Spring is Coming...

The tiny blue forget-me-not flowers that tentatively poked their heads above ground in my garden in Wales in late January were quickly obliterated by the recent weather and we wait for the genuine spring. Meanwhile I have been reading John Barnie's most recent collection of poems A Year of Flowers (Gomer Press) a beautiful volume that presents 44 wild flowers observed within walking distance of his home in Aberystwyth each with an accompanying poem.  The photographs were taken by John Barnie in 2010 and the poems provoked by each flower are, like the images, small beautiful and delicately defined.  It's a delectable little book and finely produced by Gomer.  I live in Powys, the neighbouring county to John in Mid Wales, and I was pleased to see (not ever having considered myself a botanist) that I could identify most of these flowers from my garden and the surrounding hedgerows and fields.  There were some I had never heard of such as Enchanter's Nightshade and some seaside flowers like Sea Holly and Sea Sandwort that I wouldn't expect to see in the Radnor Hills, but otherwise there they were in their glory: harebell and toadflax, stitchwort and violet...roll on Spring!

I won't quote any of the poems; instead you must buy a copy now!

(Something About Me)

I am very pleased to have been elected as a Fellow of the Welsh Academy.  I am not sure I deserve to be in such distinguished company!

Edgelands: The Wilderness in the Back Yard

Having been brought up in the "edgelands" of north Liverpool, where post-war housing petered out in a raddled landscape of stagnant pools, black canals, and the tatty margin of Lancashire agricultural land, I could hardly fail to be interested in this absorbing book by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (Vintage, £8.99).  Their title refers to these nondescript areas that are neither town nor country (the latter managed and curated and signposted).

These are where old industrial workings, canals, business parks, pylons, power stations occupy land that, in some instances, is more bio-diverse than the official rural spaces where people go to observe Nature.  Overlooked, largely undiscussed, these neglected and supposedly unlovely places are, especially to children whose play-spaces they have become, imaginatively rich and haunting and this was an excellent idea for a book.  The two poets, as might be expected, draw on some interesting poetic illustrations of their theme but the main focus is on direct observation and an acute commentary that works its way through all the types of edgeland landscape and its uses.  These boys have done their homework and when they fetch up on some tract of wild land you know that you are going to encounter an exact and copious inventory of the flora and fauna.  It's true that Google has made us all instantly omniscient but I was impressed and learned a great deal.  Buddleia, for example, the typical wild shrub of the edgelands, was actually named after an 18th century botanist, Alan Buddle.  That's why it's such a devil to spell correctly.

Early on in the book the authors have a tilt at the fashionable 'psychogeographers' like Ian Sinclair and Will Self (not mentioned by name) who use the edgelands as "a short cut to misanthropy" with their over-written and over-milked accounts (forgive me) of their urban wanderings.  There's also a bash at those who indulge in flâneurisms (something of which I am guilty) instead of getting on with the walking though, paradoxically, there's not much walking in this book, its authors, one feels getting out to many of their locations by car.  On the other hand the edgelands are more like standing pools than racing rivers so the verb to loiter or mooch (or stare through the chain-link fence of the scrap yard) is probably more appropriate than stride in this context.  Another intriguing paradox is that they attack the advocates of wilderness (i.e. 'real' rural wilderness) for seeming to want to dispense with humanity.  A good point, but the actual encounters and dialogues with individual people in this book are surprisingly rare.  It has more of the detached, analytical feel of a work of high anthropology and so we don't learn a lot about the joint authors, no messy anecdotes or too many direct reminiscences, though clearly they are drawing on personal knowledge (when describing dens and sheds for example).  The popular cultural references and the vocab is always ultra-cool and up to the minute and fogeyisms very rare – all of which of course may seem like a rather knowing tone to some readers – but the book's great strength is in the way it makes us see and think about the edgelands in a new and comprehensive manner.

To close with a typical observation of the authors.  Describing the new 'community forests' which have been planted as part of a strategy of 'regeneration' in some of the edgelands they point out how some interesting new eco-systems that were starting to establish themselves in this marginal wild have actually been destroyed "to make way for the new 'high quality environments'. It feels like a green version of what happened in our inner cities after the war, when communities were cleared and moved on to outlying housing developments.  Regeneration is such a seductive and powerful metaphor."  They are thinking for themselves, in other words, which ultimately makes this a very valuable exploration of the contemporary English landscape.

Would You Treat Your Apostrophe Like That?

As someone who has had to teach writing skills to undergraduates (sometimes in "world class" institutions where one might have thought such a task unnecessary) I know that the basics of English grammar are not universally grasped even by the brightest of young minds.  This was the context of Lynne Truss's best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves which revealed a hidden passion amongst the British population for trying to get things right grammatically.  There were opponents, of course, in the shape of the academic professors of linguistics who (unlike the person in the street) didn't like the idea of prescriptive grammar and who argued instead that usage is the God and that permissive grammar is the only permissible version. No one, however, has taken much notice of them.

