Looking Back and Forth

So we have rolled around to another year. There seems to be some consensus on good riddance to 2025. Routine life has plodded on with the highlight being my trip to Japan, but it now seems so long ago that I am barely sure it happened. Monkey is visiting in July this year so I can count down to the next time I see her. We chat on WhatsApp but it's not the same. I have restarted (for the third time) learning Japanese, but deliberately started before the new year so that it was definitely not a resolution. I need to go back to exercising but am going to consider my brain health first. And then financial health, which will involve not taking on anything else that will cost money; paying down the mortgage is going to be a priority.

So, books? I don't feel like I have read very much, and certainly far too many that were a bit meh. Having started well I have often not really liked the book club books, but I love the talking so have persevered with it and will continue to do so. Here is this year's list:

• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama
• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
• The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
• The Gentleman From Peru by André Aciman
• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Bird Life by Anna Smaile
• When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• The Beekeeper of Sunjar by Dunya Mikhail
• The Echoes by Evie Wyld
• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
• Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
• The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
• Your Neighbour's Table by Gu Byeyong-Mo
• Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson
• The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
• Spoiled Creatures by Amy Twigg
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman
• Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver
• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
• The Anechoic Chamber by Will Wiles
• Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo
• The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale
• The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
• The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley
• Recursion by Blake Crouch (not worth a review, though I did read it all)

37 reviewed last year, though several abandoned part way and two to come from before Christmas, both wonderful (see one below). Highlight of the year has to the Emperor of Gladness, but also Orbital and Safekeep (below). More than I remembered that I did enjoy, maybe I was just being negative, it wasn't bad reading just neglectful reviewing.

'The Safekeep' by Yael Van Der Wouden was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Women's Fiction Prize in 2025, so was definitely on my radar. It starts a bit slow, with Isabel who lives a very small life in her childhood home, after her mother's death. Lots of snippets to come because it was so beautiful; coming back from dinner with her brother Hendrik :

"Home, when she arrived, welcomes her with relief. There you are, said the dim light in the kitchen, left on for comfort. I've waited up for you, said the rattle of the key in the door." (p.18)

After another family dinner her other brother Louis announces he is sending his current girlfriend Eva to stay with Isabel while he has to be away working. She resents the intrusion in her life but is so meek and submissive she just accepts it. The days, then weeks go past, the two young women tiptoeing around each other, Isabel resentful, Eva desperate to ingratiate herself. Isabel is obsessed with her possessions and the fear of someone stealing them, she goes around the house making an inventory, rechecking the spoons and ornaments. But Eva pushes back against her reserve until a tension exists between them. It starts really slow and builds:

"Up in her room Isabel sat at her dresser. There was a cloud of bugs by the open window, catching there setting sun, dancing up, down. In the mirror Isabel tried to see what Eva had seen. She pulled the strand from behind her ear, arranged it over her eye again. Pushed it back, hand slow, smoothing it back. She touched her cheek, the corner of her wide mouth.. Her fingers to her lips: she pushed two inside, over her tongue, the ridge of her teeth, and then a door slammed shut downstairs and Isabel got up and dried her fingers off on her skirt and swallowed three times. She could still taste her own skin. She rearranged herself, looked from the window to the wall to the bed." (p.58)

The next day Louis phones:

"Isabel put her forehead to the papered wall, looked in through the gap of the door hinge. Eva sat on the arm of the couch, phone to her ear. She had her hair up. Her dye job had missed the patch at the nape of her neck, and there was soft brown hair there, a few curls. The top buckle of her spine jutted pout above the collar of her blouse. Of her face, Isabel could only see the curve of her cheek, the shape of her smile." (p.63)

On the surface there is a formal awkward atmosphere between them, and then a horrible interlude where a local man who is basically harassing Isabel takes her on a date, because she is incapable of refusing him (and I became convinced he was going to rape her). Hendrik and his boyfriend Sebastian come and visit for a few days, and it breaks the tension between them, diverting their attention, but then Eva kisses her, and all hell lets loose.

"Isabel, too full to be teased, came to stand behind her. Wrapped her arms around her, pressed her face to Eva's neck and stayed there. Eva's laughter went quiet. She let herself be held a moment. She stroked Isabel's arms. She said, quiet, 'Who are you?' she said, 'Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?'" (p.149)

Then, 

"'That's nice,' Eva swayed into her. Isabel turned her face this way, that. Eva let her. Isabel kept her with a hand to the small of her back. She put the wet towel to Eva's throat.

'Yeah,' Eva sighed, and shivered. Isabel held her there. A hand over coth over throat - held her there like that. Held her by the throat." (p.152)

and my mind leapt ahead anticipating huge crushing heartbreak and a terrible, terrible consequence. The intense passion of their relationship seemed to only allow for tragedy. But the story is so much more subtle than that. There is back story that emerges gradually, as we learn who Eva really is and how she came to be in Isabel's house. 

The first part of the story is tight with anticipation and the second half swamped with passion. Both women, so lost and alone, you want them to find and keep each other. 

