Dear Readers, I have just received my copy of ‘Nature’s Calendar’ by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. I was intrigued because instead of the usual monthly or weekly format, the book divides the year into 72 seasons, based on a traditional Japanese calendar. What the authors did was to ask people to post on social media about their observations of the natural world every four or five days. A list of four would then be presented, and people would vote on which one resonated most for them. The authors recognised that there would be differences in when things happened, both according to where you live and what the year is like, especially in a time of such climate turmoil, but sometimes it’s as interesting to see what isn’t happening as what is.

Each section of four or five days has a name – for the period 8th to 12th September it’s ‘Arachnids Assemble’. I am thinking that I might use the book for inspiration to see what’s happening around me, and  to share anything that I’ve observed. Let’s see how we go!

‘Arachnids Assemble’ is absolutely right for my garden at the moment. Every time I go through the back garden  I am limbo dancing under spider’s webs, and the cellar spiders are looking lean and hungry in the shed.

If you’ve ever disturbed a cellar spider, you might be surprised to see it suddenly vibrating up and down at high speed. There is a very interesting film showing a variety of cellar spider behaviours, including vibrating, here (though note that it is very spooky trip down into some very dank places). There are various theories about why they vibrate: most likely the movement confuses predators, especially in the caves where the spiders originally lived. In the film you can see how the spider basically becomes a blur, so it must be very difficult for a cave-dwelling bird or another invertebrate predator to ‘lock on’ to the target.

Interestingly,  although I already knew that these wispy, ghost-like spiders are able to kill other kinds of spiders that are much beefier than they are,  I had no idea how until I read the chapter in the book. It appears that the cellar spiders find their prey (usually another ‘indoor’ spider like a house spider) and then do their vibration-dance next to the spider’s web in a way that imitates a trapped fly. The house spider rushes out and the cellar spider immobilises it by ‘throwing’ silk at it, until it is so entangled that it is no longer a threat to the cellar spider. Then, the cellar spider is safe to inject its venom into its much larger prey, and to consume it at leisure.

Incidentally, in North America you might know this gangly creature as a ‘daddy long legs’. In the UK this would mean a cranefly. Clearly we are two nations divided by a common language, but fortunately we have Latin names to help us out. If the cellar spider (Pholcus phalangoides) could fly I think we’d all have problems.

Even more incidentally, I wonder why nature didn’t evolve a flying spider? Flight has evolved several times in the insect kingdom, but I’m not sure if any of the other invertebrate groups ever took to the wing. Any theories, please share!

And in the meantime, I do highly recommend ‘Nature’s Calendar‘. It’s taught me lots of new things, and I’ve only read 1/72th of it.

 

Dear Readers, it’s difficult to avoid the tales of Asian hornets that are filling our newspapers at the moment, and there is rather a lot of confusion around, so here I am to try to clear things up.

First up, what’s the story? Asian hornets originate in Asia, as the name suggests, where honeybees are also native (they aren’t native to the UK). The Asian hornet specialises in hunting and killing not only honeybees but also a variety of  solitary bees and lesser-known colonial bees. In Asia, the honeybees are largely of the Eastern Honeybee species, and these have developed a variety of means of combating the Asian hornet, including  entering and leaving the hive at high speed, clustering over a hornet so that it overheats and dies, or using a particular kind of ‘wing shimmering’ that confuses the bees. When the Asian hornets arrived in Europe, however, the honeybees (largely of the Western honeybee species) have no such defences, and so are uniquely vulnerable to predation, as are our many native bee species.

The Asian hornets arrived in France in 2004, probably after being accidentally transported with cargo. Europe has banned the import of soil in pot plants from the UK because it’s a way of transporting a variety of invasive species, including the Asian hornet, but we have not reciprocated. The insect could also be arriving under its own steam, or by hitching a ride on ferries etc. Climate change will also make the conditions in the UK more comfortable for the insect.

The first Asian hornet arrived in 2016, but this year has seen a large increase  in the number of sightings. In 2021 and 2022 there were only two confirmed sightings, but this year there have been 22 sightings so far. Worse, these are not just individual insects, but nests, and there is a cluster in Kent, with four nests destroyed in the past week. There have also been confirmed sightings in Eastbourne, Weymouth and Southampton, plus a sighting in Thamesmead on 21st August where a nest was destroyed (altogether too close to home!). You can find the map of Asian hornet incursions here, and very interesting it is too.  Both Matt Shardlow of Buglife and Dave Goulson, bee expert extraordinaire, think that there is a real danger of the insect becoming established in the UK. With all the other threats to our native bees (pesticides, habitat loss, climate change) they can really do without another one.

