Patterns

There are no straight lines in my body nor most people I know. So why do we live in square boxes? Do you know how difficult it is to get a builder to do a bendy wall with curvy bricks?
The problem is we like patterns. We like to organise the visual world into lines, dots and symmetrical squiggles because it helps us interpret it as data. 1s and 0s.
I received a V&A Pattern book based on Sanderson 1954-74. You've probably guessed by now it's not a bodice-ripping best seller but it is very pleasing to the eye.
This illustration is not Trio (Triad1) which I would have liked to have used because I don't trust the Trustees not to enforce  copyright restrictions even though the book comes with a handy CD of beautiful images. So this is my sketch interpretation of a field boundary marked by an old hedgerow tree that didn't get grubbed out when the farmer decided he wanted to draw the plough lines up to the edge.

Not just a penguin

The Invention of Nature by A. Wulf. I just love it when somebody does something appropriate to their name. It seems to happen more often than you think. I used to think Humboldt was just a penguin. Of course I knew the penguin had probably been a person's name. I didn't think Humboldt was an adjective. But I knew nothing about him. It's odd that some people get all the credit for breakthrough discoveries when in fact an idea often builds amongst great men and women over many decades.
Andrea Wulf's excellent biography is subtitled The Lost Hero of Science and it's unfortunately down to a bit of anti-German feeling post two world wars that seem to have obscured this Prussian polymath from wider recognition. I think it's also difficult to classify someone like Humboldt when we are used to being able to say someone is a naturalist or a botanist or an astronomer or an explorer. Humboldt's strength is his description of people and places that brings his data and analysis to life and his ability to think about connected environmental systems where geology, geography and evolution are integrated. He sits fair and square in the centre of a continuous rope of thought that connects Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir (who persuaded the US President Roosevelt to effectively found the National Parks movement). Just a shame the British East India Company persistently prevented him from exploring India so his observations were restricted to South America and the Russian end of Asia. Not that it really dented his global vision and his legacy.

Skin

Sarah Hilary's Someone Else's Skin is a perfectly good novel.

I liked the way she skittered over your preconceptions about gender and race to tell an otherwise routine detective tale of murder and mayhem.

The world she conjured up is largely nocturnal, urban, claustrophobic and full of mistrust. It's not my world but I recognise its appeal both in book and TV worlds. I longed for more description of place (set in Bath ideally), not just people, and a little less violence.

But I know I'm in a minority so I wish DI Marnie Rome well.

If only he had understood the variety of sausages available on the continent

The reinvention of Ladybird books with adult satirical content has been a brief but enjoyable fashion. The best are full of cracking one liners that go well with the artists' pastiches of original content.
Less successful, I think, is the attempt at longer form writing with little Enid Blyton-style stories...or maybe it's just this one: Five on Brexit Island by Bruno Vincent. Perhaps it's still too painful or, you could take the opposing view, that the reality is far funnier and involves bigger buffoons than you could possibly make up.

In the Kingdom of the Blind Eye the Optician is King

Like many journalists Emma Jane Kirby has highlighted the plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to a largely indifferent European public.
Occasionally a small child being washed ashore might get attention. The overall statistics of deaths and drownings at the hands of unscrupulous criminals are not enough to shock us. It's only when you follow an individual story that makes it easier to relate. Once such tale is of The Optician of Lampedusa - someone who goes out fishing in a small boat and catches 47 human beings. The boat was designed for 10 people and already had 8 on board. 368 people died and the most shocking thing was that there were other boats that didn't stop.
By putting this story into book form Kirby has raised the stakes once again in terms of the role of the journalist as moral optician helping us to see more clearly. Thankfully the trade can still aspire to more than tabloid tunnel vision.

A man with two heads is very unique

Everybody is unique but some people are more unique than others. At the danger of being labelled an oxymoron I wish to pay brief homage to the totally unknown pop act that is John Greaves and Peter Blegvad. John is a bassist and pianist who has played with Henry Cow and National Health and has an unhealthy obsession with the French poet Paul Verlaine. Peter is a wordsmith and cartoonist (the Independent's Leviathan) who also doubles as a musician and has performed as part of Slapp Happy. Their two headed collaborative album Kew.Rhone is a classic and thankfully impossible to categorise. You could write a book about it - with contributions from Jonathan Coe, Carla Bley and Robert Wyatt - and you would know a great deal more about palindromes, numinosity, proverbs and even perverbs so Peter Blegvad has done just that. Like this painting 'Exhuming the First American Mastodon' by CW Peale you would get to dig (ie understand and appreciate) a little more about the author and his chum but it would still leave you with a poetically playful sense of awe and wonder at how such a beast could have lived and now go unrecognised.

Dun and Dusty

The Rural Life in the Dun Valley 1066-1900 is a bit of a specialist volume. Like the author, Margaret Baskerville, I've had to resort to illustrations from the Weald and Downland Museum in the next county as there is not a lot of material to go on. But that's the point. I think some of the source material such as receipt of tithes, probates and inventories are presented without a lot of colour or comment but nonetheless it gives a fascinating insight into how people lived. There are unexpected events (such as the Swing Riots organised by the fictitious Captain Swing of the scythe gangs) and you can imagine the lives and times of the agricultural labourers that just don't get told in our chocolate box National Trust view of rural estates. Overall it is difficult to put a swift narrative flow to such a wide period of time but the narrow geographical focus is well set in Britain's social history.

Annoyingly talented

I saw Bill Bailey on tour last year. Like everyone else I'd seen him in various guises on quiz shows and doing stand up. I knew he could play music pretty well but, even so, wasn't prepared for how prodigiously talented he was on so many instruments in so many genres. I guess his problem as a musician is that no-one will take him seriously as you expect satire all the time.
As a naturalist he has the same problem...when to drop the humour and when to just enjoy his enthusiasm for the natural environment. I don't think it really matters. I can't bear anyone who takes themselves too seriously anyway and twitchers are the worst.
Bill's Remarkable Guide to British Birds is a rubbish guide but is full of surreal little cartoons, off the wall information and anecdotes. This is how it should be. It's just a shame he is so remarkably and annoyingly talented. A bit like the Herring Gull which he describes as the "Gimlet-eyed snaffler of a million battered sausages."

No Sussex please, we're Hampshire

Timothy Mowl has produced an outstandingly researched set of volumes on historic gardens within England. Often it is most revealing what has gone as much as what is familiar. For 2016's Hampshire he has taken on one of his former students - Jane Whitaker - to help with the 'volume' of the volumes. I learned a lot about places I thought a knew a lot about already.
Just a few minor niggles as this kind of factual book brings out the anorak in me. For example Petersfield is a significant Hampshire town so to place it in Sussex in this sort of geographical review is a bit sloppy and results in missing out the modern recreation of a 17th Century-style "physic garden". Secondly I don't think that Capability Brown's work at Warnford is more than a tenuous stylistic link through contemporary knowledge and not necessarily carried out under contract by him. Thirdly there were a few too many "but they wouldn't let us look around"... in the case of Westbury it was full of patients with serious crash injuries so I'm not surprised the authors got a refusal but you can still see all you need by visiting the ruined chapel by the roadside and walking up the public footpath that goes through the grounds past the old kitchen garden walls. But I guess I'm guilty of being pernickity-picky as I have more time to find my way around these places. Illustration by the way is Mottisfont Abbey where Graham Stuart Thomas' famous rose garden goes unmentioned along with other admittedly contemporary features like a grove of gold painted upside down tree trunks.