Author: bookramblings142

I Wanna Be Yours – John Cooper Clarke

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This is my three hundredth blog entry so I have decided to tackle what turned out to be a fascinating autobiography of the famous ‘punk poet’ which comes in at a pretty massive 470 pages, of which more later. Clarke is now seventy four and has lived a fairly unusual life, which he is extremely frank about in the book. This includes his many years as a heroin addict, indeed his descriptions of sometimes desperate attempts to get his next fix make up quite a lot of the last half of the book, it could have been a depressing read and it says a lot about his wordsmith skills that it isn’t. I first came across Clarke’s work when I went to university in Manchester in 1980 although sadly I never managed to see him perform. His famously stick thin physique was undoubtedly aided by the heroin but I hadn’t know until reading this book that at the age of eight he had had tuberculosis and probably shouldn’t have made it out of childhood in Salford, South Manchester. Clarke is brutally honest about his slide into addiction and the subsequent partial collapse of his career as getting the next fix became more important than anything else. He even took to avoiding his mother after she found out and he claimed to her to be getting help when in fact he was taking even more drugs and progressing to speedballs, cocaine and heroin mixed in one shot this is probably the lowest point of the narrative.

I was aware he had had a drug problem but the extent of it surprised me and I wasn’t really prepared for the story of a drug addict being the main part of the book rather than his climb to be performing and comparing at shows at the biggest clubs in Manchester. Thinking about it later I was also aware that he had largely disappeared for years after the late 1970’s, or at least I hadn’t heard of him for a long time until he reemerged to a larger public presence many years later and yet now plays sell out shows around the world. Indeed his 2024 fiftieth anniversary of performing tour, entitled ‘John Cooper Clarke: Get Him While He’s Alive!’ is already having to add extra dates due to demand for tickets.

There is also substantial coverage of his childhood and early years before starting to perform which was characterised by the poverty of growing up in Salford in the 1950’s and the extra problems due to his poor health. He worked as a bookies runner for a while whilst still at school before the police started to crack down on unlicensed bookmakers and going round taking bets and paying out winnings became too hot a job to continue. He was always looking for a way to earn some money but his apprenticeship on leaving school as a car mechanic eventually ended early due to both parties, employer and employee, recognising that he had absolutely no aptitude for anything mechanical. His desire to be a poet was strong even then but his father pointed out that nobody made any money at poetry until they were dead and it was only the arrival on the scene of the so called Mersey poets from Liverpool that proved that it was possible to make it a career. But it took a long time, and the assistance of Manchester club owner Bernard Manning, now a somewhat controversial figure, that eventually got him onto the stage and making some money at what he wanted to do.

As I wrote at the beginning of this review the book is 470 pages long, but by page 430 we have spent so much time on his childhood, youth and addictions we have still only reached 1985 and I was thinking that this was just the first half of a planned two volume autobiography. Instead Clarke basically sums up the remaining thirty seven years as: Met Evie (his wife), tried and eventually kicked heroin, rebuilt the career, started a family, gained an honorary doctorate from Salford University and nothing else much happened. Thirty seven years in forty pages, I’m pretty sure there is more to that period than that and as I had so enjoyed reading the first 430 pages, covering thirty six years since his birth in 1949, I was definitely set up for volume two.

If I have one criticism of the book it is Clarke’s excessive name dropping, usually in long, frankly tedious, lists of people or bands he has met or worked with, or maybe had worked in the past at a venue he was then working at, which I got into the habit of skipping as I got more into the book but as the last line of the book makes clear he isn’t bothered about criticism of the autobiography.

Any complaints, mail them to last Tuesday, when I might have cared.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde’s only novel can famously be summarised as the story of a man who doesn’t appear to grow older, but rather the portrait of him ages on his behalf. But the copy I have is 256 pages long so it must be much more than the twenty word precis just given and indeed it is. I didn’t know what to expect when I pulled this book off the shelf as for some reason I have never read it before despite it being a famous work of literature and my owning this copy for at least fifteen years, but I definitely enjoyed it for it is beautifully written.

Yes the story of the painting ‘ageing’ rather than Dorian is there but that just scratches the surface, the picture shows all the corruption, not only of his increasing age, but also the collapse of his morality and does so in real time. So when he views the portrait, which he does regularly as time goes on even though he has it locked away in an attic so nobody else can see it, he can see the effects of his lifestyle boldly depicted on the canvas. Indeed when he kills a man blood starts to show on his hand in the portrait and appears to be dripping onto the floor within the painting from his fingers.