However! It is really, really important to know what an Asian hornet looks like and what to do if you see one. The last thing we need is for our native hornet, hornet mimic-hoverflies and other insects to be demonised and swatted in an Asian hornet panic. Our native hornets eat a whole variety of large insects, from beetles to wasps to flies, and so are an asset rather than something to dread.

Also please note that the Asian hornet that we have in the UK is not the Giant Asian hornet (the ‘Murder Hornet’ beloved of the press). That is a completely different species. The Asian hornet that we have in the UK is actually smaller than our native European hornet, and its sting is no worse than that of a native bee or wasp.

There is an excellent definitive ID sheet to download here

However, here are the key points: the photo below shows an Asian hornet. Note that the abdomen is largely black, except for the orange segment towards the base. The hornet also has yellow legs (hence an alternative name of ‘yellow-legged hornet’).The British Beekeepers Association sum ID up in three easy to remember steps:

• Is it mainly black?
• Does it have a wide orange stripe on the fourth segment of the abdomen?
• Do its legs look as if they’ve been dipped in yellow paint?

So, the Asian hornet is actually very different from our native hornet (Vespula crabro). In flight this creature sounds like a Vulcan bomber, but gives much more of an orangey-brown impression than the Asian hornet which looks distinctly black. When the insect has settled, the differences are very clear. Note that the insect is much more wasp-like, with a yellow striped abdomen and that it has brown legs.

Another confusion that could arise is with a magnificent insect called the Giant Wood Wasp. This completely inoffensive creature has an ovipositor at the back which is often mistaken for a sting. She is also unfortunate enough to have yellow legs, and the base of her abdomen is yellow. Fortunately this magnificent creature is largely confined to coniferous forests, so hopefully she won’t be too hounded.

And, incidentally, here is a creature that is often mistaken for a European hornet, but is actually a hoverfly, another visitor from overseas who is making itself at home in the UK now that it’s getting warmer, with no unfortunate consequences at all. The Hornet-Mimic Hoverfly (Volucella zonaria) is a frequent flyer in my garden. What a magnificent insect it is! But a close look at those compound eyes will tell you that this is a fly, not a hornet.

So, finally, what to do if you think you’ve seen an Asian hornet? You can report it via the Asian Hornet app (available for iPhone or Android). You can report it online here. Or you can email at this address: alertnonnative@ceh.ac.uk <alertnonnative@ceh.ac.uk>

If possible include a photo of the insect (dead or alive), and the exact location where it was seen. A group of organisations plus the government are coordinating to detect nests and destroy them to prevent the Asian hornet from becoming established.

You’ll know that I am generally relaxed about non-native species (and I have many, many posts on ring-necked parakeets and grey squirrels to prove it). But the Asian hornet really does seem to be a danger to our native bee species and to honeybees, already challenged by everything from varroa mite to climate change. Let’s be vigilant, informed and sensible.

 

Dear Readers, I peered out from my office window yesterday to see this young crow sitting on a gutter and trying to work out if there was anything tasty to eat. What a little sweetheart! I love the way that that beak looks too big for the bird’s head, and that the head and body are still fluffy while the wings have nice sleek feathers.

Crows breed every year in a large tree somewhere in the County Roads here in East Finchley, and this year magpies bred in my whitebeam tree. Crows and magpies are not best friends, although the magpies usually seem to come off best, and the noise of their conflict can be quite alarming. Still, everyone  seems to have reared babies to at least this stage, and while the parents of this fledgling are still around, it seems to be quite self-sufficient. Young crows often stay close to their parents for up to 3 years and may help to provision and take care of next year’s chicks. In some cases, they will even return when they’re older than that to help out if they aren’t breeding themselves.

Cooperative breeding is an interesting phenomenon, seen in 40% of crow species but only 9% of bird species overall. I suspect it’s something to do with food availability – crows are big birds that need a lot of food, especially when growing up, so the more eyes there are to spot opportunities and to find novel food sources, the better. We know how intelligent and adaptable crows are, so when they’re working together they’re pretty much unstoppable. So it seems that although this young crow now looks independent, s/he’ll be hanging out with her family for several years to come, and will in turn benefit when s/he  reaches breeding age.

