In the ‘Eddy’ entitled ‘Flow’ the author is writing mostly about finding her mojo, getting into the zone, when it comes to kayaking but here she is on writing, first citing the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who published his Flow Theory in 1975, “describing a state of mind exemplified by trained and motivated individuals performing complex, challenging tasks. In a flow state, body and mind are wholly absorbed, time appears to slow down, obstacles seem manageable, stress and anxiety are virtually non-existent … Sometimes when writing – those rare days when four or five thousand words just seem to run out of my fingers …” I know this feeling, if it is a feeling, exactly and it is wonderful. Writing has always come fairly easily and naturally to me, but now, although sometimes still ‘pre-written’ in my head, words really do flow and there is very little need for subsequent revision (in my opinion at least). Business e-mails are different and often need careful sculpting but otherwise, with the exception of just one e-mail correspondent, a friend, where my words are very carefully chosen and edited (I am not sure why this applies to that friend alone, possibly it comes from respect) I do not find the need to go back and revise very often, other than to check for typos of course.
Amy-Jane Beer is of course firmly on the side of the angels when it comes to big agriculture, the water companies, government and regulators when in terms of what is happening to our land and rivers today through grouse shooting, poultry and other farming, sewage pollution and all the rest, citing Nick Hayes (on trespass), Guy Shrubsole, Chris Packham and George Monbiot. Most of this I have covered elsewhere in my books and this blog. I had not hear of Rachel Salvidge however. She is the founder of Watershed, a fine example of hugely important public interest investigative journalism, concentrating on threats to “rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands, oceans and the wildlife they support”, and in particular on “forever” chemicals, the widespread contamination of our wildlife with PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are synthetic, and also pollute our rivers and farmland. We have been misled about them and little is really known about long-term toxic effects. There is a shocking map here:
The Watershed Pollution Map – Watershed Investigations
It shows the presence of PFAS in μg/kg (micrograms per kilogram) in birds, fish, foxes and aquatic mammals across the country.
On trespass, Amy-Jane points out that if you travel on or swim in 97% of waterways in England without permission, you will be trespassing. On her British Canoeing licence she continues, “I was about to learn that this official looking piece of paper gave me a right to paddle on less than 3 per cent of English rivers. Large, flat ones mainly, plus tidal waters. Even a few months into the sport I knew there wasn’t a great deal of white water in such places. Which begged the question, what was the point in having a licence at all? … Little by little, like so many others, we lost faith in the ability of the BCU, or British Canoeing as it became, to ever get a breakthrough because the landowning and angling lobbies were never serious about giving up control and these are people with friends in high places – indeed many large riparian landowners sit in Parliament.”
Riparian law is famously complex. It seems beyond belief that the owner of land through which a river passes not only owns the riverbank and the bed but can also lay claim to the water itself. Which is manifestly a nonsense. As I have suggested myself and she has experienced, campaigning in favour of the Right to Roam on social media can unleash a torrent of “vitriolic, patronising, gaslighting responses.” Of course in Scotland where there is a right to roam, there are safeguards in place which render the suggestion that people will be trampling all over each other’s back gardens absurd.
She also takes on those anglers who complain about otters, “without bothering to understand that otters only live where there are a lot of fish, and, as top predators, are never going to become abundant enough to threaten fish stocks. They don’t want to do the work of understanding ecology. And they are hostile to sharing the river with anything other than fish.” Enough, she says, of the white male patriarchy which polices the countryside.
Around 90% of the 200 to 260 chalk streams in the world (depending on how they are counted) are in England. Due to abstraction two thirds of them ran dry in 2019 and Ofwat was as ineffective as ever.
In the chapter ‘Ouroboros’, a snake eating its own tail, see here:
Index, A History of the, Part II – Animal Wild
she brilliantly describes the Severn Bore*, a river turning on itself in a way I had not imagined. She also succinctly explains spring and neap tides, yet another of those things which I thought I more or less understood but didn’t. They occur when solar gravity most exerts its influence with or against lunar gravity. Spring tides are the greater, smaller tides are neap.
*Predictive timetables can be found on line, for example here:
River Severn bore predictions for 2025
The strength of the bore depends on weather conditions, wind direction, barometric pressure and other factors. 2025 does not look to be a dramatic year with the vast majority of bores rated small or medium, none are very large and large may only occur on March 31st. Three months will have “no good bores”. Times are approximate. The best viewing locations are provided (apparently they can get very crowded): Minsterworth, Stonebench and Over Bridge. We are reminded to be careful where we might witness the bore from: it can be dangerous.
Her turns of phrase are so beguilingly lyrical, for example “the outrageous blaring yellow of marsh marigold”, “smirking cormorant” (I went to my own photographs and can see just what she means) and there are more enchanting words new to me: “staithe”, used in the north and east of England, a landing stage for cargo boats to load and unload, and “smeuse”, a hole or gap in vegetation made by the passing of animals. Also “cist graves”, prehistoric burial places or coffins made of stone or a hollowed-out tree.
Wales. I love Wales, it’s people and the Welsh accent. Amy-Jane Beer delves into the mythology, in particular the The Book of Taliesyn. In Welsh instruments are not played but made to sing. She also gives us the Welsh word hiraeth: “a sort of bittersweeet longing for a place which came into common use in the nineteenth century when people were forced from their lands …”
I have thought seriously about moving to Wales, but whilst I have always found the Welsh supremely welcoming to visitors, I would be a little wary of my reception as a permanent incomer from across the Severn. The Welsh language has known periods of cruel suppression. I was interested to learn that there are thought to be critical thresholds for language use: 40% becomes non-functional, 70% gives viability. The author’s contact is insightful folk singer Owen Shiers who devotedly endeavours to revive old stories and songs: “We’re seduced into this progress narrative, and it’s relentless. The songs and the stories remind us about things that have always mattered.” But his nationalism is not aggressive or even defensive, rather “open hearted, outward facing and vulnerable.”