I'll just finish with this last one, a quote from Eva's diary February 8 1961:

"She was staring at me. She stared in a way that I knew she would want to talk to me. I did not want that. She came to me just as I wanted to bike away and held my arm and said that I was Esther's girl. 'Aren't you? Aren't you Esther's girl? You are, I know it.' I couldn't say anything. It was like someone had put a stone in my mouth and now I could not speak. Who says my mother's name other than Malcha? No one says her name to me these days. She insisted on speaking to me. She wanted me to come have tea at a café at the corner. I thought, Oh, she has someone waiting there who will get me and send me to the Germans. That's what I thought! And then I thought: that can't happen anymore. Isn't that strange, how that works? You can think something that used to be true but isn't true anymore but still believe it in your bones." (p.196)

What a lovely book, intense and overwhelming. just what I needed to end the year.

Stay safe. Be kind.

Ineffable Riches

 

'The Serviceberry' by Robin Wall Kimmerer is one of those books that gets recommended on Bluesky, and it's so lovely and thoughtful and idealistic, but you can just hear the rightwing eyerolling from 100 miles away... because it assumes that human beings are basically decent and want to connect with other human beings. I have come to feel that it is the fundamental difference between left and right wing political ideology: the left is based on the basic assumption of human decency and cooperation, the right on the idea that 'other people' are out to take what they can get and so you should do so too. 

So Robin talks about the joy of giving, and trusting in your community. She never outright says 'the problem is capitalism' but that's the crux of it:

"Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditise everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong." (p.25)

This tiny book outlines the history of gift economies, where sharing is the norm and inter-reliance is not seen as weakness or failure. She talks about her own local community, where people share their surplus, pass on goods they no longer need and accept and give gifts freely. It's not transactional, it's simply living together as people, helping others and trusting others will help you. It happens all the time in times of crisis, people give and share when there is an urgent need without thought of repayment; this impulse is there, it just needs to be tapped into:

"The challenge is to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economies without the catalyst of catastrophe. We have to believe in our neighbours, that our shared interests superseded the impulses of selfishness. There is a tragedy in believing the proffered narrative of our system, which turns us against each other in a zero-sum game." (p.44)

"If we think of the Earth as a big warehouse of commodities, as mere objects, we claim a kind of privilege to exploit what we believe that we own. In that property mindset, how we consume doesn't really matter because it's just stuff and the stuff all belongs to us. There is no moral constraint on consumption. And so, we find ourselves in a time of ecological and spiritual depletion.
But in the worldview of land as gift where the givers are 'someones' not 'somethings,' consumers confront a moral dilemma. We humans must consume, since we are animals to whom the gift of photosynthesis was not given. But our patterns of gross overconsumption have brought us to the brink of disaster. What would it be like to consume with the full awareness that we are the recipients of earthly gifts, which we have not earned? To consume with humility? We are called to harvest honourably, with restraint, respect, reverence, and reciprocity." (p.62-3)

I recall reading somewhere about a council planning to plant fruit trees in public spaces, a plan potentially scuppered by people worried that the fruit would be 'stolen', missing the point entirely. She acknowledges that her sharing of garden surpluses with her neighbours is not a replacement for the capitalist system, but something that runs alongside it, that encourages people to connect with their community. Public services like libraries being perfect examples, but also informal organisations like repair cafés, freecycle groups, charity shops, plant swaps and free little libraries exist and thrive in many places making contributions to the wellbeing of local communities. 

At a time where the world seems to be spiralling into despair this is a lovely uplifting book about human connection and an alternative way of looking at how we coexist.

Stay safe. Be kind. Give something away.

On Tyranny

After the American election lots of people started mentioning 'On Tyranny' by Timothy Snyder, written in 2017 during the first Trump administration, many of them quoting the first lesson: "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." 

I have been listening to Lord of the Rings on Youtube (for the third time) and at one point Frodo laments that the task has fallen to him, how hard it is to be living in such dark times. Monkey is currently on Okinawa and went today to the memorial to the 200,000 people who died in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. I found myself very moved by the photos she sent. I guess many people never realise at the time that they are part of a dark time in history, nor the role they may have played. 

Timothy Snyder ends his lessons with this one and it left me feeling overwhelmed but also heartened to think that throughout history people have been prepared to die for their freedom, and wondering about my own courage:

"Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny."

Art and Meditation

One of the perks of my loft bed is that I can have a whole stash of books tucked down the side and they don't fall off. 'The Yellow House' by Martin Gayford has been renewed several times as other things have interrupted the reading. (I think I read a review of another of his books and the library happened to have this one.) It tells the story of a brief period in 1888 when Paul Gauguin lived with Vincent Van Gogh in a house in Arles. It was just such an interesting book because it gives you the two artists as real people, their lives together and the impact they had on each other's work. It is a detailed timeline of the works they produced during this brief intense period. Vincent had this idea of creating a place where artists could come and work together and share ideas and influences. He had set a lot of store by his invitation to Gauguin and admired him greatly, though it turned out Vincent himself was not an easy person to live with. There is much discussion of the art they created but it also charts the development of the crisis in Vincent's mental health, an issue that had haunted his life and would lead finally to him taking his own life. The books brings to life the real person behind the myth that is Vincent.

