A First Book of Nature
May 3, 2012 at 10:40 pm | Posted in Learning Stuff | 2 CommentsTags: A First Book of Nature, Eileen Soper, Foyle's, Mark Hearld, St Jude's Gallery
Today was the official launch of a beautiful new book that admirably continues the tradition of Enid Blyton’s Round the Year and other nature books. A First Book of Nature is written by Nicola Davies and illustrated the wonderful Mark Hearld. Hearld is one of the group of artists with a close affiliation to the fine St Jude’s Gallery which is situated in my home country of Norfolk.
Hearld works in printmaking, collage, painting and ceramics and uses birds, animals, flora and fauna in his work. Pigeons and hares seem to recur quite a bit and A First Book of Nature features these and much more.
The book travels through the year with hares, birds’ nests and blossom in the spring; honey and hay-making in the summer; ‘spiderlings’ and squirrels in the 
autumn; and naked winter trees and cold dark skies filled with stars in the winter. It is less didactic than Blyton’s books (which are full of projects and classroom exercises) but there are little poems, lists of reasons to keep chickens (‘they look very silly when they are taking a dust bath’), a recipe for making a cake for birds and instructions on seed saving.
To celebrate the book’s publication, Foyle’s bookshop is holding an exhibition of Hearld’s original art works for the book in its 3rd floor gallery until the 13th May. If you’re in town I highly recommend stopping by to take a look (and browsing the book too).
While I’m on the subject of nature illustration, I have to take this opportunity to post up some of Eileen Soper’s work. She usually appears on this blog through her Famous Five illustrations (and with thanks to the Enid Blyton Society who make these images available on their very good site) but she was also a dab hand at nature drawing too. Both of these are available to buy online. The top one is titled ‘Who-Who-Who-Who?’, the bottom one ‘Woffly the Rabbit and Quick Ears the Hare’ (and we all know whose nose is a ‘a bit woffly’, don’t we?! – see The Famous Five in Love if not).
Off-Beat Walking in London
April 8, 2012 at 3:25 pm | Posted in Eating and Drinking, Learning Stuff | 1 CommentTags: Badaude, Hackney Hear, London Fields, London Wall, Museum of London, Off-Beat Walks in London, Shire Guides, St Albans
Well, we’re three quarters of the way through this gloomy Easter weekend and I’m sad to say I have not cycled once. Prof Hayling and I didn’t make it to Essex after all so I instead opted for a pleasantly melancholy London-themed weekend of gin, Patrick Hamilton (a re-read of Hangover Square) and walks around the city courtesy of Shire’s retro classic Discovering Off-Beat Walks in London and the fascinating Hackney Hear (which has led me around London Fields this afternoon, possibly looking a bit like a weirdo).
Yesterday I opted for Shire’s (partial) London Wall walk. Starting at St Paul’s you walk up St Martin-le-Grand and Aldersgate before wandering round the back to Noble Street where large portions of London’s Roman city wall can be seen. Things get a bit confusing when you negotiate the raised walkways around the Museum of London and the Barbican but it’s all fascinating stuff, especially as this is a walk that really highlights London’s rich juxtaposition of old and new, 
e.g. the 200AD Roman wall next to 20th and 21st century office blocks, or St Giles, Cripplegate Church in the midst of the Barbican complex.
This (left) is the the tower of St Alban’s Church and is all that remains of an early church that was rebuilt in the 17th century by Inigo Jones and again by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. The church was partially destroyed in the Blitz, with the rest demolished in the 1960s. Now just the tower remains as a listed building serving as a private home with a roof garden.
Hackney Hear is a GPS-enabled application for the iphone or similar. As you stroll around London Fields and Broadway Market, audio clips based on your location get played – I heard Iain Sinclair musing on London Fields’ distant and more recent past; a local discussing the gang culture of the area; a poem about trees; a song about the lido, and the history of outdoor swimming in East London.
If you stray out of range whilst listening to a particular recording you have to walk back – hence my possibly looking a bit odd as I paced back and forth, suddenly halting from time to time. But hey, who cares about such things? If you are in the area and are technologically enabled, I recommend you check out Hackney Hear – it’s free to download here. The map (pictured right) that accompanies the app is by the talented Badaude. You can read more about her experience of working on Hackney Hear here, and see some of her other London walking maps here.
Tomorrow I will re-emerge from these solitary London pleasures and host a Famous Five High Tea. It’s time to finally attempt the chocolate mould of Five Fall into Adventure as the Lenten chocolate fast is over, and, in the words of young Sid the paperboy, who gets embroiled in this adventure, I am now feeling ‘partial to anything in the chocolate line’.
