I Am a Polar Bear

The original plan was to have one Travel Library a week in Blogmas and then I spoiled that by deciding – quite foolishly – to have the entire last week be my trip to Germany (oh, please tell me I can write five new posts in that tiny space of time!). So three Travel Libraries, not four. The trouble is, I particularly disliked the last one. After spending several days writing, deleting, rewriting (and then losing the good version by not saving it in time!) I was half-tempted to simply replace it with this one – but during possibly the busiest time of my life, could I really just bin the time I’d spent reading the book and then trying to write the post? So this is a bonus extra Travel Library, a little sweetness after the bitter of the last. This is Nightwalking by John Lewis-Stempel.

I liked this one a lot!

It’s another of these mindfulness-cross-nature books but this is how you do it right – or rather, this is how I personally like it done. It’s 95% nature and only about 5% mindfulness whereas Wintering leaned very heavily in the opposite direction. It’s four walks in the vicinity of Lewis-Stempel’s Herefordshire farm, at night, a walk per season. It’s a pretty short book anyway – I can’t find the wordcount but it’s 104 pages, which is well under half of Wintering’s pagecount of 276. I read them both through the Kindle app so it’s all the same for me. There’s an introduction, a poem to introduce each season, a story of the walk and then some highlights of the season before the next season begins. I do skip over the poetry – I’m so not into poetry that I can’t even bring myself to read these ones, which have presumably been selected carefully to fit their places and set the scene and all that – but I enjoyed the walks and the nature notes.

This is lyrical. This is poetic. Several times I had to stop and re-read the last few lines to figure out if it was actually poetry in disguise. It’s not. Your opinion might be that it’s a bit purple prose. Certainly wherever an adjective or a long word can be jammed in, it has been. But it works for me. It’s pretty, it’s functional, it’s descriptive and in certain moments, it’s funny. I highlighted one sentence in winter, where the author and his dog (if he doesn’t take the dog, he looks a bit threatening walking around the countryside in the dark) spot a badger. He’s wearing smelly farm clothes; the dog has rolled in fox poo. They freeze and the badger doesn’t notice them, or isn’t bothered about them.

She, being a Labrador, was bribed to mute immobility by a biscuit

I also enjoyed one of the winter notes, about why he’s gone out for a walk this particular cold, dark night:

It’s late, and I have gone for a moon-time walk around the fields, for the solitude of it, because no one comes crowding you with DEFRA forms to fill in.

It’s very easy to romanticise being a farmer – living off the land, being surrounded by animals, salt of the earth, honest day’s work and all that – but farming is incredibly hard work and it’s the opposite of lucrative, and like he says, there’s so much admin! A Guide leader I used to know had eight sheep that she kept on her sister’s farm. A couple of times a week, they’d move those sheep into the field opposite for some variety and to give the field a few days to recover (Is that why? I’ve never farmed, but there had to be a good reason for it) and every single time those sheep moved across the lane, a form had to be filled in accounting for every last sheep. So I chuckled a little at those DEFRA forms.

It’s only flashes of humour. This isn’t a comedy book. It’s about being outdoors. It’s about nature. It’s about solitude and quiet. But it also doesn’t drown under the weight of its own importance or seriousness.

In the winter, I, too, walk in the dark. But my dark is the dark of town: streetlights, headlights, Christmas lights, dogwalkers with (utterly unnecessary) torches. I’d love to walk occasionally in real dark but unless you’re a rural farmer or a Professional Adventurer, that’s a bit scary for most people, especially doing it alone. It’s why I still haven’t climbed the glowworm hill – I don’t want to deliberately go out to a dark place on my own. So I walk vicariously through Nightwalking.

There are creatures in the night, be that the frosty night of winter or the twilighty night of summer. Foxes and badgers out and about, owls screeching or hooting or just gliding around on silent wings. Stars. The moon. It’s all very beautiful and it doesn’t get mawkish or over-the-top or too romantic. I don’t want to pin that down to gender differences but a labrador-owning, midnight-striding man is going to see the world and the night differently to – well, most of the nature writing I’ve seen from women is more personal, more mindful, more… feminine. This is not soft or introspective. It’s insightful and it’s packed with knowledge about nature and a connection to the outdoors but… oh, I really don’t want to say it’s a more masculine approach. Maybe it’s simply that it isn’t quivering with agonised self-awareness. Which isn’t an entirely female trait, by a long way. I’m explaining this badly. OK. It’s about the outdoors, not about the author and I’m just thinking about and comparing it to Wintering because I only finished that yesterday. Nothing to do with male vs female. It’s just about the two books I’ve read most recently. Glad to clear that up.

Given that it is kind of poetic and thick with adjectives, it would be easy to assume this isn’t my thing. But it really is. I think it’s my favourite of the four Blogmas Travel Library books. I’ll definitely be pulling it out a few more times next year, re-reading the walks as the seasons change. And I’m going to pick a walk, do it four times in 2023 and maybe have a go at writing my own version of this book – or at least a matching set of seasonal blog posts.