26/01/19: Richard Mabey – The Unofficial Countryside (1973)

Now regarded as a pioneering classic of psychogeography, but written before such a thing was fashionable, The Unofficial Countryside remains a luminous and visionary work.

It was revolutionary at the time of first publication for the way it refused to accept the standard definitions of “urban” and “rural”. Mabey found and observed nature in the marginal spaces defying categorisation between the two. This wonderful book celebrates the wildlife that others overlook or condemn, and expands at length on the notion that “a weed is just a flower in the wrong place”. His outlook is liberating. There’s a sort of poetry about his observations that – as Iain Sinclair notes in his introduction to this beautiful edition created by Little Toller Books – isn't far from J.G. Ballard’s ability to see possibilities in ugly and abandoned spaces: “...a sliver of land left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electricity substation. Nothing can be done with these patches. They are too small or misshapen to build on, too expensive to landscape.” Ignored, they therefore “form some of the richest and most unpredictable habitats for wildlife to be found in urban areas”.

The book is a reassuring reminder of how resourceful life can be – what he calls nature’s “perennial opportunism and exuberance” – with birds and other small creatures often finding ingenious means to sustain their threatened communities.

There are musings on the life-giving properties of abandoned gravel pits and the English canal system. Plus, there are brilliant passages on the ingenuity of urban pigeons and the demonisation of foxes: “Our attitudes towards urban wildlife, our readiness to tolerate pests, is conditioned more than anything else by whether the creature in question will eat, both literally and metaphorically, out of our hands. No doubt foxes would be regarded as acceptable if they came sweetly, by day, to lap milk from doorstep saucers. Being lone wolves, midnight ramblers, prowlers and looters, they are branded as outlaws. It is homo sapien’s old chauvinism again: we are the stewards; animals should live by our rules, not those of the jungle. It’s not one of our most consistent attitudes.”

Mabey despairs at the sorry state of our parks, but marvels at the urban/rural idyll that is Hampstead Heath. It’s delightful to read of how he looked for a rare orchid on a golf course: “I quartered the slope carefully, eyes close to my feet, and going down on hands and knees in the more promising patches...I didn’t notice whether in fact it was the ninth and final green where I struck lucky, but my patience was running out and it was certainly the last one I was going to play. But there, nestling under a foot-tall birch shrub, I spied a couple of skulking frogs. I crawled about the area, expecting a horrified ‘fore’ to ring in my ears at any second, and found a couple of dozen plants growing in an area not more than two yards square.”

I particularly admire the way the book is organised, moving fluidly between topics without you really noticing. It’s a more satisfying approach than if it had been rigidly structured into sections.

The author largely avoids the topic of insects: “I think we may be lucky that insects are too small and remote ever to have entered our understanding in the way that birds and flowers have. If we saw their lives for what they really are I think it might be too much for us to bear.” He also writes surprisingly little about the vast volume and ubiquity of litter spoiling wild land everywhere, but then this is a problem that has grown since the book’s original publication. There was far less plastic debris in our midst in 1973 than there is today.

Whether he’s looking for wading birds at sewage farms or admiring the natural riches at landfill sites, the book is a joy to read because of his gentle wit and empathy for all living things. It’s a real pleasure to see the world through his eyes.

20/01/19: Anne Scott – 18 Bookshops (2011)

I love books and I love bookshops, so it’s difficult to say why this account of 18 “significant” bookshops seems so uninvolving. Perhaps it’s the dry way the author relates history, or maybe it’s just that her writing lacks character. Either way, I found myself wondering why I was reading about the ephemeral aspects of books rather than actually spending time reading something life-enriching. There were quite a few typos, too. It also annoyed me that this edition is printed without page numbers. It seems over-designed in general – intended to be a beautiful object, no doubt – but its usefulness is diminished as a result.

Trivia: Anne Scott is the mother of Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

16/01/19: Steven Callahan – Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (1986)

“Sailors may be struck down at any time, in calm or in storm, but the sea does not do it for hate or spite. She has no wrath to vent. Nor does she have a hand of kindness to extend. She is merely there, immense, powerful, and indifferent. I do not resent her indifference, or my comparative insignificance. Indeed, it is one of the main reasons I like to sail: the sea makes the insignificance of my own small self and of all humanity so poignant.”

While sailing from the Canary Islands in January 1982, Steven Callahan’s ship, Napoleon Solo, was hit by something and swiftly began to sank. Callahan launched his inflatable life raft and had a few minutes to retrieve emergency supplies from his boat before it went down. This raft would become his home for 76 days, drifting 1,800 nautical miles.

He suffered hunger, thirst and countless other medical problems but survived by extraordinary resourcefulness. When he was eventually found by three sailors off Guadeloupe, he had lost 44 lb and was unable to walk. 

The book is both poetic and philosophical. He has a real way with words:

“The bag is freed but seems to weigh as much as the collected sins of the world.”

“I arise for a gulp of air. There is none. In that moment I feel as though the last breath in the galaxy has been breathed by someone else.”

“I dive into the raft with the knife clenched in my teeth, buccaneer style, noticing that the movie camera mounted on the aft pulpit has been turned on. Its red eye winks at me. Who is directing this film? He isn’t much on lighting but his flair for the dramatic is impressive.”

There is indeed plenty of drama, from shark attacks to accidentally puncturing his raft and having to constantly pump air into it. He sees nine ships but none of them see him – or if they do, they don’t stop to help. He is utterly alone at sea (“That torn blue desert”) with only his intelligence and unbreakable spirit. 