'Meditations for Mortals' by Oliver Burkeman has been just a lovely and helpful as 'Four Thousand Weeks' was in 2022. It's all about considering what's important in life and not sweating about being a 'better person'. I loved this notion, 'cosmic debt': 

"Of course, there's the mundane sense in which we 'need' to do all sorts of things: in order to pay the rent, you must generate an income; if you do that by working at a job, you'd better meet your employer's requirements, or you can expect to run into trouble. If you have kids, it's generally a good idea to provide them with food and clothing. But we overlay this everyday sense of obligation with the existential duty described above: the feeling that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it's a cosmic debt we've somehow incurred in exchange for being alive. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written, 'we produce against the feeling of lack'. Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society." (p.21)

Designed to be read over four weeks, not as a blueprint for 'action' but as a guide to considering different kinds of problems and getting comfortable with imperfection, insecurity, and inevitable oblivion, and I was left with much to ponder. 

I very much liked this analysis of Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' poem (which I understand he grew to hate since it was so much requested at readings), taking a closer and slightly alternative reading of it, and it kind of sums up much of the book's message:

"Frost's poem undermines the conventional reading on almost every line. No sooner has the speaker told us about the road less travelled than he admits that, in fact, previous travellers had left the two paths worn 'really about the same'. And on closer examination, he never asserts that his choice of path 'made all the difference' in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one? What the speaker of the poem may be saying is that 'ages and ages hence' when he's an old man, he expects that's what he'll claim. Because he'll want to rationalise the choices he made - like everyone else does.

The true insight of Frost's poem, on this interpretation, isn't that you should opt for an unconventional life. It's that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you're inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can't ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you'll never know in hindsight, either - because not matter how great or how appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you'll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing." (p.49-50)

Stay safe. Be kind. Eat the damn marshmallow.

All the stuff

It has been a troublesome time. I have found myself obsessed with the American election, compulsively watching news reports and rallies on Youtube and pouring over the politics pages in the Guardian. The end is nigh, and all the rest of the world can do is hold its breath and wait. I could pretend I have been trying to distract myself, but no, I have just wallowed. All these books have been read weeks ago.

'The Advantages of Nearly Dying' by Michael Rosen was bought ages ago. In it he recounts through poetry the experience of nearly dying of Covid. I'm so glad he didn't die. Many of them relate to his body, and the things that nearly dying did to it, they are often witty and poignant at the same time, but the one I loved at the end has nothing to do with Covid. The rhetoric of the Republican nominee and his minions makes me afraid for the world again, so much hate and fear mongering, so much reducing people to less than human. Please, if you have a vote, vote for hope.

Sonnet for Anne Frank

Since you took us into that attic space

no room under the eaves has been the same.

Wherever we go - our homes or others

whenever we dip and duck under beams

you are in the shadows, writing pages

laughing, crying, eating, daring to love

imagining a better world than yours

How you wrote leads us to think we know you.

You compressed so much life into that loft

which we pore over and love you for it

yet the real world - not the one you imagined

didn't allow you to live and write anymore.

Each time we read, we struggle to enjoy

your love of life while knowing how it ended.

'We All Want Impossible Things' by Catherine Newman was a lovely story of friendship, put to the ultimate test as Edi is dying, and Ash focusses her life in on caring for her. We watch their day to day struggles and learn the history of their lives. It was warm and full of love, even with the inevitable ending. 

"I want to stay in the deep thrum of the profound, but I don't. Instead, I notice that Edi's nail polish is peeling - should I remove it? - and that Honey's wearing a sky-blue sweater I've never seen before, and that it looks great on him. The toasts are over, and Belle is laughing with Jonah, flashing the perfect gap between her front teeth. Jules is leaning against me, so grown-up in her tights and boots, and her hair smells like apples. Everyone is so beautiful. I'm seeing all of us surrounding Eli in this room, her bed in the middle like a raft. I'm seeing Shapeley on the grid of the town's streets and buildings, seeing the town in the state, the state in the country, the country in the globe, the earth in the boundless, endless universe, surrounded by infinity, spinning pointlessly. I slip outside into the hallway to catch my breath, and Honey follows, squats down by me. 'You okay?'

'Yeah. I think I'm having vertigo. Or, like, an existential crisis.'

Or apeirophobia, which, Jules has explained to me, is fear of eternity, which I'm definitely having. Where will Edi be? And for how long? Nowhere and forever. No." (p.155-156)

'The Garden Against Time' by Olivia Laing was bought at a Literature Festival event back in September (or maybe it was August). She tells the story of a Suffolk garden that she restores, and the history of the people who have over time impacted on its development. The whole book was so very readable, engaging, alternating between describing her own struggles with stories from the garden's past. Random quotes because she had so much thought provoking stuff to say, often at a complete tangent to gardening.