Dorian Gray is the only child from a very wealthy family so has no need to work instead he can just idle his way through life doing whatever he wants and because he can do this he does, dragging other people along with him. We see evidence of his moral dereliction many times through the book and his effect on his friends and lovers, one of his friends is depicted late in the book in an opium den hopelessly addicted and others commit suicide after being abandoned or blackmailed by him. Dorian however does not care about any of them even the social approbation that comes his way with people leaving rooms if he comes in or otherwise shunning his company means nothing to him for he has retained his youthful looks and that is all that he apparently needs. In his rejection of societal norms he is guided by the hedonistic dandy Lord Henry Wotton, whom he meets right at the beginning of the book at the studio of artist Basil Hallward whilst he is painting the titular full length picture. Henry becomes probably his only life long friend, apparently unconcerned about the depravity of Dorian’s life and loves and equally unfazed by Dorian’s never ending youthful looks or his occasional collecting manias. Due to his vast wealth Dorian can pursue any interest he wishes, collecting rare tapestries, perfumes, musical instruments or even jewels amongst other things, becoming an expert in this or that field before moving on and it is this money and knowledge that enabled him to stay accepted by at least part of London society.

Yes Dorian Gray is a repellent character, one that if he had really existed anyone would do well to avoid the company of, but Oscar Wilde’s writing is in contrast truly lovely. The pages just flew past whilst I was reading the book and as the story developed of Dorian’s spiral into vice the writing seemed to get better. It is. I suppose, part gothic horror and part social commentary upon the idle rich that Wilde spent so much time in the company of both in the city of his birth, Dublin, and London but I loved the book and can’t believe I have managed to not read it before. The final denouement, whilst the reader is expecting something of the sort, still had surprising details so Wilde kept me engrossed to the very last word and there are few books where that could be said.

Murder in the Basement – Anthony Berkeley

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After the awful MC Beaton of a couple of weeks ago I felt that a decent murder mystery was called for. I normally only read a mystery and crime story about once every three months or so but Something Borrowed, Someone Dead was so dreadful I don’t think it counts so back to the heyday of crime novels, the 1930’s. I have several books by Anthony Berkeley Cox who wrote not only as Anthony Berkeley but as Francis Iles, A Monmouth Platts and A B Cox, but it is as Anthony Berkeley that he is, if at all nowadays, best known, especially for the ten amateur detective Roger Sheringham novels of which this is the eighth, first published in 1932. I chose it as it was the only Berkeley novel on my shelves I had not already read, although this is the first of his I have blogged about. He was one of the founders of The Detection Club, a group of then famous mystery writers including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers amongst others who use the meet for regular dinners, sadly several of the early members are largely forgotten including Berkeley whose books nowadays seem to be only reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics series which exists to spread the word regarding such authors.

Murder in the Basement is a classic of the genre in that the discovery of a body in the cellar of a newly occupied house in south London reveals that it was a woman, probably between twenty and thirty years old, five months pregnant but otherwise no distinguishing features as she had been buried for several months and decomposition had set in. The police then spend several chapters not really achieving very much until the chance discovery that a metal plate used to repair her femur after a break some years back was of an experimental type of which only a hundred or so were used before the material it was made from was abandoned as not really suitable for the job. This eventually leads to an identification of the body, as the only person to have that plate fitted that the police couldn’t locate but even then more work was needed to find more about her as she had changed her name to conceal her time in prison for theft. It is at this point that Roger Sheringham appears in the story, but not as the amateur detective but rather as somebody who had for a short while worked with the victim whilst doing a supply teacher role at a boys preparatory school just outside London where she had been the school secretary. The police want him to go back to the school and try to work out what had happened but Sheringham refuses to have anything to do with the case as he had made friends there and didn’t want to be working against his then colleagues.

The police soon decide on their suspect, one of the masters at the school, but cannot prove a case against him no matter how hard they try and they do trawl up some potentially damning but insufficient evidence for court. Sheringham stays out of the case but is kept up to date by the police in case he can be useful and ultimately solves the crime, but again without positive evidence that could be used in court. The lack of a suspect that can be prosecuted is unusual in a mystery novel but because of the way Berkeley concludes the book it is oddly a satisfying ending despite this.

I really enjoyed the book, as I have with the other Berkeley novels I’ve read and it’s a pity that he is so neglected nowadays. My copy is the 1947 Penguin Books first edition, I think Penguin published all of the Sheringham novels between 1936 and 1947 with several of them being extremely rare.

The Ship Beneath The Ice – Mensun Bound

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Mensun Bound was the Director of Exploration for the two trips to the Weddell Sea where they ultimately found Endurance so he is ideally placed to tell the story of finding the wreck. In a decades long career as a marine archaeologist (he is now seventy years old) he has been involved in the discovery of many famous shipwrecks and he tells the story in the beginning of this book of being in a coffee shop with a friend ten years ago and how he came to be looking for Endurance.

The book is actually two books, the first is about the unsuccessful 2019 expedition and was written by the author during the 2021 Covid lock down in Port Stanley, capital of The Falkland Islands which is where he was born. At the time he wrote it he never expected to get a chance to go back and try again so after 204 pages it ends with him and his team defeated. The second half of this volume recounts the unexpected return and the elation of success in 2022 and was written partly on his way back from Antarctica and completed at his home in Oxford. I’ll deal with the two parts separately. The combined book, the first section wasn’t printed independently, was first published by Macmillan in 2022 and my copy is the sixth impression which shows that this was a story a lot of people were interested in. The front cover features a famous floodlit night-time photograph taken by Frank Hurley of Endurance stuck in the ice shortly before she was finally sunk by the enormous pressure on the hull.

