Just waiting for my movie to start & reviewing my purchases. One for me, one for the 7 year old.
And I'm turning my phone off now, I promise!
Just waiting for my movie to start & reviewing my purchases. One for me, one for the 7 year old.
And I'm turning my phone off now, I promise!
A beautiful ode to wild landscapes in Britain. It‘s easy to think we don‘t have wilderness here and forget how much history wild places have and ppl who still know them. Gorgeous writing, a wonderful reminder that Britain isn‘t just concrete jungle. It was moving to read this as we left the EU last night and thinking about the natural links we‘ll always have across the channel and the Irish Sea, the birds that still migrate across countries.
To experience openness [in landscapes] is to understand something of what the American novelist Willa Cather, who was brought up on the Great Plains, called ‘the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands‘. To love open places- and they have, historically, not been loved- you have to believe as Cather did, that beauty might at times be a function of continuous space.
Woot! Not too shabby! It's not in the Litsy Database yet. Gorgeous gorgeous book!
What starts out as a fairly typical male quest for untouched wilderness (albeit focused on the UK and Ireland) becomes an appreciation and celebration of the less declamatory, more personable wild places that down the years have nourished people going about their everyday lives. We have lost much to concrete and tarmac in the UK but this lyrical book gives me hope for the wild places and for those of us who love them.
Feeling this.
Last weekend our neighbours chopped down their mature ash tree. I wonder how much time I spent gazing out the window at that tree and silently conferring with it.
My #TBRtuesday has a few books that have sat on my list for awhile, Hotel California is non-fiction about the explosion of low-fi rock in the 70s in Laurel Canyon, Case Histories is British murder/mystery & The Wild Places is nf about the authors walking journeys through the whole of the UK.🇬🇧