It’s ironic that, having grown up in the country, my love of nature has most recently been fostered by life in the city. My suburban garden in Crystal Palace has brought me into greater proximity with wildlife than I ever thought possible. The back garden adjoins other gardens and allotments bordering a pocket of woodland, […]
I love the autumn equinox. It’s the only time of the year when, along with the spring equinox, day and night are of equal length (not quite true – it’s complicated … ) and the earth is straight on its axis! Catch the brilliant BBC documentary ‘Orbit’ to see scientists explaining this with globes next […]
Lammas – the festival of the first harvest, the bringing in of the grains from the fields – is here. From now into August, pagans celebrate a season that our more agricultural ancestors would have marked with feasting, wheat sheafs and corn dollies. Largely now forgotten by the mainstream, it’s a festival redolent with the […]
High summer. During this, the hottest time of the year, when the birds have done their nesting and mammals keep to the shade, it’s easy to assume there’s little for the nature-lover to observe. Traditionally, the Dog Days are a period of stagnation when the heat hangs heavy over drooping seedheads, signalling the degeneration that […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve just done my last camp of the year. Over the summer, I’ve made a temporary home of seven campsites in south west England and Wales, sometimes accompanied and sometimes alone, at times in a campervan, but mostly in a tent. It’s the first time I’ve attempted this much outdoors living in my native land. […]
What is it about hills? For no obvious reason, they continue to exert a powerful influence over us, just as they did over our ancestors. A testament to what religious historian Mircea Eliade called ‘an almost universal belief in a celestial divine being’, they’ve drawn people up to hold religious ceremonies, live as hermits or […]