Now someone has come up with the bright idea of following the success of Eats Etc with a practical workbook, that helps you get on top of the good advice in the earlier book and try out its prescriptions for grammatical improvement for yourself.  It's a simple idea but an excellent one and saves you having to spend Tuesday nights in a drafty further education hall being taught how to do it. You can do these exercises at home with a G&T in one hand.  The author of Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave?, Clare Dignall, has put together a lively little workbook that is a lot more attractive to use than those big fat hortatory books about good usage (sorry Simon Heffer) that clog up the bookshops. There's a characteristically trenchant and funny introduction by Lynne Truss herself who makes the interesting point that never in human history have we done so much writing, as we scribble texts, emails, Facebook posts, tweets – you name it – all day long.  So it makes more sense than ever before for us to get it right.

Clare Dignall briskly takes us on a tour round the well-known troublespots of punctuation (beginning, of course, with the apostrophe) and not only does her book complement Lynne Truss's book, it has something of the same lively wit.  She points out, for example that the apostrophe is "obedient, enthusiastic, and capable of carrying out many important tasks" which makes it a bit like a much-loved spaniel: "However, that's where the analogy ends, because we are usually nice to spaniels."

If you have any difficulty with grammar and punctuation I would say this looks like a very good starting point.

P.S. When I was an English undergraduate at Liverpool University in the 1970s I proudly went to collect my first marked essay by the great Shakespearian scholar, Professor Kenneth Muir.  Would he congratulate me on the brilliance of my critical insights into The Tempest?  A very grave and professorial professor, Muir slid the essay across the table and announced in the tones of an Old Testament prophet: "You should never begin a sentence with 'however'."  I have not done so since. Actually, as Clare demonstrated in that sentence of hers I have just quoted, of course you flipping can.  Being exact in your punctuation doesn't mean being rigid and fogeyish.  It just means getting it right.

Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave? by Clare Dignall is published by Collins at £7.99

Dickens's London

Numberless books about aspects of Dickens's London have been written but here is one that actually has a practical utility in that it enables you to pace the streets today and see exactly which locations the author had in mind when he positioned his fictional characters in those districts of London he knew so well.  Written by Peter Clark and published by Haus in its "Armchair Traveller" series, Dickens's London, (£9.99, hardback) is based around five central London walks and, based on a road-test of the sections in Bloomsbury that I am familiar with from my own recent book, Real Bloomsbury (Seren, 2011), I'd say it is accurate and full of relevant detail and a great excuse to go walking in central London with a theme to follow.  It's an attractive, pocket-sized hardback, and probably one of the more useful and substantial of the Bicentenary missiles that will shortly be raining down on us.

Ruritania Lives?

I must begin by declaring an interest.  Mike Parker's Real Powys, the latest in the Real series of offbeat guides to (mostly) Welsh cities edited by Peter Finch, is in a series to which I myself contributed a volume earlier this year (Real Bloomsbury).  So successful have these books from Welsh literary publisher Seren been that the series has decided to invade England and a few titles like mine have started to appear, or are planned to appear, for other cities like Liverpool and Oxford.  The innovation of Real Powys is that it is about a rural county and in his introduction Peter Finch admits that he had doubts about the workability of the 'psychogeography' (I don't like this fashionable word) that is generally associated with urban writing and the lowdown on cities.  He needn't have had worries because Mike Parker shows that the idea of writing about place with an alertness to what is going on and what has been going on works just as well in the country as it does in the city.  And even rural places have their towns, pubs, streets, and built oddities and quirks.

Powys, which the Welsh poet Harri Webb, aptly called "the green desert" covers a quarter of the landmass of Wales but sheep outnumber humans by 60 to 1 and its population, such as it is, is 99 per cent white.  Bordering England along its eastern side it has had an often vicious history of conflict with its neighbour that, as Mike Parker rightly argues, still lingers in the quiet, clean air of these windy hills.

For the past quarter century I have lived in eastern Powys, in the old county of Radnorshire, dividing my time for the past ten of those years between it and London (hence that Real Bloomsbury) so I read the new book with great interest, especially on my patch of East Radnor.  (Yes, madam, I agree you haven't the faintest idea where any of these places are but that is the charm of Powys.)  I am pleased to report that Mike Parker has got it right.  This isn't Pevsner or Wikipedia.  It isn't an exhaustive checklist of everything.  It is a personal account, like all the Real books, where Penybont trotting races take up more space than architectural jottings, but you will learn a lot from it along the way.  It's true I would have liked more about Knighton, the town on the Dyke (Offa's), or a mention of the extraordinarily innovative Presteigne music festival which manages to win audiences for more original commissions of new work in classical music than the Proms would dare put on (the Proms controller frankly admitted to the larger than life director of the Presteigne festival, George Vass that he wouldn't get away with any of this at the Albert Hall), or a gesture at places like Cascob or Old Radnor.  But what he does say rings true and this is a lively and interesting book.

Powys invites gentle satire.  We all think of ourselves as 21st Century urban sophisticates and quaint customs and unchanged surfaces are easy to smile at.  Mike Parker, by dubbing this "smallest, poorest county in the land" Ruritania once or twice, might seem to go along with that trend but he is not mocking and he has a good knowledge of the patch and its history.  Highly recommended if you are venturing out into the kind of country where grass grows in the middle of the road and (indigenous) people in small market towns sometimes greet strangers in the street as if they were old acquaintances, something that would never happen in Bloomsbury.

Real Powys by Mike Parker is published by Seren at £9.99

30th November, Lincoln's Inn Fields...