The Weddell Sea Expedition 2019

This trip was run under the auspices of Netherlands based The Flotilla Foundation and was mainly a scientific expedition with the search for Endurance added on the end once the data on climate change, species proliferation and ice core sampling in The Weddell Sea had been accumulated by the scientific team. Starting on the 1st January 2019 and in a day by day diary format Bound describes the work of the crew, discoveries made and provides comments as to Shackleton and his crew’s movements over a hundred years earlier. Like Bound I’ve been fascinated by Shackleton and his expeditions since an early age and have numerous books on Antarctic exploration a couple of which I have previously reviewed, see a list at the end of this blog. Most of January is dedicated to getting to Antarctica from South Africa and the scientific research which Bound wasn’t involved in so it is referred to but not in much depth. Where he does get involved is the use of the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the two Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). ROV’s are controlled via a long cable back to the ship, AUV’s are robots which operate on their own for hours on end before returning to the ship for downloading of the data they have gained, both have advantages. ROV’s provide a continuous stream of data back to the ship but are restricted by where the cable lets them go, AUV’s can go anywhere and as the search area in the Weddell Sea for Endurance was under the pack ice this was vital however they aren’t in communication with the ship so you don’t know what they found until they get back. The expedition was to have serious problems with both sorts.

It was the 25th January before the scientific work completed and the ship set out for the last ‘known’ position of Endurance, it’s latitude and longitude had been taken by its captain, Frank Worsley, just before it sank and he was one of the finest navigators at the time but working in very difficult conditions with no readily available flat horizon and very little sight of the sun due to poor weather, how accurate had he been? One of the AUV’s was no longer available after failing during the scientific surveys and on the way to Worsley’s position it was decided to do a test dive with the ROV to the depth of Endurance (approximately 3000 metres), just before it got there the ROV catastrophically failed, this was now the 30th January, time was running out and so was the equipment. It was decided to try to repair the ROV but this meant abandoning the voyage to the search area and heading off to the nearest ice airstrip to get parts which were going to be flown to them. This used up days of possible search time and ultimately failed as the plane couldn’t reach them due to bad weather. Finally deciding to just use the remaining AUV they went back to the search site with just fifty hours of possible dive time available before they had to leave or be locked in the ice just as Endurance had been. We will never know if the AUV found Endurance as it never returned from it’s dive, it also failed. This part of the book ends in dejection all round, but it’s still a fascinating story and if it had been published with no follow up I would still have really enjoyed the book, however better news is to follow.

The Endurance22 Expedition 2022

As can be told by the expedition title this was an all out attempt to find Endurance and was funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. It is hardly giving anything away to say that they succeeded, news reports early last year went round the world that the ship was discovered and it’s plastered all over the front cover of the book. But that’s not to say there were no doubts as the days went on and very little was found. This time the brand new SAAB built autonomous vehicles were on armoured fibre optic cables so real time images were retrieved and if necessary the cables could be hauled back to retrieve the submarine. The ice conditions were a lot better for exploration as well with significant breaks so they were on station a couple of days earlier than planned and moving around was much less fraught but even so it looked like time was going to run out before the ship was discovered as the Antarctic winter was setting in and they were in to the last few days that they could remain on station before they found her. Again it is diary entry format so you can follow along with the highs and lows.

The ship was just three miles south from where Worsley had said she was and within the search box defined for the 2019 expedition by Mensun Bound which shows what a superb set of calculations both men had made but there was one very odd coincidence that was only spotted the day after the discovery and that was the date. Shackleton was buried on South Georgia on the 5th March 1922 after dying of a heart attack on his rather nebulous Quest expedition. Endurance was found on the 5th March 2022 exactly one hundred years later. It gets stranger, according to contemporary news reports his funeral service was at 3pm and allowing for a half hour service, regrouping of attendees and the twenty plus minutes to get the coffin from the chapel up to the graveyard they probably got there around 4pm, a few last words at the graveside and Shackleton was probably buried a few minutes after 4pm, Endurance was found at 4:04pm.

It’s a brilliant book, I was hooked all the way through and thoroughly recommend it as a read.

Other Antarctic blog entries

Biography of Tom Crean – who sailed with Scott and Shackleton and was one of the crew members of the James Caird, the lifeboat sailed from Elephant Isle to South Georgia to get help for the rest of the crew of Endurance.