Touring England
March 11, 2012 at 6:52 pm | Posted in Anne, Fun and Games, Learning Stuff, Travel | 2 CommentsTags: Touring England
A lovely Sunday afternoon spent with Anne: tea, scones and the Touring England board game – an exciting 1930s race around the country by motor car. Anne won. You actually tour England and Wales but the 1930s was clearly a time more indifferent to the divisions between the nations of Great Britain. Apart from that little slip up, the game is both educational (there are interesting facts about each town or city you have to visit) and fun.
Each players picks 8 cards at random and these decide the destinations you must set off to visit (pre-motorway) before returning to your home town. You choose your route and encounter a number of obstacles along the way (traffic lights, minor collisions, stubborn ferries that require you to roll at 6 before boarding). As the box says, this is a game requiring both skill and judgement.
East Anglian Film Archive Online
November 26, 2011 at 1:52 pm | Posted in Learning Stuff | Leave a commentTags: East Anglian Film Archive, Old Shuck, Ted Ellis, Witness in Brass
On Thursday I went up to Norwich for the launch of the East Anglian Film Archive’s new website and digital archive. This contains 200 hours’ worth of films from the East of England region, from 1896 to the (almost) present, all available to watch online for free. It’s a fantastic achievement although sadly the launch comes at a time when the archive has had its staff and funding cut and has had to curb its operations for the foreseeable future.
Here’s a quick pick of 5 Famous Five friendly films to try (but please explore further as there are some incredible films looking at slum housing in Ipswich, the art of paper marbling, lavender growing and much more)
1. Witness in Brass (pictured above) Two boys (quite Julian and Dick-esque) rub church brasses under the guidance of a friendly Essex vicar.
2. Old Shuck A spooky tale of Mr Leslie Goodwin’s sighting of Old Shuck, the Black Ghost Dog of North Norfolk. On a par with stories of ‘spook trains’ and the numerous other tales told by some of the old salts that populate Enid Blyton’s books.
3. Ted Ellis Learn about nature with the legendary Norfolk naturalist Ted Ellis. A good companion to Blyton’s Round the Year series of nature books.
4. The Flood The adventures of four children who get stranded in a Fens farmhouse by a dramatic flood.
5. The New Gypsies (Caravans). An Anglia news report from 1961 on the rising popularity of caravan holidays. The Five were well ahead of the game here (see Five Go off in a Caravan)
Oh, and because I can’t quite resist throwing in one for George, here’s one more, a curious BBC Look East piece from 1977, Dog Psychiatrist. Obviously no other canines are quite as smart as Timmy.
The Urban Physic Garden
June 11, 2011 at 10:02 pm | Posted in Aunt Fanny, Eating and Drinking, Learning Stuff | Leave a commentTags: Open Garden Squares Weekend, Urban Physic Garden
I often like to ramble on about Aunt Fanny’s (potential) skills and interests as a country housewife, mostly because this gives me an excuse to write about making fruit syrups, how to use milk to remove freckles and how to make traditional remedies for all manner of ailments. Following this line of imagination, I suspect Aunt F. would very much enjoy the Urban Physic Garden which opened today on Union Street, Borough, London.
This pop-up garden has been created on a plot of urban wasteland and was built by a team of designers, gardeners and volunteers. Last year the space became the Union Street Urban Orchard, and as well as a fine array of fruit tress, it boasted some excellent avian action too (see my post on Bankside Birds). This time the planting and construction has been inspired by the medicinal, as the project website states: ‘a physic garden is a place where medicinal properties grow. For thousands of years people have been using plants to cure all ills’.
Today was the official opening of the garden, neatly timed to coincide with the London Open Garden Squares weekend. We arrived around lunchtime while the finishing touches were being put in place 
- plants in pots were being set out on newly-built shelves and information sheets outlining the properties and uses of various plants were being pinned up. Knowledgeable ladies were handing out homemade mint and ginger tea, elderflower ‘champagne’, gooey liquorice and a particularly delicious (and sticky) toffee-type creation made from liquorice and sage.
The raised planting areas are organised into ‘wards’ based on their healing powers (orthopedic, respiratory, dermatology, psychiatry etc) and there’s also a plant orphange, 
a decommissioned ambulance-turned-cafe, a consultation area and (somewhere) a compost toilet. The garden is open until 15 August and there are various events taking place over the summer including consultations, walks, talks as well as bread-making and drawing classes and a pop-up ‘Rambling Restaurant’ based out of the aforementioned ambulance. NB This is positioned somewhat close to the ‘Poison Cabinet’ but I’m sure they know what they’re doing.
