B.B.’s novel “The Little Grey Men,” originally published in 1942, as it was the recipient of the Carnegie Medal that same year and was later adapted into a television series in 1975, is most likely to be his most popularly known amongst his many books. It recounts the story – as directly received from one with personal knowledge of it, as he tells it – of the last four gnomes in England who live inside an old oak tree beside Folly Brook in Warwickshire.
The four women profiled in Prof. Matthew Kelly’s new book are very much deserving of our thanks and praise for all the work they did to make it possible for so many people today still to be able to enjoy some of England’s most important, iconic, and beautiful urban green spaces and wild natural areas.
Melissa Harrison has begun a podcast – and it is absolutely brilliant.
Recording her walks through the Suffolk countryside where she makes her home, “The Stubborn Light of Things” offers listeners an exquisitely gentle, relaxing, running – well, walking, perhaps even ambling, actually – commentary on the nature she observes around her on her journeys, as well as the sounds of the English countryside that are more than enough to make a Anglophile pastoralist weep tears of joy.
The challenge with life lately (say, over the past two years, give or take) is that it has been throwing me so many curve balls – or to use the British vernacular, bowling me so many googlies – that it’s been all I can do just to keep the Aspidistra flying. And one of the many ways I’ve let it fall over this time has been my neglect of proper correspondence with Mark Avery.