Biography of Sir Ernest Shackleton – written by fellow Antarctic explorer Sir Ranulph Feinnes

Something Borrowed Someone Dead – M C Beaton

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Marion Chesney wrote 157 books between 1979 and her death in 2019, 72 of which were as M C Beaton which was the name she used mainly for her mystery romances featuring Hamish Macbeth (35 titles) and Agatha Raisin (33 titles plus a companion volume). She also wrote under the names of Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, Sarah Chester and even 64 books (mainly historical romances) under her real name. Something Borrowed, Someone Dead was first published in 2013 as the 24th Agatha Raisin story. As can be seen from the sheer number of books published she is extremely popular but this is the first one of her books, and certainly the last, I have read, and I wouldn’t have picked up this one except that I spotted it in a charity shop for £2 and having heard the name decided to find out if she was any good. I knew the local secondhand bookshop sells out of her works almost as fast as they come in, so I thought they must have something to recommend them.

OK lets start with the positive point. The book is set in the fictional Cotswold village of Piddlebury and I can definitely believe that the Cotswolds (a region in south west central England) would have a place called Piddlebury after all they have Stow in the Wold, Moreton in the Marsh, Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter so why not Piddlebury. That however was the last thing I believed in throughout the book, the characters introduced for this novel are mere cyphers with no depth to them, the plot is so ridiculous as to be safely ignored and it frankly felt like a formulaic box ticking exercise on behalf of the author. Lots of random characters that have appeared before so readers recognise them even if they have nothing to do within the story – tick. No explanation as to who the hell these characters are for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read their way through the previous 23 novels – tick. Doomed romance, in this case an odd romantic entanglement between the lead characters’ ex husband and her much younger member of staff who gets mistaken for his daughter when he takes her on holiday to Barcelona – tick. Lead character in constant desperate need for a romantic involvement with any apparently available male (a la the worst of Mills and Boon from the nineteen seventies and eighties) – tick.

I thought for a while that if I ignored the dreadful ‘romance’ part of the book the mystery would get my attention but as it became less and less believable as a possible real situation I frankly lost interest and only finished the book because I was writing this blog. Thank goodness it was only 198 pages long and at no point did I need to engage my brain in understanding what was going on as it was all so superficial. It’s quite possible, and indeed almost certain, that I am the wrong demographic for M C Beaton and I’m glad to say that the book has already been passed on the the secondhand bookshop that does have customers that want to read it.

The Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin books are still being written, and are now credited to M C Beaton and R W Green who is Rod Green, husband of Chesney’s publisher Krystyna Green, see here for how he came to take on the mantle of these characters. Other fiction titles that have been continued after the authors death, such as the James Bond novels by various authors including Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz amongst others, The Hitch-hikers Guide to The Galaxy sixth book by Eoin Colfer, Peter Rabbit by Emma Thompson and many other examples have not continued the odd and somewhat creepy fiction of the original author being involved. It would be much more honest to simply give the author as R W Green as clearly M C Beaton has no input having been dead for almost four years, so equally clearly the publisher doesn’t feel the characters are strong enough to continue on their own without the Beaton tag.

Puffin Picture Books illustrated by Paxton Chadwick

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Paxton Chadwick was a well known artist who was born in Manchester in 1903 but after marrying his first wife he moved to Suffolk and took a post of art teacher at Neill’s Summerhill School in Leiston Suffolk which is where he lived for most of the rest of his life. His natural history artworks are justifiably celebrated and this blog looks at the four books he illustrated for Puffin Picture Books, three of which he also wrote. Sadly Chadwick died in 1961 before he completed his fourth title for Puffin Picture Books and so there was a gap in the series at number 116 out of the 120 volumes in the set. Number 116 was eventually published by The Penguin Collectors Society in 1995, see the end of this blog for more details as to how it came about.

Puffin Picture Books was an imprint of Penguin Books originally aimed at children of all ages with counting, spelling and story titles alongside works on shipping, agriculture, nature of all kinds and pastimes such as stamp collecting and building models. Gradually the fiction titles were phased out leaving the educational works, a lot of which would nowadays be categorised as Young Adult for their reading demographic. Starting in 1940 they were the first series of books published by Penguin that were aimed at children but are also excellent illustrated monographs to be read and enjoyed by all ages.

PP81 – Wild Flowers

Written and illustrated by Chadwick this is the first edition printed April 1949 and it was reprinted a further four times making it the most reprinted of the four Paxton Chadwick Puffin Picture Books. As soon as you open the book it is clear why it was so popular, unlike any other Puffin Picture Book this one is almost full colour throughout (pages 2 and 3 which describe the structure of a flower are in black and white), normally half the illustrations would be in black and white and the pictures are beautiful. I particularly like the double page centre spread comparing a Great Mullein and a Foxglove see above. In total there are sixty one different plants illustrated and described giving their flowering season and if they are annual, biennial or perennial species. You also get the common English name along with the Latin and some more information as to how to identify the plant making it the best reference work on British wild flowers published by Penguin up to that point and not superseded until John Hutchinson and Edgar Hahnewald’s Wild Flowers in Colour was published by them in April 1958 which covered five hundred species.

The book won a National Book League (NBL) award for its quality of production.

