The April issue of ELLE Australia is out and it’s greeeeen (themed, that is). We created it and sent it to print before the madness descended, but it actually couldn’t be more topical. What kind of world do we want to return to when all this is over? Are we happy that, for example, the New South Wales Premier seems to be using the pandemic to cover the news that she’s approved a new coal mine (under one of Sydney’s biggest drinking water reservoirs, no less)? (If you’re a NSW resident, feel free to email her here! I did, making my opinion QUITE clear - no reply yet…)
And it was actually ELLE’s April issue that inspired me to do that - I interviewed Professor Lesley Hughes of the Climate Council about how we can effectively fight climate change (including a template for writing to our MPs). I spoke to Professor Karen Hussey of the University of Queensland’s Centre for Policy Futures about how big business is, rather surprisingly, coming to the climate change party. And I profiled Kate Grarock, an ecologist who has the coolest job in conservation: going out into the remote bush on expeditions to find animal species as yet unknown to science. (Fun fact: I met her in a deserted campsite four days’ walk out of Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. A photographer and I were documenting the hike for Australian Geographic, and she was doing it solo for fun. She blew in with a tiny backpack, had a brilliant conversation with us over our respective dinners, wandered round the campsite barefoot, and was up and gone next morning before I was even awake. She’s a powerhouse!) It’s a cracking issue and well worth buying (online of course!).
I also noticed gardening and other wholesome, home-based activities are going gangbusters and I joined the scrum, madly ordering seeds and bulbs that I have no idea how to plant or grow. Nothing like learning through doing, though! I’ll let you know how my grape hyacinths, sweet peas and cosmos fare… (My fit of garden frenzy inspired by a re-read of Virginia Woolf’s Garden by Caroline Zoob, which details the author’s 10 years as a National Trust tenant at Monk’s House, Woolf’s last home and one of my favourite places to visit when I’m back in Sussex. Gorgeous coffee-table tome heaving with glorious photos.)
What I’m reading
A long read from the Guardian about the trend for ‘nature cure’ books - this one is super interesting on the idea of the green pharmacy - just pop out for a walk in the woods and your depression will be cured! For soppy greenies such as myself, it’s an appealing idea, but people - and nature - are rather more complicated than that, as this piece breaks down, with reference to some of my favourite books, including Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, Helen MacDonald’s H is For Hawk and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun.
Also: let’s just do nothing. Now I know that productivity is a lie, I’m quite good at this - see: every Instagram Story I’ve ever posted from my hammock.
I’ve also been reading Harry Saddler’s The Eastern Curlew, which is one of that rare breed, the Australian nature writing book. I’m not a big bird fan, but Saddler won me over with his earnest pursuit of his own favourite rare breed - he visits China, South Korea and the Finnish Arctic to follow the eastern curlew’s migratory route.
“Since humans have been studying bird migration,” he says, “we’ve mapped the flight paths of countless species. And in drawing the boundaries of the invisible flyways of the world we create an architecture, a house of the imagination, in which human and bird minds meet. By tracing the world’s flyways we attempt to see the world, though imperfectly and at a remove, through the eyes of a bird. We translate the non-human world into something human.” That’s a gorgeous way of introducing an idea that’s part of the current move in nature-inspired writing towards centring the non-human. See: Richard Power’s The Overstory. This trend seems to be a reaction to the books in which nature is valued only for its power to help humans, mentioned in the Guardian piece I talked about above. Nature writing really does contain multitudes.
Saddler writes of the mudflats of the South Korean island of Ganghwa, which is on the curlew’s migratory route: “The gloss of moisture in the meandering lows caught the low-angled late afternoon sun, causing part of the mud to shine like silver. In the first blush of dusk the mud assumed a soft magenta hue. Birds’ footprints were imprinted like hatch-marks on the mud: webbed for gulls, unwebbed for herons and shorebirds.” And of the Finnish Arctic, where the curlews breed, he writes: “The same crisp, clear air that makes the colours of the forest and treeless fells so vivid also makes sounds seem brighter and sharper… in the cleanness of the air, sounds crack like snare drums.” And of Victorian saltmarsh: “On a sunny day in summer when the water levels are down salt glitters in the exposed mud like stars.” I just want to chew on those sentences, they’re brilliant.
And inevitably he speaks of the human development of the mudflats that’s destroying the habitat of his beloved shorebirds, meaning many species are now endangered. And this isn’t without consequence. He points out how interconnected we all are: “Shorebird lives are inextricably linked to the sea; so, too, are human lives, for we all live connected lives now.” Planetary health is a concept I’ve just been introduced to by this story (warning: corona content) and it’s very relevant. Everything is connected - something I hope we remember when this is all over.
What you should be reading
People seemed to like the giant reading list for troubled times in my last newsletter, so I’m adding a few more escapist, comic reads here. I’m violently against the idea of using lockdown to tackle Ulysses or the complete works of Shakespeare, if that’s not your bag. Stressful times call for relaxing reading, not self-improving tomes.
So I just re-read Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm for the thousandth time. It’s not screamingly, laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s lightly, drily, understatedly, unrelentingly witty, gloriously plotted, and Flora is a heroine for all time.
I think Gibbons is the mother of many equally brilliant comic novels by British women, and Mary Wesley’s The Vacillations of Poppy Carew is pre-eminent among them, to me. Just the name makes me giggle.
Sylvia Townsend Warner actually wrote Lolly Willowes before Gibbons wrote CCF, but it’s somewhat along the same lines: gorgeously weird and deeply, deeply satisfying.
Nina Stibbe is the modern bearer of that crown, and any of her brilliant books tick the comic, clever box.
And if I may introduce a Y chromosome to the mix, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is utterly brilliant: the shy and retiring nature writer William Boot is mistaken for up-and-coming correspondent John Boot and sent to cover the war in a tiny African country for The Daily Beast newspaper. It contains the most gloriously overblown nature writing I’ve ever read, penned of course by the more hapless of the Boots: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole…” Even though I adore nature writing, I’m now always on the alert for any hint of the plashy fens in it. This one, I think, IS screamingly funny.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf isn’t broadly comic but is very amusing, compulsively plotted, and is quite the loveliest love letter I can think of. It’s to Vita Sackville-West, of course, and contains the most beautiful portrait of her and of Sissinghurst, the beloved ancestral home she lost through being a woman unable to inherit. Another of my favourite places to visit in the south of England, and another of my favourite books.
I’ll keep adding to this list until I run out!
See you in two weeks.