Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking (London: Jonathan Cape, 2020)

As mentioned by the review I read before getting this book out of the library, this could be a very annoying book, but it’s not.  Bill Buford is a writer/editor at the New Yorker.  He’s written a book on Italian cooking, which involved moving to Italy and learning to cook.  In this book he repeats the experience, but this time he moves to France to learn French cooking.  He chosen destination is Lyon, which is an important culinary capital, in large part because of the influence of Paul Bocuse and his new cuisine.  After taking a few classes in New York, he moves to France with his wife and two boys without speaking very much French at all.  Although the food is good, he finds that Lyon isn’t the friendliest city, and it takes him a while to find his feet.  An early experience is working in a bakery with Bob the baker, who uses a special flour from the Auvergne region (good bread comes from good flour is the lesson here).  After taking another course at the Institute Paul Bocuse, he the moves into a Michelin starred restaurant as a stagiaire (essentially an unpaid intern), where he works his way up to cooking the late morning meal for the staff.  It’s a fascinating insight into French cooking and food culture, and at times a really funny read. 

Yesterday was the first Sunday of my part time placement with Jonathan Philpott in Berrow and Brean.  I attended the 9am service  of morning prayer at St Bridget’s in Brean.  It was a small congregation of around ten people, but a very nice service and a beautiful space for worship.  I’m excited to have the opportunity to learn more about rural/non-urban Churches, and hopefully to contribute something to these communities. 

Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Aleks Sierz, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights (2011)

Although 10 years out of date now, this guide to contemporary British playwrights offers an interesting overview of the lives and work of 25 of the most important dramatists working in Britain today.  The list only includes seven female playwrights (Sarah Daniels, April de Angelis, Debbie Tucker Green, Tanika Gupta, Sarah Kane, Winsome Pinnock, and Shelagh Stephenson), but there is a good representation of Black and Asian British playwrights, and race, gender, and class are important themes throughout the book.  It would be interesting to see what an overview book published like this would look like today.  Several of the names were familiar.  For example we went to see Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman in London a couple of years ago.  But most of the playwrights and their work were new to me.  There sems to have been a strong trend towards what Aleks Sierz calls ‘In-yer-face theatre’ in the late 1980s, through the 1990s, and into the 2000s, in which playwrights aimed for a deliberate shock value in terms of sex and violence.  Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill is one important example, Sarah Kane’s baby eating Blasted is another.  These extremes seem to have toned down a little in recent years, but again it would be interesting to see what a contemporary book would say about this.  Many of the writers have an association with the Royal Court Theatre in London, frequently described as a ‘writers theatre’. 

Daniel Simpson, The Truth of Yoga: A Comprehensive Guid to Yoga’s History, Texts, Philosophy, and Practices (New York: North Point Press, 2021)

This book presents an overview of the history of yoga, from the earliest recorded references in Vedic texts c.1,500 BCE up to the present.  It offers a really useful summary of how yoga has developed over time, and how current iterations of yoga practice are very different from its early forms, even in such key texts as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, which was published around 400 CE.  It’s interesting to note that the asana practice of much modern yoga owes more to the development of nineteenth century Swedish gymnastics and British military stretching exercises, than to anything in the ancient meditative practices.  Simpson, however, is not overly judgmental about this, and he’s happy for modern yoga to work if it works.  In particular he focuses on the opportunities modern yoga brings for pause and self-reflection in its contribution to making the world a better place.  The future of yoga, he concludes, is what we make it. 

Ben Mercer, Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby (2019)

