Newsletter No. 21: ‘Positively sluggish’

19TH FEBRUARY 2021

Hello.

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you and yours are keeping safe and well. It’s not a particularly ambitious target, but let’s hope 2021 pans out significantly better than its predecessor.

Despite misgivings, I decided to stick with tradition and publish an annual video slideshow for 2020. Ninety-seven photos of life pretending to go on as normal.

In other news, I’m pleased to report progress on my Darwin book has accelerated from sub-glacial to a positively sluggish. Coincidentally, slugs feature prominently in one chapter—although I appreciate I probably shouldn’t mention this in future sales pitches. But it does very much feel as if the book is finally starting to come together. Slowly. I think.

When I ought to have been working on my book, I’ve continued to bang out occasional ‘Sideline’ posts. Here’s what I got up to in January and February.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Happy Birthday Richard Mabey!
   Richard Mabey turns 80 tomorrow (20th February). Tim Dee celebrates the author who pretty much single-handedly invented modern nature writing. And there’s even the obligatory Twitter #MabeyMonth hashtag.

2. How we lost our green and pleasant land
   Mark Cocker on how the pandemic has revealed not only how essential Britain’s natural landscape is, but how little ownership we have over it.

3. A Hyper-Local Spring
   Amy Liptrot on contracted horizons during the pandemic.

4. Keep him as a curiosity: Botanic Macaroni
   Steven Shapin reviews The Multifarious Mr Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World by Toby Musgrave.

5. Art Lessons
   Peter Campbell was the resident designer and art critic at the London Review of Books until his death in 2011. In these 1996 notes, he offers art advice to Anna Fender.

6. The Greatest Journey of All Time
   Gillen D’Arcy Wood on how the first Americans made their way from Siberia to Patagonia.

7. Tweeted new poem
   Kathleen Jamie: ‘After a weepy morning missing folks and thinking This Will Never End, I made myself go out. Wrote a re-balancing poem. Feel better now.’

8. ‘As a writer, you can be a pacifist or a murderer’
   As she prepared to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, Patti Smith explained why she was optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office.

9. Honeybee historians reveal how the UK floral landscape has changed over the last 65 years
   Scientists have compared flower DNA extracted from British honey made in 1952 and 2017. Their results reflect changes in UK agriculture, and provide evidence for how best to increase floral resources.

10. A Round of Applause
    The latest annual collection of Alan Bennett’s diary entries, courtesy of the London Review of Books.

Plus… Three excellent videos featuring prominent nature writers:

1. Discussion and reading with Tim Dee and Kathleen Jamie
   A fascinating, hour-long conversation hosted by New Networks for Nature Online 2020.

2. Second Nature - New nature writing from Scotland
   An 18-minute documentary featuring five award-winning writers talking on the subject of nature and nature writing today: Kathleen Jamie, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Roseanne Watt and Gavin Francis.

3. In Conservation with… Melissa Harrison
   As a Zoom-call audience member, I very much enjoyed this hour-long conversation between the Urban Birder (David Lindo) and novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison.

Recent Reading

	The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison During the 2020 lockdown, Melissa Harrison’s weekly podcast brought comfort to many, myself included. This essay collection, bearing the same name as the podcast, comprises seven years’ worth of Harrison’s Nature Diary columns for the Times newspaper. It, too, brings plenty of comfort.
	The Sea View Has Me Again by Patrick Wright This huge, surprisingly entertaining book is really two books in one: a short biography of the great East German novelist Uwe Johnson (no, me neither) and a much longer history of the Isle of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames estuary.
	The Fire of Joy by Clive James The late Clive James’s final book comprises a collection of classic poetry he encourages us to learn and recite out loud. Each poem is followed by a brief, perceptive, often funny commentary.

More book reviews »
Note: My book reviews now contain links to the recently launched UK branch of Bookshop.org, a website supporting local, tax-paying, independent British bookshops.

And finally…

Thanks for taking time to read this newsletter. I hope you enjoyed it. Feedback is always welcome. With Facebook throwing its weight around (yet again) regarding who is allowed to see what, and with Twitter prepared to boot even the (then) President of the United States off its platform, I can’t help feeling cutting out the giant social-media middlemen and relying on good, old-fashioned, uncensored, unmediated email is the right way to go.

So, if you’re reading a copy of this newsletter on my website, and you haven’t subscribed yet, perhaps you better had. (That’s a spectacularly unsubtle hint, in case you didn’t notice.)

See you next time, spam filters permitting.

Richard
richardcarter.com