Nature Notes

Lots of fluffy little baby birds are turning up at the feeders with their proud, solicitous parents. The starlings come in flocks of adults and juveniles- all squwaking and squabbling and jockeying for position. The baby robin doesn't have a red breast yet but you can tell its species from its attitude.

We're having gorgeous weather. I keep expecting a storm and it keeps not turning up. Maidstone got really clobbered a couple of nights back- hailstones included- but all we had was a little gentle rain and a rumble of distant thunder.  

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson was a big name in English literature a generation ago and now he ain't. It happens. Personally, I thnk there's a  high degree of arbitrariness about the canon. Books need champions and if they don't show up, well...

So here I am to say that Anglo Saxon Attitudes is pretty good. Not, perhaps, a world-bestriding masterpiece, but sharp, funny, clever- and valuable- if only as social history- for it's wide-ranging view of English society in the 1950s. There are professors, there are "pansies", the generation of 14-18 is running things but with increasingly palsied hands, people with money can still afford to have servants living in, young people in bedsits and studios are reading Sartre- and TV is creating its first national celebs...