Last summer, I decided to visit Glastonbury for the first time. The place, as the heart of the county bordering on my native Gloucestershire, had long intrigued me. And, as somewhere that claimed to be a special spiritual place, I wanted to get under its skin, to take a kind of experiential snapshot. According to […]
Travel writing is in crisis, for at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, it reflects – perhaps even amplifies – the wider crisis afflicting journalism: failing media outlets, derisory writing fees and an editorial culture that favours puff pieces over independent reportage. ‘The dream is over and the quickening plunge into poverty is unsettling,’ explains […]
So the blue tits finally fledged, having had many of us repeatedly checking the livecams when we should be getting on with our own, human lives. We’re in the season of Springwatch – the marathon outside broadcast that is testimony to the peculiarly British passion for nature. Over half the adults in the UK feed […]
This week sees two of the most worthwhile events of my year – Dying Matters Awareness Week and the Eurovision Song Contest. An incongruous coupling, I know; I’ll try to explain. I came across the campaigning organisation Dying Matters a few years ago in the wake of the death of both my parents and an […]
In my third and final blog on public libraries before the election, I want to deal with an obvious yet overlooked aspect of the library and why we still need it: Libraries are places, housing physical books and sheltering people of flesh and blood. It is this truth, until recently accepted as an unquestionable good, that […]
The measure of a society is how it treats its libraries. ‘It just strikes me as something a nation can boast about – we lend people books for free,’ says James Brown in a swelte little anthology I’ve been reading called The Library Book, borrowed from my local, threatened Upper Norwood Library. Library services have […]
The past is closer than we think. It’s easy to forget that public libraries haven’t been around that long. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 gave councils the right to establish free libraries in their areas. But many obstacles had to be overcome before the legislation of 1964 imposed on councils a statutory obligation to […]
It was a fitting setting for a thinker whose interests span evolution and angels. On a January evening in the Unitarian Church in Notting Hill. Maggie Stanway, chair of the Jung Club (which was hosting the event), lit a candle and introduced the renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake, who is tall and has a posh […]
It’s Christmas. It’s also, as is often remarked, a festival of other ‘c’ words such as consumerism and consumption. It’s what happens when capitalism meets the need, which has probably existed as long as human societies, for bit of a midwinter party, a distraction from the cold and the dark. It’s a time when the […]
It takes a lot to make me leave my local habitat in mid-November, but this year I was lured across the flatlands to attend the New Networks for Nature conference in Stamford. The multi-disciplinary forum brings together writers, scientists and creative people of all kinds to share their responses to the natural world. Now in […]