One that I forgot to publish, hence not realising it was so long since the last post!

Rave review ~ Meadowland

I’ve just finished reading a book, in which the quality of writing has both inspired me to put pen to paper, whilst making me doubt whether I can really string two words together coherently or indeed successfully!

The book is about an English field – a meadow – and takes you through from the start of the year: “The Ice Moon is already rising over Merlin’s Hill” on the first of January until on New Year’s Eve twelve months later: “This is how it is, has been, how it shall be evermore.”

Those are the actual first and last lines of this remarkable book, a book that quite simply transports you to the meadow, and its close proximity, situated on the Herefordshire / Wales border, and leads you magically, although not without the reality of death, be it from old age and a life well lived or as the result of a sharp retort from a treasured shotgun, through the seasons in all their guises.

The characters in the book are not human, I can recall only a handful of people even receiving a mention often briefly in passing, no instead the cast of millions, nay billions, are the “not so dumb beasts of the field, wild or farmed, who tolerate me,” and “the flowers, grasses and trees too,” as the author credits them gratefully in the books Acknowledgements.  They’re all there from the largest cattle and horses, right down to the “bacteria, about a billion of them per gram, the land’s hidden farmers, breaking down the faecal matter into humus, into soil.”

I finished the book in winter, as the year ended, but in reality it’s only early October and although the nights have become, at times, markedly more chilly, it was still on this particular evening fourteen degrees outside at eleven o’clock at the night.  But, I got up feeling cold and was reminded of the time, many years ago, when I read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It was the height of a very hot summer, but I was in an extremely cold Siberia, and found myself quite involuntarily, reaching for a jumper and putting it on before realising!  It was “The wind (that) rakes the valley, searching into every fold of earth and unbuttoned flap of coat,” on the twenty-eight of November, that had me contemplating putting on a hat and scarf, before realising that the room was a pleasant twenty degrees Celsius!

 

Early on when I had just started reading the book, I was extolling to my wife, the virtues of the author’s way with words and flicked back through the previous pages for a good example to quote.  I now had a problem as I couldn’t find anything specific, instead I realised I could read out any passage, at random, and prove my point:  16^th May – “Early murk, banished by the ascendant sun,  Three trout lie like wooden clubs in Periscope Pool, faces upstream.  They are the counterpoint to the frenzy of the rest of nature:”    28^th June – “Under a chattering swallow-sky I run down the bank.  Two of the Gloucester Old Spots have done a bunk from the orchard.  Like the truant cow they have headed for the luxury grass of Lower Meadow, where they have snouted the entrance gate off its hinges, and are now energetically eating, their mouths an epileptic, frothy green.  They are pigs in clover.”  And in July “On this furnace-hot afternoon when no birds can be bothered to sing, and I am unsure whether the metre-tall meadowsweet looks more like debutantes gathered for a ball or a cresting white wave.”  I could easily go on at random and find much more, but I’ve already filled up eight pages of my small notebook with hurried scribbled notes and need, before I forget to tell you the details of the book:

The Private Life of an English Field

MEADOWLAND

by

John Lewis-Stempel

To finish my humble offering, which I hope does justice to this extraordinary nature book that Tim Smit of The Eden Project says: “I want to scream from the rooftops: buy it, give it, read it,” I was gratified to see that in the Meadowland Library that Lewis-Stempel includes at the end, many of the books on his Meadowland bookshelf are also on mine, or I have read over the years.  I’m also glad to say it made me put pen to paper, hopefully not incoherently, and that’s now ten pages of the notebook filled up and as a lot of the words belong to Lewis-Stempel himself, take his if you don’t like mine!!

4^th Oct 2018