I am naturally inclined to dismiss any book written by a TV presenter, particularly one with locks as lustrous and flowing as Oliver’s, so it pains me to admit: this is really good. Oliver – and I think it is him, not his editor – writes with a sureness of touch and an ability to find the telling detail that brings his subject as close to life as is possible for a people that raged against the dying of the historical light a thousand years ago. His description of the taste, smell and texture of eating preserved basking shark – like ‘a French kiss with the living dead’ – is a classic, and he makes good use of the opportunities offered a TV presenter to bring us closer to Viking life: meeting, at sea, a replica long ship sailing from Norway to Dublin and finding the crew soaked, exhausted, cold and morose, and all too willing to deal out some violence to interlopers, provides a better understanding of life on a drakkan than most academic texts.
There I was at the London Book Fair on Tuesday, wandering along, taking in the bustle and the deal making, enjoying the atmosphere and slowly heading over towards the Lion Hudson stand, where I had a 10.30 meeting with my publisher, when I stopped (creating something a people jam behind me). There, ahead of me, were the swirling lines of an Anglo-Saxon design, and ‘Edwin: High King of Britain’ in letters considerably bigger than my head, and ‘Edoardo Albert’ (about the size of my head), on a series of display boards. Unknown to me, Lion Hudson was featuring Edwin as one of its major new titles for the year. So, here’s a picture of me standing in front of the display.
At the London Book Fair 2014
And here are a couple more photos, with Tony Collins, publisher of Lion Fiction, and Jessica Tinker, my editor at Lion.
With Tony Collins at London Book Fair 2014With Jessica Tinker at London Book Fair 2014
All right, he’s not strictly speaking a saint, only a blessed, but Ramon Lull (1232-1316) deserves a place in any list of Catalan holy men. However, the Fool of Love was for the first 30 years of his life fool to an altogether more earthly sort of love. Lull was attached to the household of the future James II of Majorca and he eventually became its seneschal. Marriage and two children did nothing to cool his ardent pursuit of the court’s women, to whom he composed many songs in the romantic troubadour style of the period.
‘The more apt I found myself to sin the more I allowed my nature to obey the dictates of my body,’ he wrote later. Not even the shock of one of his amours yielding to his advances, only to reveal breasts ravaged by cancer, could stop his philandering. But then, in the summer of 1263, while Ramon was busy writing another song in honour of a new love, he looked up from his work to see ‘our Lord Jesus Christ hanging upon the Cross’. Lull, his poetic flow seriously interrupted, escaped to his bed, no doubt assuming that a good night’s sleep would clear his mind of such troublesome visions. But when he next returned to songwriting, the figure returned and a terrified Lull again retired to bed. However, Ramon was no dilettante libertine and three times more he returned to his love song, only to be faced with the same figure. Lull decided that these must be authentic visions rather than mental phantoms and he set himself to working out what they meant. In the end he decided that ‘our Lord God Jesus Christ desired none other thing than that he should wholly abandon the world and devote himself to His service’. This he decided to do by trying to convert the unbelievers (in Ramon’s world, this meant chiefly Muslims), by writing a book, ‘the best in the world, against the errors of unbelievers’, and setting up colleges to teach Arabic to missionaries.
Ramon then sold his possessions, though keeping some back to support his wife and children, distributed the proceeds to the poor and spent the next nine years in study. It was only then, approaching his 40th year, that Lull began the literary and missionary work for which he would become famous, known in later centuries as the Doctor Illuminatus, the Illuminated Doctor, from the series of mystical visions he had on Mount Randa in Majorca. The sheer scale of his labours almost defy belief. Lull was the author of 265 works in Catalan, Arabic and Latin; the writer of the seminal Catalan novel, Blanquerna; a missionary in almost constant travel between Europe and north Africa; a teacher at the University of Paris when it was the foremost institution of learning in Christendom; a suitor at papal and imperial courts; and the originator of the Art, a systematisation of, well, everything with respect to God’s attributes. This was the book, ‘the best in the world’, that Lull believed showed the truth and which he illustrated through diagrams, tables and, literally, millions of words.
