Nicks Pics
6 September 2010 // Nick's Pics
Another Boring Sunset. Words & picture by Nick Small.
The camp fire contemptuously spits pine resin at the man made fibres that keep the mosquitoes off my legs. Ignoring the threat of spontaneous combustion, I pick up my camera to take this shot. It is the umpteenth photograph I’ve taken of this particularly riotous display in the past hour or so. My good friend sitting next to me, sharing the view and the Akvavit, pipes up “I really don’t get the point of taking photos of sunsets”. (more…)
Offshore Islands
A Guide to Coastal Birds. Episode 5. BBC Radio 4, today at 2pm
now on the iplayer.
from the BBC website:
5/5. Brett Westwood is joined by keen bird watcher Stephen Moss on the Devonshire coast. With the help of wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson they offer a practical and entertaining guide to birds that you’re most likely to see and hear on Britain’s off-shore islands; birds like Common Eider Duck, Puffin, Manx Shearwater and Arctic Tern.
This is the last of five programmes to help identify many of the birds found around our British coastline in places like sandy beaches, rocky shores, estuaries, sea cliffs and off-shore islands. Not only is there advice on how to recognise the birds from their appearance, but also how to identify them from their calls and songs.
This series complements three previous series; A Guide to Garden Birds, A Guide Woodland Birds and A Guide to Water Birds and is aimed at both the complete novice as well as those who are eager to learn more about our coastal visitors and residents.
Produced by Sarah Blunt.
The Caught by the River Nature Book Reader
4 September 2010 // nature book reader
Ken Worpole on D.H.Lawrence’s, The White Peacock (1911)
It is now some thirty years since I visited Lawrence’s childhood home at 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, which by then had been modestly adapted as a museum, recreated as it would have been when the Lawrence family lived there. The memory stays strongly with me, of a small, neatly furnished terrace house, with lots of dark greens and browns in its interiors, somehow at one with the colour range of the fields and woods beyond. Lawrence’s father was a miner, but his mother had come from more propitious circumstances, and it was her love and ambition for the young Lawrence (1885 – 1930) that propelled him out of Eastwood – where for a long time he was regarded as a fantasist and writer of ‘dirty’ books – to a life of international travel and literary acclaim, concluded too early by ill-health and TB. (more…)
Pike: Luke Jennings
3 September 2010 // Luke Jennings; Pike
Originally published in the London ES magazine on the 6th of February, 1998.
The alarm goes off at 4.30am and I dress with care; the forecast has promised Siberian winds and snow. I meet Marco Pierre White in Knightsbridge, we pick up David Profumo outside Barkers, and head off down the M3; we were aiming to reach the Royalty fishery on the Hampshire Avon by dawn. The first snow hits the windscreen just beyond the M25, and soon we are driving through a blizzard. We pass flashing emergency-services vehicles and two overturned cars, and by the time we reach Chistchurch, the temperature is well below zero, with a sleet-laden wind roaring upriver from the sea.
With fingers frozen to slow-motion, we assemble the rods on the bank, cast out into the swirling blackness of the river, and settle down to wait. For the next two hours nothing happens; the windward side of Marco’s body turns completely white, and ice forms on David’s hat. We share a Thermos of tea. The fish are testing us, we agree, but this is no more than one would expect on a river that has produced some of England’s hugest pike. In four hours or so we will be on the motorway again, subject to the usual chaos and delays and domestic recriminations, but for the moment we are removed from all that. Pike angling is not about patience, it is about an intense, taut-wired expectancy, about a connection with the primeval. Marco flicks the last of the tea from the cup and we resume our positions.
Click here to read previous ‘Pike’ entries.
Luke’s book ‘Blood Knots’ is on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £12.99
The Eel Man of the Fens
An audio slideshow on the BBC News England website:
Peter Carter’s family has been eel fishing in the Cambridgeshire Fens for the past 500 years.
The 45-year-old, from Outwell, near Wisbech, believes he may be England’s only remaining eel catcher who makes and uses traditional willow traps. Mr Carter has been working with the Environment Agency to help stem the decline of eels in UK waters and is concerned for the future of his family’s traditional way of life.
Watch it HERE.
Stalin Ate My Homework
Stalin Ate My Homework by Alexei Sayle (Sceptre)
review by Frank Cottrell Boyce.
I don’t think I’ve been so surprised by a book since I turned the last page of ‘I Am David’ at the age of twelve and found a note informing me that Boggy was going to drown me during Swimming.
Obviously I knew ‘Stalin Ate My Homework’ was going to be “just let me read you this bit” funny. The scene of Sayle’s Mother screaming “What about the Rosenberg’s” at the television during the Queen’s Speech is one of the funniest I’ve ever read. The strange trousers that his Mother made him and which he carried on wearing well into his teens, the bizarre trajectory of his athletic career, the weird privileges that came from being a delegate at the TUC (free pass to the miniature railway and model village) will haunt my imagination forever. See? I’m saying “just let me read you this bit” now. (more…)
Birdsongs 7
31 August 2010 // Birds //Matt's Bird of the Week //Music
Number seven in our series of ‘Birdsongs’ themed music downloads goes out on Friday and this one’s been compiled by Edwyn Collins. (more…)
Kurt Jackson – The Dart
30 August 2010 // Miscellany //On Water
An exhibition of new work by Caught by the River contributor Kurt Jackson.
4 September and 2 October 2010
Lemon Street Gallery
13 Lemon Street,
Truro, Cornwall, TR1 2LS
Press Release:
Childhood memories of rural idyll mixed with a schoolboy’s excited view of war are at the heart of a new exhibition by the renowned West Cornwall-based artist Kurt Jackson.
The show takes place at the prestigious Lemon Street Gallery in Truro this September and tells the story of the artist’s detailed exploration of the River Dart in Devon. (more…)
Sea Cliffs
A Guide to Coastal Birds. Episode 4. BBC Radio 4
listen on the iplayer.
from the BBC website:
4/5. Brett Westwood is joined by keen bird watcher Stephen Moss on the Devonshire coast. With the help of wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson they offer a practical and entertaining guide to birds which you’re most likely to see and hear on sea cliffs around Britain’s coastline; birds like Fulmar, Kittiwake, Guillemot and Razorbill.
This is the fourth of five programmes to help identify many of the birds found around our British coastline in places like sandy beaches, rocky shores, off-shore islands, estuaries and sea cliffs. Not only is there advice on how to recognise the birds from their appearance, but also how to identify them from their calls and songs.
Produced by Sarah Blunt.
Environment Agency investigating massive fish kill in River Line, East Sussex
News from the Environment Agency website.
Environment Agency technical officers are working to find out what caused the almost complete loss of aquatic life in a stretch of the River Line last week.
Members of the public contacted the organisation with reports of 40 dead trout in a tributary of the River Line near Battle. Fisheries Officer Jamie Benton immediately visited the site and walked a stretch of the watercourse, recording that all aquatic life had been killed over the 2km stretch, including bullheads and brook lampreys (protected species). Current estimations are that 100 – 200 trout, 40 brook lampreys and at least 5 bullheads were killed. (more…)
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