The Butterflies of Billycock Hill
May 25, 2011 at 10:03 pm | Posted in Learning Stuff | Leave a commentTags: butterfly-spotting, butterflying, Matthew Oates, Mr Brent, Mr Gringle, National Trust, Stapleton, The Collector, The Hound of the Baskervilles
The National Trust’s quarterly magazine is really rather interesting. The summer edition includes articles on many Famous Five-friendly topics including camping, beekeeping, bread-making and butterfly spotting. In the latter, Matthew Oates discusses a recent National Trust survey that asked people what butterflies meant to them, and notes that ‘no longer is butterflying the domain of eccentric loners’.
This of course provides the perfect opportunity for me to take a look at Messrs Gringle and Brent, the ‘queer’ butterfly men of Five Go to Billycock Hill. 
These chaps can be seen as part of a literary tradition that links lepidoptery with the sinister. This line includes Stapleton, the villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles (right), who spends a lot of his time prowling the moors, net in hand; and the protagonist of John Fowles’ unsettling first novel, The Collector (1963), who also gives butterfly enthusiasts a very bad name.
Oates notes that the UK’s top butterfly sites are ‘staggeringly lovely locations’ (the Trust’s top three are Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge; Sizergh, Cumbria; and Murlough Nature Reserve, Northern Ireland). In Blyton world the top butterfly site is undoubtedly Billycock Hill. This is, as Mr Gringle tells the children, an excellent place for rare butterflies. He’s dismissive when the Kirrins’ chum Toby spots a meadow-brown (“very common indeed”) but gets excited when he sights a Brown Argus, “one of the family of Blue Butterflies you see so often in full summer” and a Six-Spot Burnet Day Flying Moth (“highly-coloured and unusually large”). It goes without saying that Blyton was a keen naturalist and her descriptions of butterflies and moths are pretty accurate.
Mr Gringle breeds butterflies in a series of glasshouses and gives the children an extremely thorough tour:
‘The Butterfly farm was certainly interesting and the children wandered about the glass-house watching caterpillars of all kinds, admiring the lovely specimens of butterflies, and marvelling at the collection of curious-shaped chrysalides and cocoons that Mr Gringle kept carefully in boxes, waiting for the perfect insect, moth or butterfly, to emerge.
“Like magic,” he said in an awed voice, his eyes shining behind his glasses. “Sometimes you know, I feel like a magician myself – and my butterfly net is a wand!”
The children felt rather uncomfortable as he said this, waving his butterfly net to and fro like a wand. He really was rather a queer person.’
Even creepier is Gringle’s partner, Mr Brent, who is a small and thin man ‘with a pinched face and dark glasses’. Julian finds him prowling Billycock Hill one dark and stormy night. Brent is supposedly checking honey traps (oh yes) for moths before they get washed away by the rain but is really up to something far more sinister… It turns out that Brent isn’t a true butterfly lover and is in fact officially a Bad Sort. Mr Gringle on the other hand is just an obsessive eccentric with a prickly personality – a bit like Uncle Quentin in fact (a more benign version of this type is the endearing Mr Luffy, champion ear-waggler and bug-hunter extraordinaire of Five Go off to Camp).
Whew! So we can indulge in a spot of butterfly spotting without the criminal/sociopathic associations. Oates does recommend using binoculars, however as ‘it makes people think you are a birder and not a weirdo’ (ah, how birdwatching has come on in the world since it became ‘birding’). And now’s a good time to get started with butterflying, in advance of the Big Butterfly Count between the 16th and 31st July. More details here.
Schools of Cycling
May 21, 2011 at 11:51 am | Posted in Cycle Rides, Learning Stuff, Travel | Leave a commentTags: Bicycle Hub, Practioners' Parlour, School of Life
Plans are advancing for 2011′s cycle holiday. This year Dick and I are leaving the Cotswolds behind and cycling around the charming county of Kent. We’ll be starting in Broadstairs and working our way towards Royal Tunbridge Wells via Canterbury, Whitstable and Faversham. Once again we’ll brave the August weather (we’ve had remnants of hurricanes and cloud bursts in previous years) and report back on good (and bad) cycle routes and places to eat, drink and stay.
