I don't normally go in for nature books. I don't know enough about nature, I don't have enough vocab to follow them. The conceptual bricks aren't there. But I bought Notes From Walnut Tree Farm because I discovered it had some references in it to Rogue Male, (my all time favourite book ever) and I've slightly fallen in love with it.
It's a set of jottings and notes by Roger Deakin organised, after his death, into a rough diary of the seasons. And it lends itself rather well to Mike's 'Blog All Dog-Eared Pages' format. (Incidentally, doesn't 'Blog All Dog-Eared Pages' seem like a rather exact precursor to what Steven Johnson is talking about here. Imagine how popular this would be if you didn't have to transcribe stuff by hand.)
Anyway. Here we go.
Page 21 - On corduroy (for Ben)
"We wore corduroy in those days: Barrell wore navy, Chapman wore black, I wore dark brown. I also went in for brown herringbone tweed jackets or overcoats. The jacket was very expensive, bought from Jaeger after working with Ken Russell, who wore the full works: brown herringbone trousers, jacket and matching cap. I couldn’t even afford the jacket, but bought one anyway.
I now realise that all these English country gentlemen outfits were designed to make you look as much like a ploughed field as possible."
Page 22 - On tools and sheds
"There are many of us for whom the shed is a natural habitat. Mine is full of woodworking tools; a classic Myford ML8 lathe, band-saw, circular-saw and various drills, Skil-saws, planes. A whole wall of screwdrivers, chisels and gauges, and little drawers full of screws and fixings. Shelves of varnish, oils, stains and paints, and more drawers with drill bits, seeds, cramps, vices, an adze and several wedges for splitting wood. Handsaws, jigsaws."
There are many lovely passages in the book in praise of tools. There's also this, for instance, from page 296:
"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’
Buckminster Fuller weighed in at the front with an encouraging piece about geodesic domes, and a movement was launched all over the world. They showed the earth as a tiny planet on the front cover, as photographed from space.
Tools were what we needed, and tools were what went out and sought. I went to farm auctions and bought impossibly long wooden stack ladders nobody needed or wanted any more for a few pounds. I bought a giant old 1948 Fordson Major tractor with a six-cylinder Perkins diesel engine in perfect working order, and a full armoury of ploughs, harrows, cultivators and hay-cutters to go with it, for well under £600."
There's also a couple of little moments about the joys of driving, like this one on page 272:
"In a dark Norfolk lane driving at speed behind Adam Nicholson in his V.W, the brown toasted beech, oak and chestnut leaves swirling and tumbling in the slipstream of these cars as we whiz along beside the wide verges and hedges. This is how roads were meant to be. No mean farmers pinching bits of land."
I think this is what turns the book into more than just a paean to nature. It acknowledges, and likes some of, the technological, human-made world. It made me wonder how, when and if, the digital tools we work with today will end up integrated into a natural world view like this. Will a dusty old N96 feel as smooth, natural, and timeless as an old hammer in 50 years? Is it somehow inherently less 'natural' than a saw? Is it to do with materials? With screens? With needing a power supply? Lathe's need power and must have seemed un-natural and outlandish once. Now, not so much.
(Incidentally that reference to self-builders in the Whole Earth passage struck a chord with me too. It's the stuff that's being self-built that's so exciting at the moment. Not houses necessarily, but the most interesting digital and post-digital tools and toys.)
Page 27 - On the architecture of trees
(He's describing a programme he's filming for Channel 4)
"I talk about the architecture of a tree, about its essential cone shape, with the branches cantilevered from the central tower of the trunk, tubular structures being the strongest. I stand beneath the branches and say there are thirty-five of them, and their combined weight must be several tons. I love the horizontality of oak. Of all trees, it has the strength to float its outstretched branches out at ninety degrees to the trunk. These horizontal branches exert enormous forces at the cantilevered joint, which must be immensely strong. That is why the joint pieces are so sought after by carpenters and shipwrights. They are the ‘knees’ of ships, binding the ribbed frame together, joining the horizontal keel to the upright stern and bow."
Like I say, I don't know much about nature and trees. But talking about a tree as an engineering issue connected with me somehow. I think that's something I'll pay attention to next time I see one.
Page 73 - On lidos
"Lidos are more fun than swimming pools. Lidos are to swimming pools what cathedrals are to churches. They are much more fun, they leave a lasting impression, and they cost a lot more to do up these days. ‘Fun’ is a word you immediately associate with lidos. Nobody can ever quite agree whether to say ‘Leedo’ or ‘Liedo’ (a place for lieing down in the sun). It is one of those words, like ‘toilet’ that we have borrowed from the Continentals, and tried unsuccessfully to Anglicise. ‘Toilet’ sounds much better as toilette in the original French. And ‘lido’ sounds much better in the original Italian."
Mr Deakin knew what he was talking about with lidos. His most famous book is probably Waterlog, a chronicle of swims up and down the country.
Page 106 - On silence
"Sometimes, when it gets too noisy in the country, I escape into the sheer throbbing silence of my flat in the city. I hear only the blackbird in the back gardens and, pressing my ear to the pillow at night, I hear the distant rumble of the tube trains on the Northern Line far beneath the house, heading out of Chalk Farm, uphill to Belsize Park, deep under Haverstock Hill."
You see, he's done it again. He's made the tube sound natural, like an enormous bear or a thunderstorm. Will this one day happen to an iPhone?
Page 142 - On visiting Dylan Thomas's old writing shed at Laugharne
"Thomas mostly wrote not in the boathouse but in its wooden garage. So, like garage music, his was garage poetry. I see straight away that it has the optimum dimensions for a writing shed; fourteen by nine, with a whitewashed boarded ceiling over a pair of pine cross-beams a foot above head height.
There are two windows in the shed, now brought up to a standard of repair far higher, I imagine, than in Thomas’s day, and a wooden floor with a single, diminutive scrap of a rug on it.
The place has been window-dressed to look as if the famed artisan has just popped out in mid-flow for a cup of tea, or more likely a beer or a pee. One imagines that DT must have been a much stained man; his fingers nicotine-stained, and perhaps his trousers eroded by dribbled pee in the frequent visits to the gents at Brown’s or the Three Mariners."
Page 155 - On fire
Mr Deakin was once an advertising copywriter and wrote a famous tagline for the Coal Board - Come Home To A Real Fire.
"I really do want people to come home to a real fire. A nation without the flames of a fire in its hearth, and birds singing outside the open window, has lost its soul. To have an ancient carboniferous forest brought to life at the centre of your home, its flames budding and shooting up like young trees, is a work of magic."
Page 290 - On pockets
"Boys pick up odd things – a snail, a pebble, a leaf, a dead beetle, a chrysalis, a bit of sheep’s wool on a fence – and their pockets soon come to resemble birds’ nests. The contents of the pocket have no intrinsic money value but they do have great sentimental value to their owner. They become a microcosm of the local landscape, of the boy’s habitats and haunts."
I've long thought that pockets deserved more study. Dan made a great start here, but there's a whole lot more to be thought about. It's what tends to end up in the pocket that's interesting. And so many modern devices don't have the pocket appeal of conkers and fob watches.
Anyway, there we are. Well worth a read. (The pictures are mine by the way, nothing to do with Mr Deakin, just things that seemed to fit.)