PP93 – Pond Life

This is the only one of the four books just to be illustrated and not written by Paxton Chadwick, but rather by Jean Gorvett, about whom I can find nothing, this is the only book she appears to have written and I have been unable to find any biographical details on the internet. Regardless of the difficulty of finding information about the author the book was first printed in February 1952, going on to be reprinted twice by Penguin and then re-appeared as a hardback in 1971 under the title of Life in Ponds in the USA by McGraw-Hill with a completely different cover of male and female mallards, which was taken from page 25 of this original softback edition.

We are now back to the normal layout of Puffin Picture Books, after the anomaly of ‘Wild Flowers’, so colour only appears on alternate double page spreads. The text is the same chatty style that was familiar from the books written by Chadwick himself and is clearly aimed at a child from about nine to twelve years of age whom has access to a decent sized pond and is interested in what can be found there and is looking for a beginners guide. The first section ‘How to Enjoy Ponds’ discusses how to catch various creatures and suggests a suitable net, various jars for examining your catches and of course don’t forget your wellington boots. We then go on through plants, molluscs, insects, larger animals, fish and finally birds such as ducks and moorhens that you could expect to encounter. The final section discusses how to stock an aquarium so you can continue your pond life watching on rainy days.

Like Wild Flowers the book received an NBL award despite, in my opinion, the least inspiring cover of any of the Puffin Picture Books but the book itself is excellent.

PP105 – Wild Animals in Britain

Again written and illustrated by Chadwick, Wild Animals in Britain was printed in April 1958 and was never reprinted. This was not uncommon with Puffin Picture books, indeed 66 of the 119 books issued in this series by Penguin were not reprinted, so the fact that his first two books went through multiple printings says a lot for how well received Chadwick’s books were. The title of this one is somewhat inaccurate as the only creatures included are mammals and reptiles but I suppose ‘Wild mammals and Reptiles in Britain’ is a bit wordy for a title. In all forty one species are illustrated, thirty five mammals and six reptiles ranging from the insectivores such as hedgehogs and shrews, through bats, rodents, hares and rabbits along with the bigger mammals such as badgers, foxes and various species of deer. Amongst the reptiles are the two snakes above, and there is a particularly fine painting of a grass snake on the rear cover. It’s a lovely book and the inclusion of brown on the pages that would normally be just black and white (as seen on the page with the snakes) just lifts the book above the normal format Puffin Picture Books.

PP116 – Life Histories

Written and illustrated by Chadwick this book was to be his final work as he died during its production which had started back in 1958 and was nearly complete by his death. Just how complete would become clear when the Penguin Collectors Society approached his widow, Lee Chadwick in the early 1990’s to see what, if anything, still survived. The final agreed text was known to exist in Bristol University archives and Lee confirmed that the plates were at The London College of Printing and when checked were found to be in excellent condition but needing some work before they could be used. This preparation of the plates was done by Sheila Fisher (nee Dorrell) who had been at the Manchester School of Art in the 1930’s when Chadwick had worked there and after the war became his assistant. However there was a further problem, the book needed to be properly designed and typeset in as sympathetic way as possible to the original 1960’s plans and here John Miles stepped in, he had been employed by Penguin back in the 1950’s as assistant to the head designer Hans Schmoller. By getting this remarkable group of people together, all of whom were in their seventies or eighties including Lee Chadwick to do some final editing the book was finally printed March 1996, some thirty five years after it had originally planned to be issued. There were just a thousand copies printed, the first one hundred of which were signed by Lee Chadwick, John Miles and Sheila Fisher. Penguin Books agreed to the edition having the original PP116 number assigned back in 1961. The book came with a twelve page booklet by Steve Hare entitled ‘The Life History of Life Histories’ which details the long gestation of this project and reprints sections of letters between Penguin Books and Paxton Chadwick regarding the work he was doing.

Conscious of the cost pressures that were signalling the end of Puffin Picture Books Chadwick designed the book to just use yellow and blue apart from the black text and line drawings but even so there would be just four more Puffin Picture Books produced after number 116. The creatures featured in this volume tend to be ones that undergo some sort of metamorphosis during their life cycle or have some elusive part of their existence such as eels and their trip to the Sargasso Sea so there is always something different about their entire life span. It makes it a very interesting read and such a pity that it never came out in the sixties for its target audience and that even now you are unlikely to find a copy due to its very limited print run.

The ultimate publication of Life Histories is a fitting tribute to Paxton Chadwick, an artist lost early at just fifty eight years old to an undiagnosed cancer.

