Mar
2018

thing 14: ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’: lamb-hunting

Categories: celebrating the everyday, nature, reflection, walking
Call me Ishmael.

Don’t worry, though. I’m not talking harpoons or shotguns here. It’s just that I do get possessed, each spring, by a need to find and gaze upon lambs—the wobblier and boing-ier the better. The obsession comes on really strong in early February and lasts till Mayish, when wild-swimming fever takes over. So there was never any question that lamb-hunting would be a Thing.

And now it’s time! It is a bright cold day in February and the flocks are dotting the green. Well-swaddled, I (more…)


Feb
2018

thing 13: ‘sometimes counsel… sometimes tea’: the joy of cafes

Categories: celebrating the everyday, reflection
I read an interview with Alain de Botton in which he revealed that the mirror features in his morning routine only as something he can glance into and ‘check that nothing too terrible [is] happening’. I like that a lot. This is a level of personal grooming I can relate to.

But even that isn’t necessary, of course, if you don’t go out of the house. If all you’re going to do is have a cup of tea, why put yourself through grooming, or indeed dressing, at all? Why take off your jamas/house clothes and brush your hair? (Or at least redeploy it; those among you (more…)


Feb
2018

thing 12: ‘comfortable music’: a friend, a film and some food

Categories: celebrating the everyday
Sometimes there are just too many bloody lemons. Sometimes you don’t want to make any more feckin’ lemonade. Sod turning your frown upside down and/or scrabbling around in search of the scrap of silver lining. Sometimes you just need to feel as bad as you feel.

It’s been a bit like that these last few weeks. Like many who experience periods of depression—or go through a sadness, which is definitely not the same thing—I dread the questions “what’s wrong?” or (more…)


Jan
2018

thing 11: ‘the peerless crust’: sarnies on a hillside in Lancashire

Categories: celebrating the everyday, nature, reflection, walking
In Notes from a Small island, Bill Bryson puts it like this:

‘I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker—the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm—and realized there was no way you could explain it’. And you can see what he’s saying. However. Whether it’s Britishness, or nature, or nurture, in the end it (more…)


Jan
2018

‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’: some new books

Categories: book reviews, poetry
It’s new-book-joy time again, so kettle on, phone off, biscuits out…

A couple of new poetry books have gone into the WTAK collection. The Art of Losing, edited by Kevin Young, and In Memoriam: Poems of Bereavement, introduced by Carol Ann Duffy, are both now nestled on the anthologies shelf. The second was a Christmas present (thanks, Naomi!); the first has been my companion for a while.

You can read more about them on the bookshelf pages (hover over the titles). Here, I’ll content myself with saying that, while the first is a long, comprehensive book and the second a mere slip of a slim volume, both are very approachable. And both are wonderful things to offer someone who might be going through loss—or to have on hand if you yourself are in need of comfort and companionship during a grief. Even if neither of those applies, though, these are simply great collections of poems, doing what all good poetry does: reminding us of what it is to be human, reminding us that, almost certainly, whatever we are experiencing, we are not alone in it.