"Morris was not simply being nostalgic here. In fact, the accusation of nostalgia can be seen as part of the same Whig mindset, the belief that humanity is moving perpetually upward in its attainments, and that to pause or reverse is automatically a negative and regressive act, with correspondingly devastating social and economic consequences. What Morris believed instead was that many of the decisions around progress had been wrong, that good and simple ways of doing things had been replaces by cheaper, quicker ones, which impoverished and made ugly the lives of many while making millionaires of a very few. He didn't hesitate to inculpate himself in this dynamic, as purveyor, employer or consumer, asking in one of his lecture the still unanswerable, still troubling and turbulent question: 'how can we bear to use, how can we enjoy something that has been a pain and grief for the maker to make?'" (p.171)

"The first I came to was St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest surviving church in London. I lit a candle and went on by way of West Smithfield, pausing to look at my favourite memorial. It marks the site where King Richard II met with Wat Tyler and other representatives of the Great Revolt of 1381, to agree the political reforms that he later reneged on, killing Tyler in the process and later John Ball too; the events that inspired William Morris to write his time-travelling fantasy A Dream of John Ball. The plaque is carved with John Ball's famous words, still unfulfilled, still yearning: 'THINGS CAN NOT GO ON WELL IN ENGLAND NOR EVER WILL UNTIL EVERYTHING SHALL BE IN COMMON WHEN THERE SHALL BE NEITHER VASSAL NOR LORD AND ALL DISTINCTIONS LEVELLED.'" (P.228)

"In 1945 Hodgkin wrote to Kenneth Clark begging to be allowed to produce an official record of the plants that had established amidst the ruins of the City. Clark was chair of the War Artists Advisory Committee, established in the autumn of 1939 to commission artists to produce a documentary record of Britain at war. The best known images in the collection are those made by Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone of people sleeping in the impromptu air-raid shelters of the Underground, mouths hanging open, bodies spectral, worn to a revelling by fear and exhaustion. But there are thousands more, by over four hundred artists, known and unknown, recording bombing raids and burning churches, first-aid posts and operating theatres; even a house in the act of collapsing. Convalescent Nurses Making Camouflage Nets; An Emergent Bridge over the River Thames; Fire in a Paper Warehouse; Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo during an Air Raid Fire: the titles attest to the uncanny and often terrible sights that were witnessed and logged for the nation." (p235-236)

'The Life of a Banana' by P.P. Wong came from Monkey's shelf and is the story of a young Chinese girl living in the UK and her experience of trying to be both, British and Chinese. It was sometimes a hard book to read alongside all the other political stuff as there are descriptions of unpleasant racist bullying. It starts with the death of her mother and goes downhill from there, with her unloving grandmother, weird uncle and wayward aunt becoming her new family. She finds little niches of support, from her brother and a kindred spirit at school but her adolescence becomes a struggle without her mother's support and guidance. 

"Mama said London is a cosmo-politican country and 'cos of that it's okay to be an 'ethnic minority' 'cos there are quite a few of us. But then it gets weird 'cos I'm neither here nor there. Like I'm not totally white and I'm not Singaporean either. I love Sunday roasts and Chinese food too, but I can't speak fluent Chinese, and the only Chinese word I can write is my name. None of my friends have ever been Chinese apart from when I met Jay, but he's half. Kilburn was where I grew up - whereas Singapore is a strange land where people sound and act different. They use words like wah lay, kena and meh. But most of the people here look like me and my name is just normal, not strange. Also, I blur into the crowds of black haired people and, if I wanted to, I could be like Where's Wally. I could disappear and people would struggle to find me. Mama said I should be proud to be a BBC - British Born Chinese (when I was little I thought it meant that Chinese people were owned by the BBC). Mama said being BBC makes me special. But I don't feel special. Most of the time I feel strange." (p.121)

Also I stopped going to the gym. That didn't help in several ways. I became one of those people who paid for a gym membership but did not go. I kept paying because I thought if I stopped then I would definitely never go again. So I finally had a late shift on Friday and I went with Tish. This lovely, huge patch of wildflowers in the park has remained unmowed all summer and still looks lovely. My body hurts now as I am back to square one, but I have been three times and will try and establish a new routine for myself.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't beat yourself up.

Peregrinations

I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to get a grip on my house: books to the charity shop, lots of stuff in the bin, and quite a few things sold on Vinted. All it seems to have achieved is a few gaps on the bookcase. I will plod on with it.

'Four Seasons in Japan' by Nick Bradley was a graduation gift for Monkey sensei, that I don't think she read. It is a story within a story, of Flo, working as a translator in Japan, who finds a book on the subway and decides to make it her next project, and has to track down the somewhat elusive author for permission. It is also the book she is translating, a quiet tale of the relationship between a young man and his grandmother, both struggling to make sense of the death of his father. Lovely book, read it for some peace of mind.

I read about Kathleen Jamie a few weeks ago when she was featured on the 'Poem of the Week' in the Guardian and the library had 'Findings', which I have hugely enjoyed. It is a selection of writings about her observations and experiences of the natural world, all happening as part of her everyday life of caring for her family and ill husband. I particularly liked the one concerning Skara Brae on Orkney, having visited it myself about 40 years ago, but here is a little bit about peregrine falcons:

"By Easter Sunday, the run of hot weather had broken. A bitter east wind blew from the sea. As is the custom, we hard-boiled some eggs and the youngsters painted them and we went to the park to roll the eggs downhill. Few people were there, though, and we soon dispersed. I saw the male peregrine in the afternoon being pursued around the cliff by a single crow. The crow veered off and went to sit in a tree, but it must have left the peregrine piqued, because he circled alone two or three times more, stooping as though in scorn at whatever happened to be flying beneath him. A jackdaw jinked away with its life. Then the peregrine flew up and away over the hill, and was silhouetted for a long moment against the misty sunlight. An hour later he was back. On another ledge, six feet below, was what looked like a burst cushion pigeon-pink-grey." (p.37)