I’ve been enjoying rugby over the last few weeks, and watching the Six Nations has got me thinking more about French rugby.  This is a fascinating, self-published book, written by an English rugby player who spent four years playing third and fourth division semi-professional rugby in France with Rouen Normandie Rugby (formerly Stade Rouennais).  It tells the story of Ben Mercer’s initial enjoyment of playing in France and prolonging his professional rugby career, followed by the disillusionment as the club get progressively better and end up being promoted to the Pro D2, second division (after Mercer leaves).  The story itself is interesting, but the best thing about this book is the insight it provides into the life of a rugby player on the fringes of professional rugby, which is the situation for many – probably the majority – of the players in the professional leagues.  He gets a flat to live in and gets paid enough to live on, but it’s very much a hand-to-mouth existence.  The end of a rugby career (and job) is only one bad injury away, and Mercer shows how players in this situation don’t always get particularly well treated by the club owners and coaches (in this case the former England scrum half Richard Hill, who doesn’t come across in a very positive light).  Having said that, there are times of real camaraderie (often involving alcohol), and lots of interesting characters.  I can away from this book with a sense that playing rugby at this level is not easy, but can offer a few years of intense and sometimes enjoyable experiences.  Although Mercer became disillusioned with rugby towards the end of his time in Normandy, he clearly valued the four years he spent there and he has written a very good book.

Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Picador, 2020) The winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain tells the story of a Glaswegian family caught in a vicious spiral of alcohol addiction.  The two main characters are Shuggie Bain and his alcoholic mother Agnes.  There is a strong sense of autobiography running through the novel.  This gives everything and extra poignancy, but also results in frequent questions of ‘did that really happen?’ which occasionally get in the way.  One or two episodes verge slightly on the unbelievable, perhaps a result of the selective information we’re given about certain characters.  There are also several episodes of editorial narration (New Year is big in Scotland, we’re told, and there is a big rivalry between Rangers and Celtic) which seems intended for an American audience and breaks the flow of the narrative.  But overall, this is an excellent book.  It is very sad, but there are also elements of hope, which at least in part of connected to its autobiographical character.  It perhaps verges on the edge of ‘poverty porn’, but its realism and sadness means this never goes too far

Adam Curtis (dir.), Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (BBC, 2021)

Adam Curtis’ 8-hour BBC iplayer documentary tells the story of the modern world alongside philosophical musings on the nature of being.  “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make,” begins the documentary quoting Anthropologist and occupy activist David Graeber, “and could just as easily make differently”.  The last seventy years have seen a shift from the collective to the individual, based in part on the West’s victory in the Cold War.  But this shift to the individual perhaps reached its high point in the 1990s, and what has followed is something quite disturbing.  We are living in a world where the individual has no power, where it doesn’t matter what we say or what we think, we can’t really change anything.  Partly this is a consequence of the triumph of individualism, but it is also, according to Curtis, the result of the networked, surveillance society that we’ve lived in in the aftermath of 911.  We’re ruled by a narrow technocracy that has little interest in anything beyond keeping things the same. 

The documentary focuses on a number of fascinating characters: Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao, Michael X (Michael de Freitas) a British gangster and anti-racist, Afeni Shakur, Black Panther and mother of Tupac, Kerry Thornley, hippy influenced conspiracy theorist conspiracy theorist, Abu Zubaydah a Mujahideen fighter, Dominic Cummings, a British political adviser, and many others.  In their own way, each of these characters are caught not only the struggle between individualism and anti-individualism, but in the question of whether we should even be trying to change the world at all.  All of these figures made an effort to change things in response to perceived injustice, but all failed in their way: Jiang Qing killed herself in prison ten years after being sentenced to death, Afeni Shakur became addicted to Crack and her son was shot, Kerry Thornley became increasingly disillusioned as his fake conspiracy theories took on a life of their own, Abu Zubaydah is in Guantanamo and has been horribly tortured, and Dominic Cummings has recently been sacked.  Trying to change things, it might seem, doesn’t end well. 

Where is Christianity in all of this?  With the exception of militant Islam, religion plays a surprisingly small role in the documentary.  There are occasional negative references to the Inquisition or to the role of Orthodox Christian in Russian nationalism (Pussy Riot performing in a church).  But overall Christianity is conspicuous by its absence.  This is likely in part due to the overarchingly secular perspective in which this documentary seems to have been made.  But I wonder if it also might be due to the ambiguity of the Christian story, which might be more difficulty (at least in some of its forms) to pin down politically.  The documentary helps to make sense of the Radical Orthodoxy movement in its total rejection of modernity (although leaves the problem of fetishizing the feudal).  There is a lot more than can be said about how Christianity should respond to the world that Curtis so brilliantly portrays. 