For anyone bicycle-minded who is near, or visiting Shropshire, do check out the Bicycle Hub. They restore and service old bikes as well as running classes on how to do it yourself. They also organise rides and other events and offer training for all levels of cyclist. For London bicycle aficionados, Brian Perkins, founder of the Bicycle Hub will be at the School of Life on 3 June. He’ll be speaking as part of the regular Practitioners’ Parlour series of talks which ‘brings together makers, bakers, experimenters, creators and craftspeople, in an active exploration of human hinterland of everyday craft.’ In July, Rob Penn, author of It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels, will be leading another School of Life cycling event, this time it’s a weekend cycling around the Brecon Beacons.
The Sky at Night
April 3, 2011 at 8:05 pm | Posted in Learning Stuff | Leave a commentTags: Hubble, Ladybird Books, Professor Brian Cox, The Night Sky, Wonders of the Universe
Like a large proportion of the population, I’ve been obsessed by Professor Brian Cox’s BBC TV series, Wonders of the Universe (which has just finished but is still available on iplayer). I confess that it is causing me a small amount of existential angst - as the programme’s webpages state “the ravaging effects of time are all around us. The vast universe is subject to these same laws of change. As we look out to the cosmos, we can see the story of its evolution unfold, from the death of the first stars to the birth of the youngest. This journey from birth to death will ultimately lead to the destruction not just of our planet, but also the entire universe, and with it the end of time itself”. But aside from this minor issue, I’m thoroughly fascinated and am contemplating a holiday to the Channel Island of Sark which has recently been designated the world’s first dark sky island. Incidentally, Sark itself sounds like the ideal setting for a Blyton story with its craggy coastline, wealth of wildlife and no cars (lots of tractors though). Maybe there is scope for a mystery of some sort here too, I don’t know.
To return to stargazing: in Five Get into Trouble a delightfully mild Easter break gives the Five ample opportunity for observing the sky at night. The weather is so fine that on the first night of their cycling tour Julian decrees that tents can be dispensed with. ‘”How smashing!” said Anne. “I’d love to lie and look at the stars.”‘ Snuggling down in their sleeping bags, George draws Julian’s attention to a “glorious star – like a little round lamp. What is it?” The ever-knowledgeable Julian replies “It’s not a star really – it’s Venus, one of the planets [...] But it’s called the Evening Star. Fancy you not knowing that George, don’t they teach you anything at your school?”
I wonder if George is pondering some of the more profound questions of existence as she ‘gaze[s] unblinkingly at the bright evening star for a minute’ before falling suddenly asleep? In a pre-Brian Cox era, if George wanted to find out more about the solar system, she could perhaps turn to Ladybird book, The Night Sky (1965), which tells us more about Venus (illustration to the right):
‘When you see what looks like a brilliant star in the west or south-west in the evening, shining all alone in the sky before the other stars appear, it is almost certainly the planet Venus. When it is not an evening star, it is a morning star in the east or south-east before sunrise. It alternates between evening and morning, spending seven or eight months in each, with only a short absence in between.’
The front and back endpapers of The Night Sky have sky charts for different times of year, and there are small sections on various heavenly bodies and on how to spot key stars and constellations such as the North Star and Orion the Hunter. Ladybird now sell prints of some of these, including this one of the Orion Nebula (above left). Even better perhaps (because it’s real!) is this image below, taken by the Hubble space telescope. The Orion nebula is 1,500 light years away from Earth and there are more than 3,000 stars visible in this picture. This and many more beautiful images are available to download from the Hubble website. Happy stargazing!
New Year’s Resolution?
December 31, 2010 at 10:31 am | Posted in Eating and Drinking, Learning Stuff | Leave a commentTags: Everything Stops for Tea, Imperial War Musuem, Jack Buchanan, Ministry of Food, War on Waste
Sound advice courtesy of the Ministry of Food and the Imperial War Museum. The IWM’s exhibition on digging for victory and rationing is in its last few days (ends Jan 3 2011) but is well worth visiting if you get the chance. Alternatively, the exhibition blog has lots of good photos, comments and film clips.
There are original posters on display (“Spades Not Ships”, ‘Milk: The Backbone of Young Britain’, “Food is a Munition of War – Don’t Waste it”) as well as delights such as potato flower-patterned housecoats and other rationing-themed textiles. Recreations of wartime shops, kitchens and greenhouses sit alongside oral history recordings (recalling life as a landgirl or as a canteen worker for instance), wartime radio broadcasts, propaganda films and ‘food flashes’. There are also lots of songs playing as you walk around the exhibition. My current favourite is Jack Buchanan singing ‘Everything Stops for Tea’. This is also very sound advice, especially during January when the promise of a little treat at four o’clock can help you get through the day.
Happy New Year everyone!
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