I am very fond of crows. They are so curious and intelligent, and they repay careful observation with a whole range of interesting behaviours. They’re certainly something that reminds me that while I’m huddled over my computer there’s a whole other world out there.

Dear Readers, my trot around East Finchley on Sundary reminded me of how much I love Viper’s Bugloss – so prickly, so blue, and such a magnet for bees! And so I wanted to resurrect this post, partly because it reminds me of the first time I noticed the plant.  I was taking a walk around Milborne St Andrew to clear my head after a difficult few days looking after my parents, who were seriously ailing by this point, and I remember how, on spotting this plant, all my worries fell away, just for a few moments. It’s strange how the sight of a ‘new’ flower, or a bird doing something unusual, or an interesting insect, can completely take me out of my head and plop me back into being part of the living world. And so I wanted to share this with you again, in the hope that if you’re having a hard time, it can act as a reminder of all the extraordinary life that’s going on right outside your front door. Take a walk, if you’re able, or at least open the window and stand there, breathing, for a few minutes. Sending all of you who need it a big hug.

And of course, there is a poem. There’s much to love about this work by Stacie Cassarino (for me at least), but is it too much? And what the hell is an isopleth? Readers, it is A broad term for any line on a weather map connecting points with equal values of a particular atmospheric variable’. So now you know. Let me know what you think! I am half in love with it, but not completely.

Summer Solstice
BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

 

Dear Readers, nothing delights me more than finding a plant that my guide describes as ‘common’ but which I have never seen before, and so it is with Viper’s Bugloss. What a fantastic plant it is, with its furry flowers and purple stamen and hairy stems. There is something rather Harry Potter-ish about it, and it looks far too exotic to be a UK native, even though it is.

I found this one growing from a crevice in a wall above the stream in Milborne St Andrew,  and it does seem to have a liking for chalky soils such as those in parts of Dorset. It is a member of the Borage family, and is much loved by pollinators. The name ‘bugloss’ comes from the Greek for ‘ox-tongued’ and refers to the rough texture of the plant. The ‘viper’ bit comes from the way the stamen resemble a snake’s tongue, from the look of the seed head, and from the belief that the plant could cure snakebite (probably another manifestation of the ‘Doctrine of Signatures’, whereby it was believed that God had designed the appearance of a plant to indicate what it could be used for).

Viper’s Bugloss is native to Europe and temperate Asia, and has been introduced to North America, where it is sometimes known as ‘blueweed’ and has become invasive in some parts of the continent.

The plant contains alkaloids, which are poisonous, although there are no known cases of humans suffering from eating it. Because of its long taproot it can be difficult to remove from pasture, and in 2006 a paper suggested that bulls in Spain died as a result of munching on viper’s bugloss and common ragwort. However, while ragwort gets a very bad press, viper’s bugloss is generally tolerated. I sometimes wonder how and why we get these bees in our bonnets about particular plants whilst ignoring others that, it could be argued, are equally ‘dangerous’. Could the popular press have something to do with it, I ask myself (sarcastically)?

In Australia, a closely related plant (purple viper’s bugloss or Echium plantagineum) is known as ‘Patterson’s Curse’, because it is said to have escaped from the garden of a Mrs. Patterson. After a bushfire in Canberra destroyed all the other pasture, 40 horses are said to have eaten the bugloss and suffered liver failure, resulting in them having to be destroyed.

Viper’s bugloss is such a stunner (in my eyes anyhow) that a number of cultivars have been developed, such as ‘Blue Bedder’ which can be bought from the Royal Horticultural Society shop should you be so inclined. As usual, I rather prefer the species plant, and I suspect that it might be more attractive to pollinators in its original state as well. Why would you want to breed out those bright red stamens? I think we should be told…

Incidentally, you can see here how the buds start off pink and turn blue when the plant is ready to be pollinated, like so many members of the borage family.

In addition to treating snake bite, the plant is said to be useful for ameliorating fevers, headaches and inflammation, with the best parts of the plant being the leaves that grow close to the ground, directly from the root.

A herbalist named Parkinson noted that

‘the water distilled in glasses or the roote itself taken is good against the passions and tremblings of the heart as also against swoonings, sadness and melancholy.’

which sounds like a good thing. As with all plants, and particularly ones that are known to be poisonous, I would suggest a good degree of circumspection however. Remember those horses in Canberra.

I am off to Austria next week, and I note that in the Tyrol, people were warned against consuming viper’s bugloss because it was said to stimulate sexual desire. Presumably all that fresh mountain air and yodelling was aphrodisiac enough, not to mention the lederhosen.

