“Bonfire, and cigarette smoke. A rough roll-up made by dirty fingers. Turner Blue hand-rolling tobacco, mugs of strong sugary tea, and imagined dreams of the Black Hills in South Dakota.
Spearfish. Ed Macintosh* on KBFS 1450AM playing Joe Maphis and Bobby Goldsboro and Glen Campbell, speedway and livestock markets in between the songs. Prairie Hills Transit Co. buses, passing Matthews Opera House and the old Lown General Store with its facade of stone quarried from Higgins Gulch and Lookout Mountain. Wolzmuth Hardware. State University. Wrigley’s Winterfresh and Hershey’s Kisses and real Coke. But it’s not that Spearfish, not the modern-day town.
We’re in the Spearfish Creek, Black Hills of 1876.”
My second piece as Writer-in-Residence for Sittingbourne’s Steam Railway is now up on the Ideas Test website. It’s about choosing your family. I’ll be at the railway’s Gala Weekend on 27th & 28th September, if you’d like to come and say hello.
*I emailed Ed Macintosh during his show. It’s a wild, manic thing - not like our radio. He played my request, Wichita Lineman, and said he’d never had a listener from the UK get in touch before.
Expensive firefighting planes and big machinery to fight wildfires ... or goats. This project in Spain uses sheep and goats to keep the undergrowth down, which reduces the risk of wildfires.
In Hastings, East Sussex, the rare hawksbeard mining bee was discovered for the first time in a century buzzing between blooms in newly created wildflower meadows. In Northamptonshire, Cheshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire, projects created new wetlands, ponds and bankside habitats for water voles, including 420 that were captive-bred and released to help increase population numbers. In Kent, a chough chick hatched for the first time in 200 years thanks to an extensive captive breeding programme and supervised release. In total, projects have created or enhanced over 5930 acres of wildlife-rich habitat, Natural England said.
In The Quiet Ear, the lovely Raymond Antrobus examines a life lived at the crossroads of race, disability and the deaf and hearing worlds. Raymond sets his own story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figureheads, paying homage to deaf artistry and identity and weighing the shame of miscommunication against the joy of community. He’s doing an event in Margate with the equally lovely Harry Baker.
Six beaver families are to be released at two sites near the River Beauly in the Highlands.
Thirty Tauros oxen have been released into the Saksfjed Wilderness in Denmark. “The Tauros ox is not just a spectacular animal but also an important key to understanding how large herbivores can strengthen the effects of rewilding and promote biodiversity,” said Jens-Christian Svenning, a biology professor at Aarhus University.
A new book by design studio Boom Saloon maps the life of Maggie Watson, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Vascular Dementia in 2021. The book combines personal artefacts and cherished mementoes in a ‘living cookbook’, and it’s printed using an innovative disappearing ink so it will change, as people do during their dementia journey.
Forest streams within the Cannock Chase National Landscape are nationally important for native crayfish and several other scarce species. The 2023-24 surveys showed improvements in the number of aquatic species present.
A steep slope which had long fallen out of use as allotments became the Moulescoomb Allotments Nature Site in 2015, and it’s now well-established with 150 native saplings of 25 different species, wildflower banks, and ponds to support a variety of wildlife.
“I don’t buy into this idea that everything has to be new all the time. I have seven albums in my back catalogue, and releasing a new one doesn’t make the others turn to dust.”
There’s a brilliant update from the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company on the Time Team podcast