Doc Sarah Lonsdale
@sarahjlonsdale
Books, history & nature. Politics, 48%. Writer, Lecturer, History of journalism City University. New book, Wildly Different, about women and the wild is out in the wild! Financial Times "Best Books" Summer 2025 Wrestling another one Never use AI
I see a newt and a turtle racing each other. I also see sublime brush strokes, maybe Van Gogh? trying out a new colour palette
Who needs psychedelics when you've got echinacea heads and Spanish tiles,
Who would like to see a baby field vole? One of the many harvest refugees currently sheltering in the garden.
Mackerel skies always remind me of my dad who told 7-year-old me they were a flock of sheep with no legs.
Just remember the Daily Mail has always treated its readers with contempt (article 19 February 1953, about 2 years after the links between smoking and lung cancer had been established).
Very very very happy and proud to be part of more than 200 events at this year's Wigtown Book Festival. Browse here for talks, readings, performances and more Wigtown Book Festival | Literary festival and events through the year share.google/h6Zf3fyT0hCp...
The way up to the old library. Every stair creaks with the memories of scholars' feet, eagerly seeking knowledge and enlightenment.
We can learn something about trolling 1917-style. If someone on a public platform says they haven't eaten cormorant, don't kneejerk sneer and call them a loser, but tell them what they taste like and that they are as plentiful as sparrow.
Butterflies (think these are Meadow Brown?), absolutely love Marjoram flowers
Historian and economist R H Tawney on the problems of the Labour Party in 1932. Could be written of Starmer's mistakes today, and why Burnham needs to govern with more conviction: "The Labour Party is hesitant in action because divided in mind. It frets out of office and stumbles in it.."
I'm only about a third of the way through this big, brilliant book but already I don't want it to end. The world Desai creates is so compelling and whole, it's like stepping into a complete universe. Not that the world she creates is perfect for the characters in it. Far from it. /1
A little bit heartbreaking to see the Rosebay Willowherb in flower. For me it's the moment we move from mid- to high summer, and behind the hazy, humming heat, there's the relentless ticking clock...
Quiet dusky lavender field at the end of a difficult day. The perfume is so calming and restorative I feel renewed
One day I'll find a use for all the broken glasses' legs I've been keeping.
Her full map was accepted by the American Geographical Society in 1906. Mina is one of the five women in my book Wildly Different, now out in paperback! Manchester University Press - Wildly different share.google/PH9UWoOPE9q3...
Leonidas Hubbard died of hunger in 1903 in his attempt to map the source of the Naskaupi River. Mina took up his work but was treated with contempt and ridicule for trying to carry out men's work, and with four First Nation guides. This is from the front page of the New York Times...all lies /
Here she is walking the Labrador trail. She was sublimely receptive to the beauty of the wild, recording in her diary how she rejoiced in the sense of littleness that overcame her. She might have been terrified. The water froze in her cup each morning and the lakes she washed in were already icy /
The close up above shows how near he was to the flour cache that might have saved him. Mina's map also shows the presence of First Nations in a country that white Canadians liked to see as empty wilderness. She recorded canoe portage routes, fishing weirs, food stores and First Nation settlements/
Since it's National Map Reading week, I would like to tell you about Mina Hubbard and the map of north east Labrador that she made in 1906. It's not just of the rivers, lakes, and mountains she journeyed through during the brief, thawed summer of 1905. It's also a love story to her dead husband 1/5
Current mood: (what you can't see in this image is the laptop holding a part-finished book chapter on tabloid journalism for which the deadline is galloping towards me like a racehorse)
Harvesting has begun in the fields around me. The open window brings a breath of warm, wheaty evening air, sweet and scented with grass as if a giant horse is standing outside and gently exhaling
Beautiful, crazy lavender scenting the path and feeding the bees
Looks like you can find it in Sainsbury's for £3.10 or Waitrose for, err £3.80
Re-reading Michael Frayn's The Tin Men (1965) about the consequences of a machine that automates news writing and production, is REALLY SPOOKY in this current age of AI.
Hey, brand new Cambridge South Station, you're beautiful, more like an art gallery in Scandinavia than a railway station. But your announcements are waaaay too loud.