Tag: little toller

The English path by Kim Taplin

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The English path by Kim Taplin

Nature writing

Personal copy

I have brought several books from the Little Toller nature classic series over the last few years. I love the design of the books; they are also a way to build a collection of the great natural writers of the past. I had wanted a nature writing read since watching the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady the other week. This is one of the more recent releases from the Nature classic series. It was by the Poet and Nature writer Kim Taplin this book won an award when it came out in 1984 and was her first collection of nature writing she also published a book later on that follow Jerrome K Jerome trip up the thames except it was three women in the boat (That siiounds interesting I like book s that retrace famous trips ).

Our present footpath network contains some tracks which go back to prehistoric times, and others from every period in history right down to the few, the very few, that are created today. Most paths are more than a hundred years old. To appreciate what these paths have meant to country people, from the simplest, like Richard Jefferies’ cottagers, who only knew that ‘there always wur a path athwert thuck mead in the ould volk’s time’, to the most educated, like Andrew Young, who knew that:

Foot of Briton, formal Roman Saxon and Dane and Sussex yeoman

had hollowed the lane before him, we need to realise that the paths which connected people with their neighbours also connected them with their forefathers.

The opening lines of the book

The book is divided into chapters, each with a theme around English country paths and how they came about over time. From the early routes from village to village that predate the 20th century, most people used them daily. She uses a lot of references to great writers to illustrate how various paths around the countryside were made and used in the past. Unlike in the present, where it was mainly for leisure and enjoyment, many old paths served purposes such as routes from A to B, ways to get to certain places. This is all connected with lots of poetic and prose quotes from some of the great writers of the English countryside, from Thomas Hardy’s Dorset to the Glastonbury and surrounding area of John Cowper Powys and his brother Llewelyn, as well. To the great Poet John Clare, the history of paths and the writers who wrote about them over time builds up. Powys is a writer whose books I have picked up recently, and Clare is a poet I have loved since I read many of his poems in the Penguin Book of Bird Poetry many years ago.

Whether Mrs Susannah wounded the unhappy Samuel intentionally will never be known. But in the eighteenth-century it probably took more than ankles to do it. Not so in Dickens’ time:

Mr Pickwick was joking with the young ladies who wouldn’t come over the stile while he looked, or who, having pretty feet and unexceptionable ankles, preferred standing on the top-rail for five minutes or so, and declaring that they were too frightened to move … Mr Snodgrass offered Emily far more assistance than the absolute terrors of the stile (although it was full three feet high, and had only a couple of stepping stones) would seem to require; while one black-eyed young lady in a very nice little pair of boots with fur round the top, was observed to scream very loudly, when Mr Winkle offered to help her over.

Stiles, gates, stepping stones and rough or wet places all give opportunities for flirtation, and stiles as well as kissing gates often commanded a toll.

Clare understood the rules of the flirtation game, and the gallantry and coquetry involved. At first, the lover is humble:

I had to pick a Dicken quote and I have always loved Mr Pickwick

This is one of those books. When you read it, you must go back and underline and mark quotes to remember them. Then, get a little notebook and list all the books and writers mentioned to form a list of future books to Buy. I was reminded of writers like Robert McFarland and WG Sebald, both of whom capture Nature and the way nature is captured by other writers so well in their own writing. It reminds you that although a lot of the English countryside is wonderfully serene, for walking and wandering, there was a time when it was full of work and people doing jobs, and paths were just for their work or to get to work, etc. This is a book that will leave you with a vast list of books to read after it, all the books she quotes from, and there were a few I wasn’t aware of, I will be looking out for.Have you read this or any of the other books in the Little Toller nature classic series?

Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

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Snow by Marcus Sedgwick

English non-fiction

Source – Personal copy

I love to listen to a little bit of Radio or some talking in bed I tend to drop off in under ten minutes of being in bed I’m fast on anyway last week or the week before this was on over a week. I listened the first night and liked his style. Then I listened the next night and thought that the writer’s name sounded familiar. I woke next day and looked up the book and found it was one of the Nature books I buy every time I visit where my mum’s ashes are spread. I usually visit the local Waterstones and buy some Nature writing mum loved nature and I chose this as one of my favourite books of all time is Emily Miano’s book Around Snow. Marcus was mainly a writer of Children’s fiction he had won a lot of prizes for his fiction but he also wrote several non-fiction works. He wrote this a couple of years after moving to the Alps in France. Also this was published by Little Roller as part of a series alongside the other series of classic Nature writing I have loved the couple of books I have read so far.

All my life I have loved the snow; ever since boyhood, when it seemed that every year was blessed, if you see it that way, with a heavy snowfall. There were hard winters when I was a child, growing up in the Far East. The far east that is, of Kent, close enough to the continent to be swept by their snow clouds, and it was an utter delight for my brother and me when our parents declared that the roads from our village to school, only a few miles away, were impassable once again.It didn’t take much snow to do it; the sunken rural roads that ran out of the orchards and across open wind-swept cabbage fields were easily prone to collect drifting snow, sealing us happily into our tiny village.

I was reminded of a drift in 1981 that covered most of the ground floor of the house we lived in windows,

It felt right a week after the first snow to cover this collection of essays around Snow. Marcus talks about the childhood love of snow we all have..His new Home in the Alps which he pointed out was at the same height as the summit of Snowden and how he found out what real snow was when he got there. How the plough when the snow fell a certain way would block his drive. Then digressios into how flakes form different types of snow how many words some Languages have for snow and the certain myths about this as well. Seeing certain weather phenomena he had seen caused by snow. He touches on Schubert Winterrreise how he wrote it how it was so sad and dark in parts and was written near his death(I must listen in depth to this again at some point anyone suggest a good recording of it ) He was known to be a huge fan of Thomas Mann and this crops up in the book as well. It is a slim work that links into how snow affects us all at times and also how it can inspire us at times.

Today, a Schubertiade is a gathering of musicians performing works by, or inspired by, the Austrian composer. These affairs began as little salons at his patrons houses, for his friends and benefactors, often to trial new pieces. Winterreise falls into two halves of twelve songs each. The story goes that Schubert called his friends togethet, one evening in 1827, to hear him perform the first half. When he finished, there was stony silence, disbelieving faces. What was this utterly bleak and strange music that their hero had composed?

That was the first half the later part is meant be darker I must listen to this piece of music

They were dumbstruck by the weirdness and terror of the piece, and yet the first half, the half they’d witnessed, is nothing to the second, something so completely desolate it makes the first twelve songs appear like the dream of a summer’s picnic.

 

I’m pleased I got to this I had want to try read another nature book before the ned of the year and this is a great book for winter and can easily be read in an evening and if you like writers that go from point a to b but takes us on a trip as they do that this is a book for you. His view like my own we had more snow when we were young he proves this when he gets the Met Office records for his childhood home in Kent and finds yes in the 60s there were three times as many snow days as in the last ten years. He mixes art, literature and tales of snow into a book that is fun to read and packed full of little facts and insights. Other parts of the book, reminded me of a colleague I used to work with a former merchant sailor, he had gone to Siberia on an early trip and been shocked by the snow and how cold it was there is talk of people finding arctic conditions hard. Have you read any of the books in this Series.?

Winston’s score – A – perfect to be inside warm on a winter evening reading about snow!