This indefatigable man continued working throughout his long life. At 75 we find him, on a mission to north Africa, ‘beaten with sticks and with fists, and forcibly dragged along by his beard, which was very long, until he was locked in the latrine of the thieves’ jail’. Ramon continued in this vein until the end and whether his death occurred in Tunis, or on a ship sailing back, we can say that few men have ever packed so much life and adventure into the second half of a life.
That’s right you can get a copy of Edwin: High King of Britain for nothing, zippo, nada, absolutely and completely free. If you’re already on Goodreads, all you have to do is register here and if you’re pulled out of the electronic sorting hat, then a copy will be winging its way to you, courtesy of the lovely people at Kregel Publications. If you’re not on Goodreads, the booksharing site for bibliophiles, I’m inclined to say, ‘Why not?’ but instead will merely remark that you’d simply have to register to have the chance of winning a copy of Edwin. The competition closes on 30 April so there’s plenty of time. Good luck to you all!
The discovery of the deep past in the Victorian era by geologists such James Hutton and Charles Lyell carried with it an equally deep commitment to the principle of uniformitarianism: that the Earth of the past operated in the same way as the Earth does today and, as a corolllary, that the planet was formed and is formed by gradual processes; an immortal sparrow, wiping its beak every day upon a mountain will grind even Everest down to dust, given enough time. In part this commitment was born from revulsion against Biblical catastrophism and the explanation of everything by reference to events like the Flood.
Only, it turns out, the Earth’s history is full of catastrophic events that wiped lands from the face of the planet and brought peoples to extinction. Here’s just a couple that occurred over the last few thousand years, a heartbeat in geological time.
The Storegga Slide happened 8,000 years ago, when a huge area of coastal shelf off Norway slipped into the Atlantic abyss, triggering a huge tsunami that inundated the eastern side of Britain and drowned Doggerland, the low-lying land mass that stretched into the North Sea and physically linked Britain to the continent.
Here’s a short video about the Storegga Slide.
The Earth had suffered through the long cold of the last Ice Age and, at last, the glaciers were retreating and people started moving north again. The warming seems to have been extraordinarily fast, and the glaciers melted quickly. Unfortunately, melting glaciers produce water, lots of cold water, and that has to go somewhere. Most drained into the oceans, but the geography of North America was such that an immense lake formed roughly where Lake Winnipeg lies today – only it covered a vastly greater area. Lake Agassiz contained more fresh water than all the lakes and rivers in the world today, and a chain of still unbroken glaciers held it in place, stopping the water draining into the ocean. But then, the dam broke.
Lake Agassiz
Vast amounts of cold fresh water drained into the North Atlantic Ocean, reducing its salinity and stopping the Gulf Stream dead in its tracks. The Ice Age went into reverse, the glaciers started grinding south again, and the cold returned, just as quickly as it had left.
The unlikely fact of Belgian beaches produced a couple of articles, including this one for the in-flight magazine of BMI airlines.
Mention Belgium, and beer, chocolate and Poirot are likely to come to mind. Beaches probably won’t figure. In fact, it might come as a surprise that Belgium even has a coastline, but it does, some 69 kilometres of it, squeezed in between France and the Netherlands, and from one end to the other, the land slides gingerly into the North Sea via miles of carefully tended, perfectly manicured sand. Add to these unexpected beaches Belgian expertise in food, design and fashion, and you have the ingredients for a surprisingly varied get away.
