Autumn Stack

The Wild Places 
I first encountered Robert McFarlane being namechecked in an article from Guardian's Review (RIP).  The writer had grouped together Daisy Johnson (Fens) with McFarlane's Underland alongside other authors writing similarly on landscape or wildness.         In sharing my new-found insight, I discovered my bookish friends were strides ahead of me - had got the book, been to the Waterstones signing; fully immersed.  Once known, I kept coming across him still in later works; through the beautiful, imaginative 'Lost Words collaboration with Jackie Morris. 

TWP I found in my local eco-friendly store. I was bending below the shelf to recycle a small stash of occasional green milk bottle tops when I saw too the book exchange pile.  From there, south then north; west to east on train journeys, tram journeys; plus a stint working away from home.  McFarlane propped open over breakfast, weighted with knife & pepper pot to hold the page.  Journeying myself, crossing through the sunny Peak District back to Manchester whilst reading of other journeys taken far further south. 

A revelation, 'Wrath' means not 'anger', but 'turning-point' [Cape, 133], 
& some choice extracts - -

Wildness, in Coleridge's account, is an energy which blows through one's being, causing the self to shift into new patterns, opening up new perceptions of life. 
[Ridge, 209] 
. . . 

On The Gentle Art by Stephen Graham 
Anyone who could sincerely observe that 'There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva' was, in my opinion, to be cherished. Graham was also one among a line of pedestrians who saw that wandering & wondering had long gone together; that their kinship as activities extended beyond their half-rhyme. And his book was a hymn to the subversive power of pedestrianism: its ability to make a stale world seem fresh, surprising and wondrous again, to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar.
[Holloway, 230]

> Reading this in 2021, a year on from the pandemic & impact of lockdown ... It's a sentiment many of us came to recognise or if not, remember through staying local, holding still and watching the seasons change in close proximity, in one's own neighbourhood. 

Most of these places .. were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree.. a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along - these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: [. . .]  the fall of evening light upon a stone...

 [. . .]   It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination. Taken together, the little places would make a map that could never be drawn by anyone, but which nevertheless existed.. I began to make a list in my head of what would be on my own map of private or small-scale wild places...  [Holloway, 236-7]

>  This fully engaged my attention as a reader. I may never climb a beech tree (my own climbing efforts ended in injury & a badly sprained ankle, aged 10) - nor attempt to scale Sgurr Dearg above Coruisk - nor sleep out on iced-over tarn in a blizzard in the Peaks [Ridge, 196, 199] ... but I can collate from memory a list of my very own places.
. . . 

Grief played its tricks: I kept forgetting that he had died, thinking for a second I could ring him up to ask him something, or call over to see him. I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. 
We had shared adventures, and there would have been others to come, but for the cancer.
I had wanted to know Roger as he aged into his seventies and eighties, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth. Everything he owned was worn, used, re-used. If anyone would have known how to age well, it would have been Roger.  [Storm-Beach, 266-7]

_____________

"There is wildness everywhere if we only stop in our tracks & look around us." 
~ Roger Deakin

. . .  _____________  . . . 

The Golden Thread
A bit of a voyage through time - & space. 
A good read which educated & entertained.

Some stand-out chapters: 
 Surf Dragons - The Vikings Woollen sails
 A King's Ransom: Wool in Medieval England
 Solomon's Coats: Cotton, America & Trade
 Workers in the Factory: Rayon's Dark Past

Some of what was unpacked I'd encountered of before - from social history, from C19th US Culture classes - but I enjoyed learning more of the specifics too. The challenges & obstacles faced across time by Vikings, peasants, enslaved African Americans with regards to cloth as well as the societal changes which fabric brought about. 
Alongside these, the combination of the historic & the modern - how textiles were first deployed, then improved & developed for mountaineering & for space travel (Layering In Extremis & Under Pressure respectively). 

 . . . _____________ . . . 

Our House

Mmm. Yeah. 

( No. )

It didn't help that this was my first fiction read in a long while & I was ready for something Good. I'd thought the premise sounded rather intriguing. But perhaps the  l a r g e  & thus easy-to-read, accessible nature should've sounded an even louder alarm bell as I started? 

At my most constructive, I'm going to say that when the plot hit its middle territory there was something of a recovered stride & so the tangled web became slightly more engaging.
I could have lived without every single one of the hip hashtag social media malarkey which ended each chapters & grated horribly. Reveal of Saskia = Merle brought absolutely nothing to the plot line other than a bunch of wholly unnecessary additional pages. (Couldn't the women just have been friends? Was there really so much need for betrayal to solidarity?)

A bit too much froth but hey, the same storyline came up in national news so the truth is certainly proven to be stranger than fiction & entirely plausible now, I guess.