H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Reading this book was a trudge though the stagnant ditches of Cambridge, ditches which for me are rich with memory, but also the stinking and hard to scrub off sludge of paths travelled and untravelled.

As a child in Cambridge my brother and I waded waist deep in the ooze of a backwater of the Cam at Grantchester hunting fish, and one autumn I tempted my brother with the conkers in the ditch beside Parker's Piece and then pushed him in to fetch them.

This was the first book I have read on a Kindle, and as hoped it enabled me to read without glasses and, perhaps more importantly, enabled me to go cold turkey on my raging YouTube Shorts addiction.

She reveals T H White as a sadist and homosexual, though it is claimed to be a bias brought to his life by his biographer as he did have relationships with women and is not known to have consumated his fantasies. One of the memorable, and arguably gratuitous episodes in The Once and Future King is the description of boys beating a donkey trapped in a dance of pain.

I know something of hunting with a pet, as I had a hob ferret at school and a jill when I got my first house, so I can understand the motivation to some extent, however a hawk must be hunted, for its sake rather than for the pot.

She does not mention As the falcon her bells by Phillip Glasier though she seems to have worked at the Falconry Centre he founded. I have my step father's copy of As the falcon her bells and keeping a snowy owl remains a fantasy of mine.

Her nature writing is good, and her evocation of the flint uplands works well.

The book starts to fall apart at the end, no real comments on the anti-depressants she was given, and a gratuious trip to North America remind her that commmunity is important, and the book fizzled out.

I rang my farmer friend and we agreed about the disconnect from experience engendered by reading, his family missing things on car journeys because they were reading. In an extrordinary coup of synchronicity he said after somewhile "I have a goshawk here, in a crate". It had got tangled in the chicken netting and he was going to release it, some miles away.