'The Authority Gap' by Mary Ann Sieghart was another of those books that is so depressing because you get laid out for you the systematically misogynistic structures and attitudes that exist within society that we are literally just scratching the surface of. I sometimes wonder if the suffragettes had any idea what they started by simply asking for the vote, and if they knew how long the road was going to be. Here we are 100 years later ... and the fight goes on. I skim read some of it, both because it was depressing, but also because it got a bit repetitive; seemingly endless examples of women being demeaned, belittled and ignored, even when occupying the most senior positions in business and government. Plucked at random, the experience of Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism Project):

"Bates was once invited to give a presentation to a group of MPs, who were meeting specifically to deal with gender equality, and therefore, you might assume would all take the issue seriously. 'I'd been invited to give evidence to them because of the fact that I had curated the largest dataset of its kind that had ever existed of women's experiences of gender inequality. I spoke at length about various forms of harassment, of abuse and sexual violence. And at the end of this meeting, an MP in a very important position came up to me and quietly told me that he felt that I was very "glass half empty", that I had a very negative approach. And that if I really wanted to make change, I should think carefully about ways to make my message more appealing to men. And he felt I sounded quite haranguing.'" (p.56-7)

We all so enjoyed 'Convenience Store Woman' (my goodness, six years ago!) so I found 'Earthlings' by Sayaka Murata ... and kind of wish I hadn't. Monkey Sensei did warn me that it was going to be weird. That was quite an understatement. I am not sure if I would even recommend it. Natsuke, a seemingly ordinary girl,  comes to believe she is an alien, but that was not the worrying part. The horrible treatment by her family and abuse by a teacher was much more distressing. The close bond she forms with her cousin on the annual family trip to her grandparents turns her life upside down, and even the means by which she copes with societies demands of her can't save her. It's like watching a car crash in slow motion.

"My town is a factory for the production of human babies. People live in nests packed closely together. It's just like the silkworm room at Granny's house. The nests are lined up neatly in rows, and each contains a breeding pair of male and female humans and their babies. I live in one of these nests too." (p.35)

Let me end with a poem by Kathleen Jamie (taken from 'Other Ways to Leave the Room', a small collection containing poems by Kathleen, Don Patterson and Nick Laird)

The Green Woman

Until we're restored to ourselves

by weaning, the skin jade

only where it's hidden

under jewellery, the areoles still tinged,

- there's a word for women like us

It's suggestive of the lush

ditch, or even an ordeal,

- as though we'd risen,

tied to a ducking-stool,

gasping, weed-smeared, proven.

Stay safe. Be kind. Take your overdue books back to the library.

Poems and Pomposity

 

I have been reading 'Books Do Furnish a Life', a selection of writings by Richard Dawkins but they were mostly introductions and reviews of other people's books, so you are not getting ideas but his opinions about people's ideas. There are lots of ideas for interesting books to read but I decided to take it back to the library.

Liked this:
"From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties
And things that go bump in the night
Good Lord deliver us.
Some say it is Scottish, not Cornish, but wherever it comes from the sentiments are shared worldwide. People are afraid off the dark. Science, as Sagan argued and personally exemplified, has the power to reduce ignorance and dispel fear. We should all read science and learn to think like scientists, not because science is useful (though it is), but because the light of knowledge is wonderful and banishes the debilitating and time-wasting fear of the dark." 

'Men Who Feed Pigeons' by Selima Hill was utterly surreal, juxtaposing the most mundane of situations with the weirdest of images, articulating random thoughts that might flit across the brain unnoticed for anyone else but that she somehow manages to pin down. 

Sometimes lovely cosy images:

Piglets
His head is like a barn full of straw
where piglets go to sleep in warm heaps.

Sometime very disturbing ones:

Everyone is Watching
Everyone is watching me and wondering
if somebody sitting on her own,
even though she's clean, and a woman,
is in fact a serial killer.

Sometimes just plain weird:

Honey
I do confide in him, but only rarely,
and when I do I always regret it:
he acts as if I'm smearing him with honey
in the dark with my bare hands.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't be afraid of the dark.

Friendship

'My Friend Anne Frank' by Hannah Pick-Goslar is the story of Hannah, childhood friend of Anne Frank, and the story of her war, a completely different one than Anne experienced. But before that it is the story of their friendship, having met at the age of 5, both German immigrants to Amsterdam, thrown together by circumstances but forming a bond that outlived Anne, and that meant Hannah spent much of her adult life educating children across the world about the Holocaust. It is both harrowing, for she experienced suffering that in some ways Anne was shielded from in hiding, but also heroic. Not only did she survive but she saved her young sister Gabi who was only a toddler when they were incarcerated; one by one the rest of her family died and they were left, and she devoted herself body and soul to caring for her sister. They spent nearly a year at Westerbork in the Netherlands and then over a year in Begen-Belsen, ending up on the lost train as the Germans tried to move prisoners as the allies advanced. She was a child, one of so many millions, forced to grow up too quickly, who experienced things that nobody ever should. This is from 1943, just after her mother has died in childbirth, one of so many losses she barely had time to grieve:

"My mother was my confident, my cheerer-on, she who knew me best. She had loved me and spoiled me in the small ways she could. I would have done almost anything for one more Wednesday afternoon crossing Dam Square to reach De Bijenkorf, our hands gliding over the silks and satins of dresses made in Paris, sipping our cups of warm hot cocoa for me, coffee for her. I missed her devotion to me, the intimacy we built over those years when I was the only child, fortunate in my devoted, doting parents. Where was I in this world that kept getting darker if she was not there to help me find my way? I'd sometimes creep into the bedroom she had shared with my father and open her wardrobe to hold her dresses to my face, eyes closed, imagining I could still feel her here with me. On my fourteenth birthday, one week after she died, I thought of the word 'motherless' and realised that's what I'd be for the rest of my life. People I knew - meaning the best but breaking my heart - said that I was 'quite the little mother' for Gabi. But I didn't want to be her mother. I wanted our mother back.

