has from seeing the hypocrisy from both sides and how a people that suffered from horrific genocide and during the holocaust have elements in the society that seem to inflict it on another people. This is an uncompromising read seen from the perspective of an old Irish lady who grew up in a land that had similar problems, Ireland. It might not suit everyone, but if you like a challenging book, give it a read.

4 out of 5 stars

Near where I grew up, is a place called Brookwood Cemetery. For years this 500-acre site was the largest burial ground in the world and when it was first set aside it even had its own railway line and platform at Waterloo Station. I spent many an afternoon walking around there, and whilst some might find that morbid, there was a peacefulness to the place.

Sprackland is another person who fascinated by graveyards, so much so that she remembers the places that she has lived and significant family moments by the graveyards that were nearby. She has fond memories of these places and uses them to root her in the locality. Going back over people’s past make her want to travel back through her life, to the towns and cities that she has lived before. In each of the graveyards, she finds a glimpse of a life that has long ceased to exist but still has a story to tell of the people who once walked the streets that she now walks again.

Her journey will take her from Oxford to Devon, London to Norfolk. But also back into the past to learn about a drowned lad, the owner of a steam fairground, bodies used for medical research and a young lady who died after her clothes caught fire.

Wherever I have lived, I have found them – some like cities, others like gardens, or forests of stone – and they have become the counterparts of those lived places: the otherworlds which have helped make sense of this world.

Each of these stories is told with Sprackland’s keen eye for detail in the lives that were once lived and their final resting place as she traces the inscriptions in the stone. Death is still a taboo object, however, there is something peaceful about graveyards, not only are they are a haven of quiet in a relentless world, but they are one of those thin places where you feel closer to other worlds. It is beautifully written as I have come to expect with all of her books, she has immensely powerful prose. Even though it is about the dead, it not morbid at all, rather she is curious about the past and the relics that we leave to remember someone.