This Saturday Worm begins his new weekly slot tunneling into the weirder recesses of Wikipedia and the world wide web... Hello everyone! May I say what a great honour it is to step into the Saturday slot here at The Dabbler. I have decided to use the space rented to me ... Read More...
Nature
This Lazy Sunday it's time to pull the duvet up tight and get cosy and warm, as Worm casts us adrift on the dark and stormy waters of the North Atlantic... In 1967, a couple of twitchers on a jaunt to the Hebrides to look for migratory arctic birds were met ... Read More...
Despite having fuddy-duddy connotations, I was surprised to discover that the pastime we call bird watching isn’t actually that old – or at least the term isn’t. Bird watching is popularly thought of as the sort of thing dweeby old guys do to get away from the Missus. The twitcher’s ... Read More...
The lead article in the current issue of the excellent Slightly Foxed quarterly magazine is by none other than our own Jonathan Law, who looks at the work (and alarming Nazi politics) of Tarka the Otter author Henry Williamson. Here is the original piece, and in the next two weeks ... Read More...
Toby Ash discovers an extraordinary nature writer... Firstly, thanks to landscape writer and all round literary top of the class Robert Macfarlane for introducing me to the extraordinary prose of Anna (Nan) Shepherd. He talked about her in his books Wild Places and The Old Ways (a Dabbler Book Club choice), ... Read More...
The conservationist ideology is full of contradictions, according to a new book. Elberry, who anyway would be "happier in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, daubing himself with blue woad and hunting his enemies with a stone club", reviews it... I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It ... Read More...
The lucky winners of the latest Dabbler Book Club selection… Free books. What’s not to like? Especially when the book in question is Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a book that has deservedly been sitting in the bestseller lists for weeks now. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive and celebrated voice, the book ... Read More...
Jonathan Law reveals John Ruskin's mania for mucking about with water, and explains how it stood as an emblem for his wish to tame the “frantic monster” of unchecked capitalism... Richard Nixon loved mashing potatoes; Gladstone had a passion for chopping down trees; and John Ruskin – in many ways a ... Read More...
In a recent Dabbler post, Nige sang the praises of the River Wandle. But as Jonathan Law explains, the river also had a profound significance for a great Victorian... On a sultry morning in May, Nige celebrated the rebirth of the little River Wandle, now running fresh and clear through Sutton, ... Read More...
From pubs in trees to childhood dens, Jonathan now concludes his arboreal notes with a treehouse for the old... In my last post, I mused on the fierce comfort that children take from their tree houses and brooded on what these knocked together and wholly gratuitous structures could mean to us, ... Read More...
