Fed by Birds

The copy of this children’s book on Iceland, Lapland and Greenland which I picked up somewhere or other was won by its first owner for Early Morning Sunday School Attendance in 1884. It was published by the Wesleyan Sunday School Union, and the Wesleyan approach seems to have been a gentle and kindly one, using the stories of harsh Northern lives to remind children to “think with warm interest and sympathy of those who have fewer advantages”. It has some interesting insights into Arctic life: after a black bear hunt in Lapland, the bear is taken home on a sledge “and the reindeer that has drawn it is actually so indulged as to be allowed a holiday all the rest of that year”. It also has some beautiful illustrations.

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Anyone about to visit England for the first time will be glad to find that we still like to spend our weekends in much the same way as in these photographs from the English Heritage site:

Sleeping it off

Visiting miniature villages

Sailing tiny boats

Queueing up to stare at a wet dog

Searching through cardboard boxes

and angry donkey riding

There’s a lot of this sort of thing as well:

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I came across this little sound piece called IF on the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Australian sound artist Sherre DeLys takes us into the delightful world of Andrew, an imaginative boy at the Westmead Children's Hospital, as he speculates on scuttlefish, crocodiles and problems with drawing. Like a lot of the work on Radiolab, the result is somewhere between music and speech – and short but extremely sweet.

You can hear more of Sherre DeLys’s work at Ubuweb.

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On a rainy afternoon visit the Micropolitan Museum to find revealed the most amazing things:

Waterfleas and ghost shrimps

Algae

Forams - small marine creatures that build houses from chalk

Radiolaria - protozoa that create miniscule skeletons of glass

Very art deco diatoms

and ectoprots, which look as good as they sound:

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Whether he’s advertising hotels:

socks:

cigarettes:

a holiday in the Black Forest:

Or just generally looking around:

He had a great look, too:

All these and more can be found at the Ronald Searle Tribute Blog.

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Brownsea Island in its present incarnation couldn't be more of a haven for innocent English jollity, being a National Trust nature reserve, scout camp, sometime holiday home for John Lewis employees, and written about by Enid Blyton. The reason it was known for years as Mystery Island, despite being close to a very popular and prosperous bit of Dorset, is due to the efforts of the ‘Demon of Brownsea’, Mary Bonham Christie, a recluse who drove the inhabitants from the island and let it turn into wilderness for 30 years. She refused to allow even her own family to land without permission, and kept gamekeepers constantly roaming to keep the curious locals out (although the more daring ones still managed to sneak ashore now and again).

The peculiar Mrs Bonham Christie is thought to haunt the castle since her death in 1961, and was supposedly captured in a photograph here.

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