Surprisingly, some of the most interesting passages are those in which he details the minutiae of his survival equipment – the spear gun with which he catches fish, a still with which he desalinates water and so on. These items are illustrated by his own sketches. His technical skill is remarkable and this is clearly one of the things that saved him. 

You can tell he has the psychology of a survivor because of the way he adapts his thinking to the extremes of the situation:

“ln these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed – food, shelter, clothing, and companionship – yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out of the raft, I see God’s face in the smooth waves, His grace in the dorado’s swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from the sky. I see that all of creation is made in His image. Yet despite His constant company, I need more. I need more than food and drink. I need to feel the company of other human spirits.”

Moments of occasional euphoria aside, it’s mostly a horribly painful and bleak experience. See day 71, in his final week of solitude: 

“Maybe I am the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas forever and never rest again, to watch my own body rot and my equipment deteriorate. I am in an infinite vortex of horror, whirling deeper and deeper. Thinking of what I will do when it is all over is a bad joke. It will never be over. It is worse than death. If I were to search the most heinous parts of my mind to create a vision of a real hell, this would be the scene, exactly.”

And yet he does survive. It’s hugely inspiring.

11/01/19: Dion Leonard with Craig Borlase – Finding Gobi: The True Story of a Little Dog and an Incredible Journey (2017)

I picked this up at the “donate one, take one” book stall in Totteridge & Whetstone tube station.

Dion is an ultramarathon runner. While racing in an event in the Gobi Desert, he is “adopted” by a small dog who runs nearly 80 miles of the way with him. Before leaving China to return home to Edinburgh, the smitten Dion decides that he will bring Gobi back to live with him. A crowdfunding page is set up to pay for this (importing a pet is a complex process), but Gobi goes missing in the streets and Dion returns to China to help look for her.

He is eventually reunited with the dog, of course, but there are many struggles before they can come home and live happily ever after. He is followed by sinister men in suits, for example, and has to live in a state of paranoid seclusion.

Inevitably, this becomes a heartwarming tale about man’s best friend and how rescuing a dog “healed wounds I didn’t know were within me”. The book is slightly diminished by occasionally drifting into self-help territory, making some fairly obvious statements about personal belief and overcoming failure. Perhaps there wasn’t enough to say about the dog to fill 254 pages. And although it’s a device to set the scene and provide an emotional/psychological context (father died young, turned out not to be real father), I could have done without the childhood recollections – how much did we really need to know of Dion’s youth? – which risk turning this into a “misery memoir”.

On the plus side, Finding Gobi benefits from details of running a 155-mile ultramarathon. His accounts of the extremes of the race and the performance of the runners in dangerously scorching desert conditions are probably the best part of the book.

07/01/19: Joe Simpson – Touching the Void (1988)

This remarkable and moving memoir details Joe Simpson’s 1985 climb of the 6,344-metre Siula Grande in the Andes. He was accompanied by his friend Simon Yates, whose far briefer account is also represented here with italics interspersed between sections of Simpson’s narrative.

The pair became the first to ever reach the summit, but were unprepared for the extremes it offered. Simpson broke his leg on the descent and – despite Yates heroically winching him down the slopes in incredibly dangerous conditions – plummeted off a cliff and was left dangling. Fearing Simpson dead or doomed and certain that he was about to plummet himself, Yates considered he had no choice but to cut the rope...

The book tells the astonishing and unlikely story of how both men survived. Simpson lost a third of his body weight during the ordeal and was close to death at the point he finally made it back to base camp after dragging himself and his smashed leg back across crevasses, glacier ice and boulders.

Touching the Void is fascinating on so many levels. Simpson vividly articulates the absurd degree of human suffering he endured to stay alive. He also probes deeper questions about life, death and consciousness, all of which he was brought into close proximity with. His relationship with Yates is also key. He immediately and lastingly “forgave” him for giving up on his survival – even dedicating the book to him “for a debt I can never repay” – but Yates was nevertheless demonised as “the man who cut the rope”.

In the 2003 film adaptation of Touching the Void, Simpson and Yates both speak direct to camera about their experiences. It’s sad that the passing of time and the fame/notoriety of the events seem to have permanently damaged their strained relationship. But the film remains the perfect complement to the book, with different insights gained by the perspective of those passing years. Whichever way the story is told, it’s emotional and unforgettable.

03/01/19: Raynor Winn – The Salt Path (2018)

Raynor Winn and her husband “Moth” have financial and legal problems that cause them to lose their home. Moth then receives a diagnosis for terminal brain disease. With no money, nowhere to live and seemingly no future, the couple decide to walk England’s South West Coastal Path. They do this in two sections, with a few months in between, and cover all but 40 of the 630 miles.

The story of that walk works as an amiable travel book, but there’s so much more to it. Living on the outsides of society, they encounter prejudice and fear whenever anyone hears about their situation. Often perfectly friendly members of the public recoil from them when they discover that the hiking couple are homeless, with the “h” word itself seeming to carry a lot of stigma.

There’s some pretty writing about nature and wildlife and there are quite a few laughs (or smiles, at least) – such as a running joke about Moth being mistaken for Simon Armitage, who was walking the same route.

There’s obviously a tragic element, too. Moth’s wellbeing and longer-term options are always in doubt. Paradoxically, the extremes of the walk seem to improve his health, but the days beyond the walk remain a big unknown.

A few passages of worldly wisdom and philosophising occasionally seem overbaked until you consider what the couple have been through.

It’s an entertaining, moving and oddly gripping read.