I’ve just read Helm by Sarah Hall. It’s dazzling and dizzying and almost indescribably good. It’s the story of the Helm Wind - the only named weather pattern in the UK - which occurs up in Cumbria, near Penrith. I first found out about the wind in Common Ground’s wonderful England In Particular, then I did some work up in Cumbria and fell in love with the landscape. The book weaves together a number of stories from across a long history, of people’s very different encounters with Helm - and Helm is a living thing, a character in the book, too.
I have loved Hall’s The Carhulan Army since it was published in 2007 (reread it a number of times), and that’s set in the same landscape as Helm, post-climate breakdown. Helm also explores humanity’s impact on the climate, with microplastic in Helm’s wind and an uncertain future for the weather.
But Helm is incredible - I had to put it down a few times, because I didn’t want to finish it too quickly, and kept a dictionary open because it’s scattered with dialect, words that have fallen out of use, and other linguistic quirks. It made me want to revisit my ‘complete history of Stoke-on-Trent’ book, and give it a rewrite. Helm is funny and clever and gentle and angry and the writing is downright sexy. I won’t tell you to read it, because nobody needs to be told to read stuff. But, y’know…
Join us at Marine Studios this First Friday for Dan Thompson’s Seaside History Club - Shipwreck. We’ll look at shipwrecks - those off our own Thanet coast and others that are further afield or fictional. We'll have drawings, maps, model ships and poems about shipwrecks and the sea, a large collection of beach finds, things that the sea has given back. This Friday 5th September, from 6-8.30pm, Marine Studios, 17 Albert Terrace, Margate.
A rare butterfly long extinct in Britain has mysteriously appeared in the Black Country.
Gay Beaver Day. Is this the most The Ragged Optimist thing ever? Spotted by Ant. Citizen Zoo is organising Big Gay Beaver Day, a fund-raising event on September 6 at Paradise Fields, Perivale, where London’s first urban beavers were reintroduced.
"We are Eva and Emily, both aged 13, from Tiverton in Devon. We have been breeding harvest mice in our garages and bedrooms for the past three years and we are now ready to re-introduce this important missing species back into the wild this September." Chris Packham turned up to help with the release. Of course he did.
After the success of Kelp beds off Worthing and Brighton, the Hastings Kelp Project are going to cultivate kelp under controlled conditions within a laboratory space at Hastings Aquarium. Every aspect of its management will be carefully observed to gather data on optimal growth and survival, then they'll start planting at sea
Some idiot had the US climate website taken down and sacked all the staff. Now the staff have set up a not-for-profit and are rebuilding the site.
An incredible mandala-shaped truss constructed from bamboo tops the central hall of this Buddhist meditation centre in Tibet, designed by Nepalese architecture studio Abari, created in collaboration with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyal Rinpoche.
Sharpham Trust are working to restore and recover nature on a 550-acre estate near Totnes, including creating rare habitats, making nests to welcome birds of prey and planting thousands of trees in current project Wild About Trees, which will form part of the Plymouth and South Devon Community Forest.
Unauthorised, ground-up approaches to urbanism and city planning are the main focus of new book Messy Cities. Mostly in the Toronto area, it look sat how communities’ vital creative impulses overcome local regulations and a top-down approach from government.
While other trees might succumb to damage and disease long before they reach maturity, yew trees have an extraordinary ability to rejuvenate, bouncing back from injury with new growth. Here are some truly ancient trees and here’s Kate Daisy Grant & Nick Pynn’s rather wonderful album of songs about trees, including a yew.
Lynx released in Northumberland would thrive and stretch into bordering parts of Cumbria and southern Scotland A year-long social consultation has found that 72% of people in the project area of Northumberland, bordering areas of Cumbria and southern Scotland, support potential lynx reintroduction.