Many species of bees love viper’s bugloss, including the rather splendid red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius)

It is also a favourite foodplant of the migratory Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui). These insects come out of their chrysalises in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa before heading north and east to find foodplants for their caterpillars. Fortunately the caterpillars have wide-ranging tastes, from thistles to mallows, but they also love viper’s bugloss. In years when there are not many foodplants close to home, or if a large number of adults have hatched and survived, there may be extraordinary irruptions of the adults in the UK as they arrive en masse: I remember seeing over thirty in one small patch of community garden one morning a few years ago. All the more reason for growing lots of plants for butterflies and bees! The butterflies also have a love for viper’s bugloss as a nectar plant, so it helps both caterpillars and adults.

And as if that wasn’t reason enough to welcome viper’s bugloss to your garden if you get a chance, looky here….

Perhaps the most exciting insect find of all, however, is not particularly spectacular to look at, but is a sign of how our flora and fauna are likely to change with the climate. The viper’s bugloss mason bee (Hoplitis adunca) is a brand new species in the UK and is currently found at only one site, the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park in London. It strongly prefers species in the Echium genus to any other plants and, while it makes its tiny nest in every thing from empty snail shells to old beetle tunnels, at the park it was found nesting in an artificial ‘bee hotel’. Which just goes to show that if you provide lots of habitat in your garden, you never know what will turn up. It also points up the importance of ‘brownfield’ style sites for insects – many prefer these areas, even though they look uninviting to us, because they mimic the Mediterranean conditions of dry, poor soil and exposed, hot places to warm up that these insects are used to.

I am reminded of the amazing book ‘Wildlife of a Garden – A Thirty Year Study’ by Jennifer Owen, who was a hoverfly specialist and who discovered several species that were completely new to science in her Leicestershire back garden. This was before the current (much welcomed) advent of ‘wildlife gardening’ – she had, by her own description, a very ‘ordinary’ garden with a lawn and flower beds and somewhere to dry clothes, and yet, because she paid attention and recorded the visitors that she had, she was able to list  2673 species of plants and animals. I wonder what the counts for our gardens would be? So many creatures, especially the tiny ones, escape our notice altogether, and that’s without all the ones who whistle through when we aren’t looking. We are surrounded by wonders, and I for one only notice a tiny proportion of them.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By D. Gordon E. Robertson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10222992

Photo Two by By Lubiesque [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three by By Harry Rose from South West Rocks, Australia (Echium plantagineum plant1) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four from https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/139228/Echium-vulgare-Blue-Bedder/Details

Photo Five by By spacebirdy(also known as geimfyglið (:> )=| made with Sternenlaus-spirit) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or FAL], from Wikimedia Commons

Photo Six by Thomas Roppenecker at https://www.flickr.com/photos/roppenecker/27613303396

 

 

Dear Readers, it has been ‘pretty busy’ at work today – I have exactly 6 working days left until I retire, and as usual I keep thinking of things that I absolutely have to do before I leave. But for a few minutes I did look out of the window and admire the scaffolding next door. It’s surprising how quickly something like a scaffold can become something to be utilised by the local wildlife: the magpies often hang out, squawking, on the scaffolding poles, and when we had a scaffold around our house a sparrowhawk used to sit on it, surveying the garden for prey.

But for today, it was largely spiders’ webs that caught my eye. They aren’t so clear in the photo above, but have a look at the film below. Enjoy!

I wonder how long it would be before the scaffolding was covered in vines? Maybe a little bit of soil would develop at the junctions between the poles, and I’m sure all sorts of things could live on the boards. It could be like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon given a year and minimal interference. But alas, the scaffolders will be coming to take them down in a week or so, and so I’ll never know what could have happened. On the other hand, it will be nice to get a bit more light into the house, the ones at the back have made our dining room feel like an abyss of doom, and that’s never a good thing, especially with the nights drawing in.

And now, back to the grind! But not for much longer!

Dear Readers, what a pleasure it was to go for a walk around East Finchley on this sunny Sunday afternoon. I’d thought that summer was pretty much over, but for the next few days it appears to have returned, and so we went for a wander through Cherry Tree Wood and back home, just to see what was happening. First up, there are some great plants in the grassy area outside the Monkey Puzzle nursery, right opposite East Finchley Station. This Viper’s Bugloss was doing very nicely, and various late bees were enjoying it greatly.

The Ribbed Melilot, a member of the pea and vetch family, was also doing very nicely.