Papa told me that the lessons Mama had taught me through the way she lived her life were now part of me too, woven into my heart and there to tap, even if I did not understand that now." (p.108)

After liberation she went to Palestine, became a nurse and married, living to the ripe old age of 93. Surviving and thriving seems to me to be the only way to deal with such inhuman treatment and horrifying experiences, and I was very much left with the feeling that her childhood full of family love and friendship fortified her, gave her resources to draw on and she was certainly an amazing woman.

Also this, the moment she and Anne become friends:

"We went into a classroom where there were lots of children looking extremely busy. Some sat at small desks, playing with wooden blocks; others traced letters or sat on mats working on their writing. I spotted a girl with glossy dark hair that was almost black. I couldn't see her face as her back was turned to me. She was playing on a set of silver bells. In that moment, she turned around and looked at me. In a flash, we recognised one another. It was the girl from the corner grocery store? We instantly rushed into each other's arms as if we were long-separated sisters, sentences in German flowing between us like a volcano of connection. My clenched stomach released; my anxiety vanished and I smiled.

'My name is Annelies. You can call me Anne,' said the girl."

We're all related to Charlemagne

Yet another book that has to go back to the library ... why are there people out there wanting to read the same books I am reading. I mean it's not new out or anything, look at it, it's really battered. 'A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived' by Adam Rutherford is utterly fascinating and I am just going to have to re-reserve it to read the other half. This is just going to be a quickie as I have other more important things to write about than the history of the entire human race. While he tries very hard to make it accessible to the lay reader I did flounder a bit in places with the vocabulary but I liked him because he is brutally honest about the fact that the subject is so complex that we are barely scraping the surface of genetics:

"Even when we know the genome intimately, and the pattern of inheritance, and the history of the DNA, and the migration patterns of the people who carried it, and the evolutionary pressures that led to the perpetuation of the genes and phenotypes - even when we know all that, how it manifests can still be mysterious and surprising. Anyone who says differently is selling something." (p.104)

And then it got even more brutal about the random people who make grandiose claims about their ancestors ... because when it comes down to it, you don't have to go back very far before everyone is related to everyone else:

"You are of royal descent, because everyone is. You are of Viking descent, because everyone is. You are of Saracen, Roman, Goth, Hun, Jewish descent, because, well you get the idea. All Europeans are descended from exactly the same people, and not that long ago. Everyone alive in the tenth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, and his children, Drago, Pippin and, of course, not forgetting Hugh. If you're broadly eastern Asian, you're almost certain to have Genghis Kahn sitting atop your tree somewhere in the same manner, as if often claimed. If you're a human being on Earth, you almost certainly have Nefertiti, Confucious or anyone we can actually name from ancient history in your tree, if they left children. The further back you go, the more the certainty of ancestry increases, though the knowledge of our ancestors decreases. It is simultaneously wonderful, trivial, meaningless and fun." (p.152)

Because the study of DNA is mostly interesting and useful on a grand scale, because it is teaching us about the history of the human species rather than the history of any particular person. Because genes are not deterministic, they indicate that something might be the case, or is likely over a population holding a particular gene, not that you will definitely have blue eyes, or die of cancer.

Stay safe. Be kind. Respect your genome.

Forget Me Not

I read 'Forget me not' by Sophie Pavelle last month and it had been buried under more recent reads. It was a most engaging read, and, despite being about some of the UK's most endangered species it was pretty upbeat. While giving us the lowdown about the environmental loss she also gave the positive stories of the people working to research and improve the chances of each one. The book charts her journeys (mostly during gaps between the lockdowns) around the country to understand in person what is happening to our wild environment. She covers the more relatable subjects like the harbour porpoise, the grey long-eared bat, the mountain hare and the marsh fritillary (butterfly) but also the more unlikely ones like the dung beetle and the seagrass. Each one has its very specific needs and niche. You can almost see a theme developing because it's precisely the narrowness of the niche that makes each species so particularly vulnerable; like the marsh fritillary that becomes isolated in small pockets of suitable meadows, meaning its protectors are struggling to create corridors to connect these pockets. 

The story of the mountain hares was very striking to me. Climate change has already affected the length and temperature of the winter, meaning the snow is disappearing earlier leaving the hares with their white winter coat exposed to predators. However, the grouse 'industry' means there is extensive control of predators in many areas of Scotland, which offers them some protections. This conversely means that there is not the pressure on them to change. It is a fine balancing act, one kind of human activity has one effect, then different activity also affects them. 