Galápagos Diary – Hermann Heinzel and Barnaby Hall

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The fourth book in my natural history themed August reading material is a book I originally used as reference material. Although entitled Galápagos Diary, this book is far more than a journal of a 1995 trip round most of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago by artist and author Hermann Heinzel and teenage photographer Barnaby Hall. The book was first published in 2000 and you can see why it took so long to come out as it is a truly beautiful book, heavily illustrated with sketches and photographs. But the reason I bought this copy in 2002 is that I travelled to the Galápagos that year, to mark a significant birthday, and needed a guide to the wildlife, especially the birds. Heinzel I had already heard about as he has illustrated several ornithological volumes including the classic Collins handbook ‘Birds of Britain and Europe’. Originally born in Germany, Heinzel has lived for many years in France and knew Rod and Jenny Hall and their son Barnaby, Jenny and Barnaby had been to Galápagos in 1994 and Barnaby assured Heinzel that he had seen Cattle Egrets there which surprised the naturalist who suspected that what he had really seen was Great Egrets but Baranby was certain so they decided to go together during the school holidays the following year and so the expedition was planned. Not only to see if Cattle Egrets had indeed made it to the islands but also to attempt to see all the endemic species of birds to be found there.

The book is split into three sections, pages 1 to 158 cover the diary of their travels with lovely hand drawn maps showing where on each island they stopped, with drawings and photographs mainly done at the time. A sample page, seen above, deals with part of the time they spent travelling around one of the inhabited islands, San Christobel, the birds drawn by Heinzel are North American Bobolinks which as the name implies are visitors to the islands rather than endemic. Below is a page featuring what for me was the most surprising bird I saw in Galápagos, the endemic Galápagos Penguin. Bearing in mind the island group is on the equator I really wasn’t expecting to see penguins but these photographed by Barnaby on Bartolome, which is where I also spotted them, prove that sometimes animals are not where you think they should be.

The next section is the species guide and takes up pages 159 to 261, this is entirely done by Hermann Heinzel using sketches and completed paintings of each of the endemic species, no photographs are used in this section. On this trip they failed to see just 3 of the 59 types of breeding species of bird on the islands, just the Marsh Owl, the Painted Rail and the rarest of all, the Mangrove Finch eluded them. In all they saw 66 species and they were all sketched by Heinzel and the three breeding birds they didn’t find had been seen and drawn by him on previous trips so it is a complete guide. Along with the drawings you get a map where they spotted the bird and notes relating to each sighting. The page below is for the Lava Gull, a bird that seems to be everywhere as you can tell by the notes which state that they saw examples on half the days they were in the Galápagos and I spotted them on multiple occasions.

The final section is a nine page checklist of Galápagos birds, both endemic and visitors which invites you to tick off species as you see them but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. It is not just a list but also includes which islands they are to be found on. Despite being able to fly, with the exception of the penguin and oddly the cormorant which has become flightless since arriving in the island group, the birds tend to stick to specific islands where their needs are best catered for. The islands have surprisingly different habitats even though they are a relatively small group and a tiny number of species can be seen from every island, even including those that can be expected to be seen going past.

It was a very useful book when in Galápagos and also later on trying to identify each bird I photographed. Perhaps surprisingly I have no memory of actually reading the diary at the time, I appear to have just used it as a guide to tell what I had been looking at. That is definitely a pity as it is an interesting read as well as a beautiful book.

If you are interested in the photographs I took in 2002 they can be found here:

San Cristobal and Bartolome

Santiago and Genovesa

Seymour and Santa Cruz

Life on Earth – David Attenborough

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The first in a colossal series of adventures round the world and what would eventually be seen as an incredible lifetimes work is my third natural history book for August but really it is possibly the most significant book and programme series by Attenborough in his career as it totally changed both television’s view of natural history and the global influence of such programmes. Nobody, not even David Attenborough, foresaw back in the late 1970’s just where this would lead and that almost fifty years after he started planning Life on Earth that he would still be writing and presenting on huge television wildlife spectaculars. Attenborough had started out in television back in the mid 1950’s, always with a natural history theme to his work and after the massive success of Zoo Quest, which started in 1954 and which had Atttenborough as the presenter at short notice after the originally planned presenter fell ill, he became a familiar face on British television. In 1965 however his career took a different direction when he became controller of BBC2, one of the then just three TV channels in the UK and ultimately rose to Director of Programmes, taking over control of the output of both BBC channels in 1969. Amazingly despite the high pressure management role he now had he still managed to fit in presenting the occasional wildlife programme. In 1972 when offered the ultimate top job in British television, that of Director General of the BBC he declined and abruptly resigned.

Why? Well he missed the hands on presenting role where he had made his name and after a short TV wildlife series in Asia he started planning an altogether more ambitious work ‘Life on Earth’ a series of thirteen 55 minute long programmes each of which would focus on one aspect of life and would try to tell as much of the whole story from the first single cellular creatures through to the incredible diversity of today. The series took years to film and was well in advance of anything seen before from any television channel anywhere in the world when it was first broadcast weekly between 16th January and 10th April 1979. It was an immediate hit and the accompanying book, which was released as the first episode was broadcast was already into its third reprint by the time the series had finished. My copy is the first revised edition and amazingly the tenth printing dated September 1979, just nine months after it first came out.

Back then you couldn’t record, or buy for watching again, TV programmes so you saw it when it was first broadcast and then all you had was the book and that probably explains the massive amount of reprints. Whilst reading this book again, for probably the first time in over forty years, I watched the entire series again on the DVD set that came out in 2003 and I have to say it has stood up remarkably well.

