FormerArticles
-
Keswick Woods
In which I return to a favourite childhood haunt after a gap of 40 years.
-
Bacon and X
Not wishing to boast, but Richard Carter didn’t get C-minuses—and he certainly didn’t get SEE MEs.
-
Invertigo
I’ve never seen stars remotely approaching those in Anglesey. There are so damn many of them. Thousand upon thousand. Too many to count.
-
LRB letter: ‘Weather-forecasting frogs’
On the unlikely 17th and 18th-century German fashion of keeping tree frogs to forecast the weather.
-
Pleasures of August
August on the Dee Marshes and the Pennine Moors, including encounters with a bolshie pheasant, a practising peregrine, and a flirty wheatear.
-
Keep a writing journal
…The best writing advice I ever received.
-
Life’s too short for pristine notebooks
How I eventually overcame my reluctance to write in my precious notebooks.
-
The seahorse and the pelican
How a passage from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn might give a clue to some family history.
-
The great Darwin fossil hunt
For my 50th birthday, a friend beyond compare organised a very special birthday present for the only self-confessed ‘Darwin groupie’ in her life.
-
On misunderstanding Larkin
It wasn’t until many years after encountering a favourite passage of Larkin’s poetry that I realised I had fundamentally misunderstood his view of photography.
-
Reading in the Guggenheim
Although I tend not to dabble in street photography, every now and again an opportunity presents itself, and I feel compelled to reach for my camera.
-
Venice: a model for car-free living?
It is entirely possible, it turns out, for a city to function without cars and vans and lorries. Who would have thought it? But is it practical?