I thought at first that these were Welsh poppies, but on closer inspection I think they might be Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule), and  very pretty they are too, in their yellow and orange shades.

Then we headed into Cherry Tree Wood, which was busy with families playing football and badminton  and basketball and tennis. The woods themselves are a shady haven.

There are still a few Speckled Wood butterflies about.

A nice flower border has been planted up in front of the gents toilets. Hopefully this will deter at least some of the graffiti that appears with monotonous regularity.

And the mosaics on the ladies toilet have been completed, and very nice they look too. They each feature an image of something that can be seen in  Cherry Tree Wood, from the apple and pear in the top row (they’ve been planted in the orchard) to the Archer himself, whose statue can be seen at East Finchley station. Well done to Debbie Singer, who made the whole thing, which took over a year. You can read more about it in this month’s community newspaper, The Archer, here.

And here’s the orchard, doing very nicely, thank you. Apparently you only need five trees for an orchard, which is an incentive to plant some fruit trees if ever I heard one.

And then finally it’s home via the unadopted road. It’s always interesting to see what’s going on here, and today I was rewarded by a patch of sunflowers of different varieties.

How splendid they look against the blue sky, and how popular most of the flowers were with bees! Later, if the flowerheads are allowed to stay, they may well attract finches and other small birds, but for now it’s mainly all manner of pollinators.

However, it’s interesting to see that one variety of sunflower alone didn’t seem to have any bees at all.

And it’s easy to see why – there’s no obvious pollen in the midst of all of those petals. It’s always worth bearing in mind that even plants that are normally irresistible to bees, butterflies and hoverflies may not be attractive to them if they’re double-flowered – sometimes they simply don’t produce the nectar or pollen required, or sometimes the flowers are just too complex for the insects to navigate. Still, in a patch of plants that punches so far above its weight in terms of of pollinator value I think it’s absolutely fine to grow something whimsical, just for the sake of those fluffball flowers. After all, gardens have to be places where humans can be happy too, and there’s no reason at all why a wildlife garden can’t be a sanctuary for people, and a pleasure to be in.

Dear Readers, there was a very interesting article in New Scientist last week, addressing something that attained the status of holy writ when I was growing up, and I wondered if any of you remembered something similar. I was told that it was very bad to have plants, whether in pots or vases, in bedrooms at night, because of all the carbon dioxide that they emitted. Furthermore, flowers taken to hospital patients were said to be removed from the wards at night for the same reason.

At the time, I didn’t give it much thought – my O-Level biology taught me that plants take in CO2 during the day through photosynthesis, but at night they breathed it out via respiration, just like any living thing, so it all seemed reasonable. But my science degree this year got me thinking that there was something wrong with the argument, and James Wong’s article explained exactly why.

First up, how much carbon dioxide do houseplants emit at night, compared to what they absorb during the day? Some scientists in Turkey popped some ficus and yucca into sealed boxes, and discovered that they absorb 6 to 8 times more CO2 during the day than they release at night. At night, a large ficus plant increased the CO2 content in the box by only 351 parts per million, well within the healthy range for any humans who happened to be locked in a sealed box with a houseplant.

Secondly, for those of us who share our bedrooms with other humans (or indeed other animals such as dogs or cats), we should maybe consider how much carbon dioxide they’re emitting. A single human breath emits 40,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide, which is more than ten times more than a ficus emits in eight hours overnight. As Wong says, if we’re concerned about CO2 maybe we should turf out our partners rather than our plants.

And finally, we don’t live in hermetically-sealed boxes (unless you live in a Passivehaus, which is about the closest that we come to such a thing, though these do have mechanical ventilation so it’s not a very close comparison). Indoor air is moved about by draughts, through leaky windows and opened doors, and even by the movement of humans around the house. The carbon dioxide produced by a plant overnight is not going to stay in the bedroom, but will dissipate under the doors, through the windows, up the chimney and even through the brickwork or floorboards if you live in a Victorian end of terrace like I do.

So, this is another tale that has little basis in actual scientific fact. Hospitals in the UK ban plants on the wards these days for a very different reason – the nursing staff are too hard-pressed to look after a pot plant, the water that cut plants stand in can become foul very quickly, and frankly there’s very little room for such things in the average NHS ward. But for me, there’s another reason for not having houseplants in the bedroom – pretty much every horizontal surface is covered in books. It was a tough call, but us bibliophiles have to make tough choices sometimes.