The book closely follows the structure of the television series with thirteen chapters each of which is dedicated to an episode, so we start with the first appearance of life three thousand million years ago and by the end of the first chapter get to the beginning of multicellular life. But this first chapter, like the first episode is also an introduction to the series and begins laying out just what a massive project it was to be. Reading and alternating watching the programmes made me appreciate how similar but also how different the two media are. The book can go into detail that watching a presenter speil through on screen would be potentially overbearing. With the video you want to concentrate on the wonderful pictures but in the book where there are a dozen or so images per chapter you want to get immersed in the words and can take in more information at one sitting, so the two formats complement one another.

What you also are aware of looking back from today is that Life on Earth whilst groundbreaking and feeling spacious at the time in giving almost twelve hours television and 311 pages in the book, feels nowadays like a rapid flit through its subject. Chapter eight of Life on Earth entitled ‘Lords of the Air’ covers the whole subject of birds in just thirty pages, I also have the book for the much later series ‘The Life of Birds’ (1998) which oddly takes the same total number (311) pages to cover just birds over ten chapters again mirroring the episodes of that TV series. So vastly more information and detail but ‘The Life of Birds’ and the other follow up series would not have existed if ‘Life on Earth’ had not been such a resounding worldwide success. The book is an interesting read and an excellent start for anyone who wants to get a grasp on the development of species and how our planet has become populated with countless different creatures. One point that should be made is that the emphasis is on creatures that are alive today, yes dinosaurs are mentioned and fossils shown but only on the way to modern examples. There is no specific chapter on the hundreds of millions of years that dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Frankly something had to go to get the vast subject still within the time frame for the television shows and you can’t go out and film dinosaurs so they are mainly dealt with in passing.

The book has lots of wonderful wildlife photographs inside and perhaps my favourite is the one above of a three toed sloth taken in Panama by David Attenborough himself, one of nineteen photos in the book that he took. The cover photo of a Panamanian Red-eyed Tree Frog, which became an icon of the series, was also taken by Attenborough. Reliving a television milestone which I remember watching enthralled back when I was a teenager has been a great experience, the book appears to be out of print at the current time but due to the huge numbers sold over the decades it is very easy to get a copy.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously – Simon Barnes

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So this August I am devoting to natural history and by contrast with last week’s book from the 18th century this is so contemporary that it was written during the various covid lockdowns here in the UK and was first published by Simon & Schuster on the 13th April 2023. Simon Barnes was looking forward to a trip to South Africa as a guide on a wildlife tour when all of a sudden he wasn’t going anywhere, so decided to really not go anywhere and just sit in a chair at the bottom of his garden for a year and record his experiences. Now Barnes is lucky, he lives in the Norfolk Broads, an extensive flat wetland area to the east of the UK so his bird watching possibilities just sitting at home are considerably better than the average town dweller, although by the nature of it being a flat open landscape (the highest point in Norfolk is just 344 feet (105m) above sea level) he was rather exposed to the elements.

Oddly, although he had decided to do this he didn’t explain what he was doing to his family for several months, they must have assumed that he was having a rather strange reaction to being forced to go nowhere. He is actually quite fastidious about sitting out and noting whatever he sees which is why the book runs to 336 pages from Sunday 27th September 2020 to Monday 27th September 2021, the extra day signalling that he intends to continue sitting out and making notes whenever he can going forward. It isn’t an end to his experiment but a continuation of an experience he has grown to love regardless of the discomfort sometimes. I have included a couple more sample passages below so you can see the changes to the writing style as the year progresses. I think he gets more poetic as he sinks more and more into the communion with nature that his self imposed routine gives him.

There is humour and drama aplenty as he follows the lives of the various creatures he is observing, from the majestic marsh harriers swooping across his eyeline to the much bullied buzzards, which every bird seems engaged in driving away. The herons in the lakes and marshes just beyond the river flowing past his seat and the great flocks of corvids (rooks, jackdaws and crows mainly) that are often seen, to the gay pair of male swans that encroach into his garden and one morning had clearly been roosting overnight in his chair judging by the mess. Through the year we see the animals that live here all the time along with the seasonal visitors, them pairing off in the summer months and hopefully raising young although obviously not in the case of the gay swans the relationship between them only slowly dawns on Barnes as he watches them, initially trying to work out which was the female. We also get brief insights into his family life, especially his increasing frail father who is finding living alone in London through covid lock downs particularly difficult.

I was really looking forward to reading what he saw on my birthday, in early June, and was somewhat disappointed to find that he actually did manage to get away for a weeks family holiday boating on the broads which coincided with the day in question so there were no entries between the 8th and 14th June. I am always intrigued when reading diaries to see what the person was up to on my birthday, it adds something personal to the reading experience, however it wasn’t to be with this book. That however was the only slight let down in a book I have thoroughly enjoyed and definitely learnt from. His descriptions of birds, mammals, and in the later chapters insects as he starts to take more notice of them as well are really good especially as he explains how he determines which species he is actually looking at from bird calls, flight patterns, the shape of wings and other features and what they tell you about the way the bird looks for food or finds a mate. I am by no means a bird watcher although I do watch birds when they are around, a fine but important distinction I think. I no longer have a garden, but when I did I had numerous feeders up to attract birds, nowadays I am restricted to what I can see from my living room window although that does quite often include buzzards wheeling over the valley so it’s not all bad.