"So, what's happening on grouse moors in Scotland is that we're meddling with their potential to evolve because by removing the majority of their predators, we are releasing a vital selection pressure that would, in theory, trigger an evolutionary answer to the problem of sticking out. Nature made mountain hares the right colour for each season, but our meddling has painted their fur in an unseasonal hue, and now hares are unwittingly wearing the wrong shade. Oh honey.

'It's the most likely explanation for why they have not evolved to match the 'new' shorter snow seasons,' Markets admitted. She considered how wonderful it would be if we reintroduced more golden eagles and other key predators that have been lost across much of the Highlands. But this could be bad news for the hares, as predators will find them more often. 'To restore the natural systems successfully, we must first understand all the players in the game.' Holistic with a capital H." (p.266)

The news yesterday concerning the rising sea temperature was most depressing and it often feels like time is running out. I have to balance the news with something encouraging. From the seagrass being planted by armies of volunteers to the ambitious rewilding project at Knepp Castle estate the book is full of stories of enthusiasts doing wild things and making the world a better place. It left me uplifted rather than despondent. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Try and think positive.

Walking on Icebergs

'Otherlands' by Thomas Halliday has been a most educational read. In his acknowledgements he thanks his editors without whom  "this would have been a drearier, more saltatory, and more technical read", so I would like to thank them too because, despite some parts being scientific beyond my understanding, I found it incredibly accessible and absolutely fascinating (though I did just have to look up 'saltatory'). It is the kind of book that it would be good to read in digital form, so that you could look up random unfamiliar vocabulary, and I also kept wishing there were more illustrations of the strange and fabulous creatures from the far distant past. What astounds me the most is the mere fact that human beings have poured such huge energy and resources into knowing so much about our planet. And because of the current crisis that we find ourselves in you feel that this knowledge about the millions of years of change and adaptation have much to teach us. 

The book is a geological and evolutionary history of the planet, going backwards, starting 20,000 years ago and proceeding by leaps and bounds to 550 million years ago. Each chapter focusses on a particular location on the planet, mostly it seems because of the richness of the fossil record for that particular era. His style is something of a nature documentary, describing the environment you might have encountered, the sights and smells, the climate and the flora and fauna. All the time he links it forward to our own 'land', finding similarities or pointing out significant changes. 

Very quickly (in book terms, not in years) you are back in pre-history, and the animals are outlandish. This is a Tully Monster, Tullimonstrum, described thusly in the book: "They have a segmented torpedo of a body, and at the rear, two rippling fins that look a little like the wings of a squid. At the front, a long, thin feature, something like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, wiggles, with a  tiny tooth-filled grabbing claw at its end. Adding further confusion, there is a solid bar running from side to side across the top of the creature, horizontal stalks on which are set bulbous organs of some kind, which are generally assumed to be its eyes. All in all, it is unlike anything else that is known in over half a billion years of animal evolution." (p.195) But sometimes it seems as if everything he describes is unlike anything else. I don't know very much about evolution but I think the book helps get across the timescales that are involved. The process of a species adapting and being successful takes millions of years, and yet, confusingly, it can be observed in action in fruit flies. Again, he links forward constantly, telling you which modern creatures are related to the ones he describes. Incorporated into the history and the palaeobiology there is plenty of other stuff to learn. Here, when discussing Prototaxites, he diverts into a description of how fungi operate:

"Fungi are the great collaborators of life, forming close associations with species so distantly related to them that we place them in distinct kingdoms. The most intimate association they form is with a photosynthesising organism, whether a plant or a cyanobacterium, to form a lichen. Excellent at breaking down organic matter, the fungal partner in a lichen can extract huge amounts of mineral nutrient from even the barest surface, sharing it with a photosynthesising partner (known as a photobiont) and protecting it with a tough tissue sheath. In return, with access to light, the photobiont can make energy that will feed the fungus. This powerful combination means that, wherever there is a surface exposed to light and water, a lichen can grow." (p.208-9)

Here he teaches me about ancient mollusc, this one being most curious. It was thought to be extinct for several hundred million years, then a living specimen was pulled from the deep ocean by a fishing vessel in the 1950s. It is fascinating how some creatures are transformed over time and some find their niche and just stay there, barely altering.

"Monoplacoophorans are an extremely ancient type of mollusc, the oldest known from the fossil record. With a single, central, rippling foot, they shuffle around in the sediment. Wherever they go, they leave behind the scratchings of their rasping radulae, filing at the rocks to prise off their microscopic food. Monoplacophorans still survive in the present day, but where most fossil monoplacophorans live close to the shore, today they only exist in the deep ocean. The earliest of that group to venture into the deep, though, is Thermoconus at Yaman-Kasy. Perhaps, although the fossil record is to sparse to prove it, the monoplacophorans at Yaman-Kasy represent the beginnings of a retreat into the world where no others could survive, an evolutionary hiding place in an inaccessible niche-space, free of competition." (p.229-30)

