One of the best things about the "Collins Field Guide to Fields" is the cover ... I know it's fashionable to have these faux-naive covers, but this one is especially impressive .. Who would have expected it ... a Field Guide to Fields ! But there it is .... and it's a cracker. You'll never look at a field again in quite the same way after reading this book. I know I don't. Certainly not. One of it's great ideas is a new way to classify fields in much the same way as rock strata are classified .... by naming them after a classic location ... it really works. So we have, for example, the Huddersfield C8 ...... this is a field featuring a rather loamy version of thin boulder clay with chalky inclusions ( that's the "C") and a tendency not to start to warm up until about August 5th ... that's the "8" part of it. It can often be rather over podsol-ised too. Urk. At the opposite extreme we get the Eaglefield D2 .... based on a tiny field just south of the Scottish village of Eaglefield, a thin "ranker" soil on a New Red Sandstone base, often cultivatable from late April onwards, and the sort of soil you can kneel on without getting your trousers mucky by late July. Now you might think this is all rather stuffy and academic, but the amazing thing is, there's a CD included in which celebrities (!) of all types (!) get their wellies on and clomp around "their" choice of field, explaining as they go the special features of each type, and hints and tips for identification. So ,we get Katy Brand stodging around a typical Chapel-en-le-Frith F5, poking it with a stick, digging a 3' hole to show the profile and falling flat on her face at several points... but by the time she's finished, we'll know one when we see one! Most unexpected was the sight of all of Half Man Half Biscuit traipsing round a Heswall C3 ..... but they did a terrific job of championing what can be a "nothing" sort of field, you know, the Dunnock of the field universe. I'll never walk past one now without trying their own unique method of testing the water absorption capacity. Beezer ! Morrisey... he's on there ... he plods gloomily through a rather marginal Manchester N3(d) ..... I mean ,yeah, he knows his stuff field-wise, but once he's gets through that, including a brilliant technique for assessing the nitrate level using a silk shirt, he starts singing " What difference does it make?" and throwing shapes.Bloody show-off. I'm so absorbed in my review copy that I've no time to put the music on right now ... I'm off to have a good mooch around my current favourite, a nice soggy Warrington E9 . After all, I've just seen that Joanna Newsom wandering round one on the CD. She did once sing .. " I had a little plot of land in the garden, it was dirt, and dirt is all the same." How wrong she was ! I must put that on here soon. Now, thematically, we have The Magnetic Fields and the somewhat Freudian song " The night you can't remember" .... maybe it's all this elemental stuff about muck and sludge that's brought it on .. plus ... there's a brilliant surprise ending too ... well, I was surprised anyway. Really. Incidentally, when I first "invented" the book and drew that beautiful cover, many years ago actually .... it was on my "original" birding blog which vanished mysteriously into the ether .... little was I to realise that an actual Field Guide to Fields was going to appear ...but it did. Some things you just can't make up ! Bah !
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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