Dear Readers, maybe it’s because I’m just about to retire (did I mention that I’m retiring?) but I found this book irresistible. On the face of it, it’s a history of women walking in the city, intertwined with Elkin’s own memories of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London at various points in her life, and that might be intriguing enough – amongst the cast are Martha Gellhorn, Georges Sand, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle and Jean Rhys. But for me, so much of what she says echoes my own experiences of walking, and observing, and noticing. She begins by describing her feelings on being young and living in Paris for the first time.

“Every turn I made was a reminder that  the day was mine and I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be. I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting”.

And what a wonderful feeling that is! I remember wandering in various cities but most particularly London, not worrying about getting lost, antennae twitching (well I am Bug Woman) for the next interesting sight. Since I’ve been doing the blog, every front garden or patch of ‘weeds’ has become a source of fascination. Even walking around the block can bring forth wonders.

On we go.

“Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home.”

And if you wander in a city for any length of time, and if you keep your eyes open, you can’t help but notice that not everyone is lucky. Elkin notes that she sees things in Paris that she’s never seen in New York (though I think you would see sights like this in New York for sure now), and the same is true of London, right now.

“Beggars (Roma I was told) who knelt rigidly in the street, heads bowed, holding signs asking for money, some with children, some with dogs: homeless people living in tents, under stairways, under arches. Every quaint Parisian nook had its corresponding misery. I turned off my New York apathy and gave what I could. Learning to see meant not being able to look away: to walk the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other”.

I love that last sentence. Do you ever read something, and think that if the author never wrote another word, that would be enough?

Fortunately Elkin carries on. She describes leaving the city of New York to move to suburban Long Island. Suffice it to say that she finds it problematic, and, in the era where we’re coming to realise that separating the places where we live, work, shop and spend our leisure time, her comments (the book was written in 2017) seem particularly apposite. Here she is on the history of suburbia:

“It is a story about breaking away from the collective in all its variety to dwell amongst similar people.

If suburbanites are buffered from encounters with the strange and different by their cars and their single-family houses, this is in part a result of zoning laws which divide towns up into single-use enclaves. Residential, commercial and industrial areas are kept strictly apart, which demands that you drive everywhere as your orbit between work, home, shopping and leisure becomes ever wider. Originally bedroom communities clustered around railway stations with easy access to the cities on which they depended, the suburbs in time became autonomous, spreading away from their city centres. This was mainly the fault of the automobile, which became the pre-eminent way of getting around in the second half of the twentieth century, causing an intricate system of motorways to loop and lace through the landscape, connecting each town to all the others, blurring them into a sprawling mass of units with no easy means of getting from one to the other on foot”.

And while Elkin is writing about America, it’s true to say that many areas in the UK are similarly homogenous and difficult to live in if you don’t have a car.

And she wonders what this means for women:

“I became suspicious of an entirely vehicle-based culture: a culture that does not walk is bad for women. It makes a kind of authoritarian sense: a woman who doesn’t wonder – what it all adds up to, what her needs are, if they’re being met – won’t wander off from the family”.

And it makes me think of all the ways in which walking alone as a woman is viewed as a dangerous occupation (and sometimes can be actually dangerous) – I think of the tales of Charles Dickens or Handel prowling the streets of London while composing a book or indeed the whole of The Messiah, while the only women out and about would have been the unhoused or those who needed to be out to make a living. Yet Elkin gives us some fine examples of women who did it anyway. Their stories are different, but each one is fascinating; Georges Sand observing the Parisian upheavals of the 19th Century, Sophie Calle following strangers through the streets of Venice, or my personal favourite, Martha Gellhorn in Madrid, observing the Spanish Civil War which was going on just down the street from where she was living. When we talk about ‘the flâneur’ we picture a man, probably a dandy, probably with a walking stick and a book in his pocket, possibly with a monocle (or maybe that’s my fantasy). We see him sitting in a café, probably in Paris, leading forth or scribbling in a notebook. But all the time there were women walking, and noticing, and exploring the city.

There is so much of interest in this book. I can’t wait to strap on my walking boots and get out there, to remind myself of why I love London so much. I can’t do better than finish with Elkin’s statement about walking in the city. You might almost call it a manifesto.

“Let me walk. Let me go at my own pace. Let me feel life as it moves through me and around me. Give me drama. Give me unexpected curvilinear corners. Give me unsettling churches and beautiful storefronts and parks I can lie down in. 

The city turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging. The city is life itself.”