Shakespeare would have done well in any generation
‘I don’t know why the hell I write so many letters,’ Raymond Chandler once wrote, in a letter....
Number 2 | Out There
Cantelice
'When we got in my cousin said / let’s climb that hill. We had just / got in from Rome and Cantelice / twisted away from the second story / window in cobble and brick.'
Number 2
Nature writing, but not the kind you'd expect. Robert Macfarlane, Jay Griffiths, Benjamin Markovits, Arthur Bradford, Roger Deakin, Alison Macleoad and even Raymond Chandler.
A Change of Climate
'Snubbed by her cheerfulness like a loud door / how can I greet her without adjustments? / So when she’s gone I always stray / after her temperament, her air – / hoping to keep step with her in her absence.'
Travels with Paul
I had been fired from my job for a stupid indiscretion and needed to leave town. I packed...
On Roydon Fen
'This is a classic squatters’ landscape, and all the better for it. I always feel immediately at home in such makeshift places. Even the little palings have a Dickensian sort of attraction.'
The Latter-Day Thoreau
'Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died in August, 2006, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be.'
Ancient Trees, Ancient Knowledge
'For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and your sense of kin – your social mind. Trees have long been associated with knowledge.'
Brighton Rock
I confess. I’m a push-over for those little mind-bender moments in life, when reality seems, fleetingly, to wobble...
We Do Not Use The Word Lightly
For years I have been an illicit cultivator of neglected patches of public land. I ‘fight the filth with forks and flowers’ and until now had never been confronted with the choice between arrest and retreat.