Amy-Jane goes on sublime digressions through the book, whether on railways or inundation myths, this one though is my own. One of Deep Purple’s early albums was Book of Taliesyn. 1970s ‘prog rock’ was no stranger to such things, in many cases with no little pretension (think Spinal Tap). Apart from the album cover there’s not much of a connection. They probably just thought it sounded interesting. Their guitar wizard, Ritchie Blackmore, had and maintains a strong interest in the mediaeval, and baroque and classical music, as evidenced in his reincarnation as the primarily folk band Blackmore’s Night. Led Zeppelin, whilst also lapsing into self-indulgence and pretension at times, were inspired by Welsh mythology, Norse too, and Tolkien. Led Zeppelin III in particular. There’s a good account of it here:
Led Zeppelin’s Welsh, English, And Norse Influences
Amusingly (Ritchie Blackmore’s) Rainbow’s original singer, Ronnie James Dio brought with him a band called Elf, although Tolkien’s elves were sylph-like, not diminutive. I once had a faux correspondence with a friend whose musical tastes differed widely from mine but here is a heavily edited summary (it was not entirely in the best taste), extolling and mocking the virtues of prog rock clichés.
I was a reader of Sounds weekly, not NME (New Musical Express), although the latter featured Julie Burchill – but also the dreadful Tony Parsons, much parodied in Private Eye. I loved Purple, Zep, Whitesnake and all the other Purple offshoots, Thin Lizzy (especially), UFO, Sabbath, and I’ll admit to Yes. The album title Tales of Topographic Oceans surely doesn’t mean anything though, and I was and am never sure about Rick Wakeman. ELP were a step too far down pretension road for me, as were Genesis. My tastes have always been pretty eclectic: a certain kind of soul music, especially Marvin Gaye, but not Stevie Wonder, nothing too saccharine (by the way, someone at Diana Ross’ label said “The trouble with her is she thinks she’s the best singer in the world. She’s not even the best singer in The Supremes.”), blues and my great passion, reggae (although those did not come until later). To this day I think the Stones are magnificent. Not Bowie, not Costello. I liked Dire Straits but they do not seem to have dated well. And definitely not plagiarist Paul Weller and absolutely not Paul McCartney. These are some of the bits intended to amuse:
Clothing. Never had an afghan but always did covet one and still secretly do. Thin Lizzy/Whitesnake uniform was simple and unequivocal. Jeans and a denim jacket, matching of course. And badges. Lots of badges. Sufficient so that when you were head banging they would rattle. I still have most of them. Drink? Only bitter. Pints. Band clothing – loon pants obviously preferred, chest hair revealing tops, long hair it goes without saying, make-up perfectly acceptable, stacked boots, black leather (see Judas Priest, occasionally a great band, saw them live at least twice, lead singer once rode on stage on a motorbike brandishing a whip – someone grabbed the other end of it and pulled him into the audience), denim. T-shirts with Gothic lettering (acceptable both on and off stage). And strange umlauts over consonants which makes no sense.
Lyrics – devil worship basically, any references to Nordic sagas, being the boys, being the wild one, hopeless, unrequited love, fire, hellfire, devil women, the highway, the lonely road, mighty floods and rivers, not being able to let her go, Tolkien (anything), Kubla Khan, wizards, witches, wolves, mountains, mountain kings, palaces on the mountain, silver mountains, Middle Ages (anything at all), space the final frontier, being really quite a tough guy, possibly with a switchblade at a push, being blind, wishing you were blind (never liked that in a song, even from the great Etta James/RubyTurner), being a child in time, not being a child in time, being a child out of time, being a time out of child. Welshness quite good. Not Scottish. Irish good. Birmingham extremely good. Hell and the highway to it. Money. Shaking your moneymaker. Precious metals (a big theme that one), hammers, no other tools I can think of, unless you count levers (Whitesnake actual lyric: “I’m gonna stab your beaver/With my lever”). Elves, especially Elven kings. And queens. Royalty generally in fact. Swords of course, and shields of various kinds. Green, silver, red, gold, black, mighty, you name it. Lots of swords, lots of shields.
Transport – cars, trains, planes. Cars are all red and fast and loud. Trains are long. Sometimes slow (occasionally very fast, never in between). Often black. Planes are what you regretfully leave on. No buses, taxis or bicycles or anything like that. Motorbikes sort of, but a kind of sub-genre which never really worked for me.
NWOBHM. New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Not all bad, but mostly. Quite like Saxon (“747 coming down in the night/Scandinavia 101/For God’s sake get your ground lights on”, which is pretty moving and powerful stuff).
Journalism. Only one contender, the master of hyperbole and ridiculous floridity, the late, great Geoff Barton. Sounds lynchpin of course. Hair etc. Long of course as previously stated, but it was acceptable to be bald (bass players only obviously, although perhaps the occasional drummer, definitely not up the front). If, and only if, you sported a long and preferably straggly and eccentric beard. Not moustaches (except Tony Iommi).
To end this part of the review, it strikes me often that Amy- Jane Beer really notices things and then describes them beautifully: “The rain has eased and we are climbing a steep slope among small, lichen-covered oaks and hollies heavy with fruit. Droplets of water suspended from the berries are gleaming and when I look closely I can see the whole valley upside down in each one.” I will be looking for such reflections from now on.
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