Book #52 A Good Year For Blossom

A Good Year for Blossom: A Century of the "Guardian's" Women Country Diarists by Martin Wainwright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a rare treat for all lovers of the countryside - for me an evocation of many happy times spent in my birth county of Kent and my love of wildlife and flora in all their guises.

Country gentlemen, bird-watching vicars and farmers have traditionally been the chroniclers of the British countryside. This wonderful book introduces a very different point of view. We see the changing seasons - and the 20th century revolution in the long-settled ways of rural life - through the sharp eyes of ten exceptional women including a leading suffragette, a classical scholar, an artist with her own large farm and a climber's daughter who turned to writing when her children grew up and left home. The suffragette leader Helena Swanwick, Gwen McBryde, whose husband died tragically within the first year of their marriage - and ran the lovely old farm of Dippersmoor Manor, Janet Case who taught Greek to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Arnold Foster, the toast of pre-first world war Cambridge undergraduates and lover of Rupert Brooke are amongst ten female diarists who lovingly record their surroundings with entries published in The Guardian over a period spanning from 1916 through 2007.

I loved it.

View all my reviews

A Tiger In The Sand

A Tiger in the Sand: Selected Writings on Nature by Mark Cocker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another wonderful collection of distilled articles by Mark Cocker, one of my favourite writers on nature and wilderness. The book contains over 100 articles originally published in The Guardian and Guardian Weekly during the nineties and noughties. This is a hugely varied and most enjoyable selection, the writing evincing qualities more usually associated with poetry than with prose. He covers the vast skies and wildlife riches of his home county of Norfolk along with stories of his encounters with penguins, whales, lions and elephants; blackbirds, thrushes, mountain gorillas and the one-horned rhinoceros. His attention to detail and the precise use of language is a joy. Highly recommended for lovers of nature and conservation.

View all my reviews

Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet

In Mark Cocker’s new book, we see a return to his roots - the chronicling of life in a small and apparently unremarkable piece of countryside.The short essays in ‘Claxton’ were originally written for a variety of publications, notably ‘The Guardian’. Of these pieces, 140 have been assembled here (and some rewritten) to present a natural diary of the author’s home village and its surroundings.

These essays are not confined exclusively to the ‘home patch’. Here the net of experience is cast more widely, reaching Derbyshire, Cornwall, Scotland and even the desert fringe of Morocco. Even when away, though, one senses the presence of home and sudden connections with what has been left behind. The essay on Morocco finishes with an encounter with migrant Chiffchaffs, birds which, notes Cocker, will soon be “singing from the treetops in Claxton”. It is as though one has been jerked back home by a piece of elastic.

‘Claxton’ transcends mere natural history identification and recording, articulating the author’s aesthetic as well as scientific responses to his surroundings. And there is more here too. Some essays, such as those on the persecution of our native raptors and the (now shelved) plans to reintroduce White-tailed Eagles to East Anglia, are much more political in their stance. The overall result, therefore, is a well-balanced mix of art, science and advocacy.

This is, above all, a lyric and literary rather than a documentary endeavour. As we have come to expect from Cocker, this is beautifully-sculpted, elegant prose, clean and precise, never over-done.

I loved it.

The Trip to Italy

I have just watched the second episode of 'The Trip to Italy' on Catchup TV; I forgot that it was airing last night on BBC2. I love this melancholy comedy featuring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan; their gentle banter and delightful impressions (which are remarkably accurate) of such celebs as Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Roger Moore, et al are a constant joy to watch. But above all this series is about their visits to various Italian restaurants, as Brydon has been commissioned to write another series for The Guardian, acting as a restaurant critic. Coogan goes along for the ride as it were.

This series follows on from the first 'The Trip' where these two visited restaurants in the North of England. I watched that as it was broadcast and have the box set on DVD.

In this latest episode they enjoy lunch at La Cantina, a delightful beachside trattoria located in San Frutuosso, a quaint fishing village nestled in a cove of Portofino. Dishes made with fresh fish and shellfish looked superb and certainly reflected in the price: lunch for two with wine at Euros 170.

I was so captivated by this place that it has been added to my Bucket List. Read about it here: http://www.lacantinasanfruttuoso.it/