Why has it taken me so many years to discover the joy of audiobooks? I listen in those intervals of time when my hands are more occupied than my brain.
Mozart’s Starling
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.
This fascinating book explores the story of a starling that Mozart kept as a pet and how it influenced his music. It’s part memoir, part natural history, and part meditation on creativity and companionship. A wonderful read if you’re curious about the intersections between art and the natural world.
Currently I’m listening to Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall, which is a totally fascinating and occasionally very funny look at the origins of words used over time to talk about women’s bodies, experiences and lives.
Here's a poem by Wendell Berry that I love:
The wish to be generous
All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
Wendell Berry
Here’s a song by June Tabor – “A Place Called England” – that always makes me homesick for my native country, much though I love my adopted one. The algorithm (or I guess copyright rules) won’t allow me to embed the video, but do treat yourself to a listen on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV6xiU4XyoM
This short film made me laugh quite a lot:
More things I love – language and history.
I can’t resist these two versions of well known songs in languages that not many of us speak these days.
I grew up in Hull, Yorkshire, where the Watersons come from, and I used to go to the folk club above a pub called The Old Blue Bell. There is a scene in this 1965 documentary about the Watersons, my favourite traditional folk singers, showing them singing in that room. I might be in there somewhere, though I was a bit too young really!
I just finished listening to this audiobook. It’s a wonderful outline of the travellers to Canterbury in Chaucer’s work.
Jenny Doughty, Poet 