Posted inWords
Bittersweet: reflections on ‘home’
Do you want to go home?’ my partner asks. By ‘home’ she doesn’t mean heading back to the house after a trip out, as we are already there, sitting on…
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Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Yucatan jungle is on either side of the road as I finish reading Finding the Mother Tree. Throughout my four-hour journey through the Mexican south, I’ve been idly looking…
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A Winter Walk Around St Ives
My eyes lighted on something dark, in the distance, on the beach. Coming closer, I saw it was a dead porpoise. Mouth frozen in a smile, skin radiating a silvery…
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The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
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Deliverance
For days there had been no signs of human life. Pine forests shrouded in snow and half-frozen lakes glittering in the sun stretched into an unspoilt Canadian wilderness. It was…
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The Turkish Embassy Letters
To say these are a collection of the best letter writing of the eighteenth century really would be understating the importance and brilliance of The Turkish Embassy Letters. A collection…
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The Little Grey Men. The adventures of gnomes as a prophetic eco-manifesto.
Denys Watkins- Pitchford, alias BB, writer and artist, spent his latter years living in a roundhouse, in Sudborough, in Northamptonshire, the county where he grew up and spent most of…
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
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A Thing of Beauty
I’d been looking forward to reading Peter Fiennes’ new book A Thing of Beauty since its first mentions on social media, having read and reviewed its wonderful predecessor Footnotes (2019,…
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The Five Acre Forest
Everyone has their own idea of home, and what home entails, for Trish Nicholson that idea came to the realisation on a sand dune in New Zealand, thus buying and…