As well as the flora and fauna each chapter tracks the transformation of the planet itself. It is easy to look at a map and assume that the world has always looked like this. I remember as a child learning how South America would fit against the coast of Africa and how the land used to be one huge continent. What I find from this book is that, as well as the massive changes in sea level, the land masses have had a long slow migration to their current positions that has taken them through many different configurations. He talks about how the crust of the earth is so thin, floating on a sea of magma: "The Himalayas have the thickest crust in the modern day, about 70 kilometres thick, but Mount Everest reaches only 9 kilometres above sea level. Mountains are tall because they have deep roots bobbing in the denser mantle. So much of our buoyant land is hidden below the surface. We, too, are walking on icebergs." (p.247) This (presumably artist's impression with some interpretation of data) shows the Devonian world (407 million years ago):

Here is a Promissum, a most ordinary creature, and here is the description of how it becomes fossilised (I borrowed this book without expectation and was continually fascinated by detailed information about the most random subjects):

"The rain of silt and algae that falls in the Soom summer also give the sea floor an unusual chemistry for fossil formation. If a Promissum dies in winter, it will sink to the bottom and become coated in and buried by that persistent subglacial black dirt. The body will decay, the teeth disappear, and nothing will be preserved. But in the summer, when the loess falls too, not all of it can be processed by the zooplankton and organic-eating bacteria, and it settles as a paler layer of rich sediment, enhanced by the organic input from dying plankton, a striped annual deposition called the varve. The preservation of this double-layering at Soom is an almanac, a yearly account of conditions some 440 million years ago, proportionally equivalent to having a daily diary for the earliest humans in western Europe, 1.2 million years before the present.

In the acidic conditions, the cartilaginous skeleton of Promissum will still decay, but other elemental forces will take hold. As the proteins in its muscles begin to disassemble, they release a chemical effusion of ammonia and potassium. Reacting with iron minerals, and dissolved within the spaces between individual sand grains, they turn into a rich illite clay. The shape of the muscle fibres determines the ultimate shape of the clay, and muscle is sculpted in mineral, replaced by its own facsimile. The conversion of soft muscle to clay at Soom is unique, and utterly beautiful, a vision of life in a sea that is advancing - as geologists defensively put it, transgressing - on the land, chasing the melting glaciers retreat." (p. 245-6)

The 'Big Five' extinction events also provide part of the structure of the book as they mark significant turning points for the balance of species, killing some and allowing others to become dominant. Another example of how well the book is written, explaining things without dumbing down (sometimes he assumed too much prior knowledge but not often). Apparently there is still debate about the cause of the Ordovician event, Thomas goes with the global cooling explanation:

"The algal blooms that still occur around Soon were ubiquitous, happening wherever these outwashes occurred, with bigger populations of bigger individuals. This glut increased the marine snowfall to the ocean floor from an occasional flurry to a continuous blizzard. As the algae's carbon-rich bodies settled and were buried, they drew with them carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the same time, a coincidental increase in volcanic eruptions as the Caledonides were raised produced a lot more silicate rock. As we have seen, the weathering of silicates causes reactions with carbon dioxide in the air. These fresh silicates helped to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, too. In the resultant rapid climate change, a full 85% of the species on Earth, almost all marine, went extinct. The glaciation did not last long, but it was long -lived enough to cause devastation. It was the first of the so-called 'Big Five' extinctions, and the only mass-extinction event directly caused by global cooling." (p.241)

Evolution is a weird thing. I find it annoying that much ordinary writing about it makes it seem as if it were intentional, moving forward to some kind of 'ideal' lifeform, rather than a pure chance. A creature cannot 'decide' to evolve, or try and make itself suit a new situation. Then he gives me this lovely explanation of why it seems that evolution is something that happened in the past, but not so much any more:

"Perhaps, in the Cambrian and earlier, the development from fertilised egg to embryo to animal was less defined. If so, fundamental changes to tissues and their arrangements would be, on average, less damaging. Once fixed in place, though, fundamentals become very difficult to change. As with the functioning of a computer, fiddling with the code of a single application is relatively simple, and unlikely to damage the overall function of the machine, but editing a line from the operating system is likely to cause problems. Natural selection, then, ends up being a tinkering mechanism, unable - or at least extremely unlikely - to take a sledgehammer to the basic internal structure. In this view, a new phylum cannot arise in modern day because the anatomy of living beings is simply too complex compared with that of their Cambrian and Precambrian forebears. Evolution today can only be played out within the constraints set by the past." (p257-8)

And then we find ourselves back at the very beginning, and life, life is a chance chemical reaction in the depths of the ocean, which just makes it all the more amazing. My only criticism of the book would be that I found going backwards sometimes confusing, in that you were seeing the opposite of 'progress' with fewer simpler organism. The book became for me a little like looking at the stars and realising how small you are; looking at the length of time over which the planet has been transformed makes you appreciate how brief the human race's presence is in the grand scale of millions of years. Though it is not a polemical book in any sense his epilogue is a demand that the world pay attention to the past in order the understand the future.

"As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt - if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss in the common response." (p.241)

"Unlike past occasions when a single species or group of species had fundamentally altered the biosphere - the oxygenation of the oceans, the laying down of the coal swamps - our species is in an unusual position of control over the outcome. We know that change is occurring, we know we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know we can stop it and we know how. The question is whether we will try." (p.286)

He talks about how close the planet has come, more than once, to the destruction of all life, but I was left feeling that, actually, life is pretty damn persistent, even in the face of a pitiless and inhospitable environment it just wouldn't give up.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't give up.

(Weird creature images from Wikicommons.)