Gareth Williams (editor), Sport (Library of Wales, 2007)

In the week between Wales’ slightly fortuitous Six Nations victories over Ireland and Scotland (fortuitous because both opponents had a man sent off), I read the rugby section of Gareth Williams’ Sport anthology.  This is a collection of some of the best writing on Welsh sport, and it offered a good insight into the passion for rugby in Wales.  Most of the rugby entries were on the Welsh national team, and it might have been good to include a few more chapters on club rugby and small town teams.  But the focus on the Welsh men’s team makes sense in a country obsessed with international rugby, and, in particular, the annual contest against England either in Cardiff or London.  The story is almost always one of David vs. Goliath, and a sense of Welsh nationalism is never far away in the annual grudge match against their English rivals.  Perhaps the 1970s were one period when Wales was not the underdog, and there are celebrations of J.P.R. Williams, Barry John, and Phil Bennett from this era (including the ‘greatest try ever’ by the Barbarians against New Zealand in 1973).  It’s a really fun book, and made me want to attend some more Welsh rugby matches when lockdown is over.   

David Evans, A History of Nature Conservation in Britain (Routledge, 1992)

This is an interesting book written by a former policeman with a clear passion for conservation.  It tells a comprehensive story of conservation in Britain from pre-history to the (1990s) present.  The overall argument seems to be that not enough is being done, and this is clearly demonstrated by the books lamenting the current state of the environment that I’ve been reading over the past few months.  Another theme seems to be the constant flux and fluidity of conservation organizations/departments and policies.  This lack of stability creates its own sense of uncertainty and decline, although the opposite is intended with every re-organization.  It is very helpful on the history of national parks, although perhaps a little teleological on criticising the faith in agriculture that way shown by Dower and the other proponents of National Parks in Britain: nobody could really know in the mid-1940s that agriculture would develop so rapidly and largely cease to be an ally of conservation.  Towards the end of the book Evans gets very preachy, and the last couple of chapters come across as a bit of an extended rant.  But this is still a useful book and worth coming back to as I continue to work on National Parks. 

David Wilkinson, Fight for it Now: John Dower and the Struggle for National Parks in Britain (Signal, 2019)

In the late 1930s and 1940s, John Dower played a pivotal role in what Wilkinson describes as the ‘struggle’ for national parks in Britain.  Dower was from an upper middle class family in Yorkshire.  His father was a businessman, but had studied at Cambridge, where he had been a contemporary and friend of George Macauley Trevelyan.  This relationship was to prove pivotal to John Dower’s life as he would later marry Trevelyan’s niece (daughter of the Liberal/Labour politician Charles).  Interestingly they met at a famous annual ‘man hunt’ event organised by the Trevelyan’s where instead of hunting real hares, some of the participants would pretend to be hares and would be hunted by the others.  John Dower studied history at Cambridge, but also took courses in architecture and went on to be a professional architect in London.  Partly through his relationship with the Trevelyan family he got involved with the left-wing political and economic planning (PEP) think tank, which seems to have been his main intellectual home throughout his life.  This background in architecture and planning is important for his work on national parks. 

During the 1930s Dower became increasingly interested in the idea of national parks, in part through the work of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which had been founded by Addison in 1926 and set up a standing committee on national parks.  In 1929, Ramsay MacDonald had set up a government committee to consider the case for national parks, but the timing at the beginning of the Great Depression was not good. 

Early in the war, Dower had volunteered for armed service (despite being in his late 30s).  However, before leaving the country he developed severe lung problems (probably TB) and was invalided out of the army.  This gave him an opportunity to work in the government’s post-war planning department, initially under Lord Reith, which brought him back to National Parks.  He worked to survey potential national parks and produced his famous 1945 report calling for the creation of a national park system and a commission to oversee this.  He was ill through much of this work, and he died two years later.  The book points out that he would have been very disappointed by much of the 1949 National Park and Access to the Countryside Act that created national parks.  It is a very useful book and worth coming back to, but slightly frustrating that it has no bibliography and no list of archives.