The coast tram (de Kusttram)
The Kusstram
Sitting by the North Sea, Belgium can’t rely on its weather, so it has to try that bit harder to attract visitors. A Eurostar train ticket carries with it free onward railway travel anywhere within Belgium, so no queuing to pay for a connection at Brussels station. Even more remarkable, however, is the coast tram (www.dekusttram.be). This runs the length of Belgium’s shore, from De Knokke in the east to De Panne in the west, with 70 stops along the way and a journey time from end to end of a little over two hours. With nowhere more than a short walk from a stop, all the resorts become easily accessible. During the summer services run every five to ten minutes, so should the crowds become too thick on one particular stretch of beach, it’s an easy matter to hop on the tram and alight a short time later among grass-covered dunes and stroll down to a relatively empty shore.
I first wrote this article for Time Out magazine. Since our first son was one at the time, it’s older than I thought!
Bamburgh Castle and beach – at high tide!
‘It’s perfect, isn’t it?’ My gesture took in not one but two castles, three lighthouses and a beach, broad and empty as the moon.
‘If perfection includes sand blasting and freezing water,’ said my wife.
And there you have it in a nutshell. The Northumberland coast produces extreme reactions. People either think it the most wonderful place they’ve ever seen, and make annual visits as faithfully as the pilgrims to Holy Island, or they get on a plane to a country where toes dipped in the sea don’t turn blue, and wind defences are not a prerequisite for a day at the beach.
England is tame. It’s been shorn of mystery, its wildness cut away as mercilessly as Aslan’s mane. But there are places where something wild and mysterious lingers on, and some of these places lie hidden in plain sight, side by side with all the excesses of modern-day England. Of these, none is stranger, nor juxtaposed more jarringly with its surroundings, than Alderley Edge in Cheshire.
What is Alderley Edge? In the blunt fashion of so many English place names, the answer is given in the asking. It’s a sandstone ridge, an edge that, depending on how you look at it, is the last ripple of the Pennines before it sinks into the Cheshire Plain or the first step upward from the flat lands. As such, it is border country, and this quality of strangeness is still palpable today. It was this strangeness that made the Edge the ideal setting for Alan Garner’s classic children’s books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. 2010 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Weirdstone, and the book has remained in print throughout.
Beeston Castle from the Cheshire Plain.
To get an idea of the geography of the area there is no better vantage point than Beeston Castle (Tarporley, Cheshire, CW6 9TX; 01829 260464; www.english-heritage.org.uk; £5.30 adults, £4.50 concessions, £2.70 children), which is about 25 miles south west of Alderley Edge. The ruins of the medieval castle stand atop and around a great rock crag jutting some 500 feet out of the plain – it may be the best view for the shortest climb in the country! To the west are the Welsh hills, south lies The Wrekin and east is Alderley Edge, marked out by the unmistakeable circle of Jodrell Bank just in the foreground, with the Pennines lying beyond (the visibility of the dish does rather depend on where it is pointing though). But what the view also shows is that this is a settled land, one deeply embedded in history and legend. And it is this that makes the British Isles so much more evocative than their size or comparatively gentle landscape would suggest.
Mountain, sea, forest, desert. Each has its devotees, people who repair to them again and again, forsaking all other temptations. For some it’s the wish to test themselves, for others it’s exploration and the lure of the unknown over the brow of the next hill. For some it’s strictly business, whereas for others it is simple pleasure. For me, it’s mountain, hill and moor, for you – given that you’re reading The Great Outdoors – it’s likely the same. But why should this be the case? Why is that these places call us – for it is a call and, notoriously and tragically, a siren call for some.
Anyone who has knocked around with climbers for a while will have a similar story. This is mine. I met Yossi at university and he took me climbing a few times. But what for me was a passing interest became for him the key question of his life. So when he survived a 3,000 metre fall off Mont Blanc he had to decide what was more important – climbing or the journalistic career he had set out upon. The mountains won. Yossi gave up his job, moved to South America and became a mountain guide in the Andes, only to perish a few years later in a stupid little avalanche. His climbing partner on Mont Blanc predeceased him. In Mike’s case, an overhanging cornice broke off, fell and snapped his neck. Neither man made it to thirty.