Each month starts with a beautiful pencil sketch of a bird that features in the chapter. These drawings were done by Simon Barnes’ wife, the artist Cindy Lee Wright. The one I have included above is the lovely picture of a robin which starts the chapter ‘February’. I have a certain fondness for robins, they are definitely the bird least bothered by human presence near them here in the UK and used to perch watching me as I worked in my garden in case I unearthed anything worth eating.

I can definitely recommend this book, the idea of just sitting in one place for a year and writing about what was seen from that vantage point could have been dull but I found myself racing through the pages totally drawn in by the gentle and engaging tone of the writing.

The Natural History of Selborne – Gilbert White

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To start off my latest August group of books, which this time is focused on natural history, I am beginning with a classic of the genre, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne first published in 1789, along with his Antiquities of Selborne, which initially was usually included but nowadays is largely omitted leaving just his famous work The Natural History. Both of these books consist of a series of letters, which in the case of Antiquities none of were never actually posted to anyone and in The Natural History several were also not posted but were instead created to match the rest of the content. The ones that were posted are to two different people over a period of almost two decades, but even these have been edited for publication so the whole is rather contrived. Gilbert White was the curate of Selborne on four separate occasions living in what was his grandfathers vicarage and his younger brother John, who is mentioned several times in the book as providing extra information was a vicar in Gibraltar. He is now famous for this book, which was one of the first true natural history volumes based on studies of wild fauna rather than dead examples. That is not to say White didn’t make use of freshly shot birds to complete his analysis but he was rare in studying live animals and how they reacted with the environment to give colour to his studies.

The book starts with forty four letters to the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, the first nine of which were never posted and were written much later to form an introduction to the book when White decided to publish his notes on local wildlife and plants. These describe the village of Selborne and the surrounding countryside and so give a useful if somewhat tedious background to the observations that he then goes on to make. The second batch of sixty six letters are to English lawyer, naturalist and one time Vice President of The Royal Society the Honorable Daines Barrington and again several of these were never posted especially letters fifty six to sixty five, which are concocted from White’s daily journals and provide interesting details of weather extremes he has experienced in the village including winter temperatures of below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Centigrade) with ice forming below the beds in his house. These also include an account of the effect of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland from June 1783 to February 1784 which killed around a quarter of the population of Iceland and left volcanic ash in the skies over Europe for months.

the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man … The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. 

Letter LXV

One of the frequent issues raised in the various letters is the possibility of bird migration, at the time this was merely a suggestion that it might happen with the majority view, including that of Barrington, being that birds that were not seen all year round hibernated through the winter even though no birds had ever been found in such a torpid state. White is in favour of migration but doesn’t believe that something as small and frail as a bird could travel long distances so keeps going back to the hibernation theory and indeed on at least one occasion caused a potential site for ‘sleeping’ birds to be dug up searching for them. Needless to say they found nothing. But his observations and attempts to understand the natural world from them was pioneering and one of the letters regarding the usefulness of earthworms was undoubtedly an influence on Charles Darwin a hundred years later when he wrote his monograph on the subject.

Four of the letters to Daines Barrington are in the form of monographs and were published in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society which is the worlds oldest scientific journal, started in 1665, and still in print. These four letters are by their nature longer and more detailed than the others and concern four related bird species which attracted White’s particular attention. Letter XVI is about House Martins, letter XVIII discusses Swallows, Letter XX details the habits of Sand Martins and letter XXI deals with Swifts. These are excellent articles on the differences and similarities between the four species and were ground breaking observations at the time (December 1773 to September 1774). In my opinion the letters to Barrington tend to be more interesting than the ones to Pennant which are more deferential to the addressee as Pennant had published several books on natural history including a four volume British Zoology. It is noticeable however that although there have been at least three hundred editions of The Natural History of Selborne and it has never been out of print since first coming out in 1789 I cannot find any currently in print editions of any of Thomas Pennant’s works.

My copy is the Penguin Books first edition from March 1941, which was originally planned to be a part of a second set of Penguin Illustrated Classics following the original ten from May 1938 but this set never happened. However this explains why this book, along with Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which will be covered later this year, has lovely wood engravings within the text, some of which I have included above, unlike other Penguin Main Series books which are just plain text as these two were designed before the continuation of Illustrated Classics was shelved. The engravings in this volume are by the wonderful artist Clare Leighton who despite being born and brought up in England had moved to America by the time she did these pictures for Penguin and where she continued to live for the rest of her life, dying in 1989 at the age of ninety one.