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A Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes from a Small Planet
Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain.
'If you’ve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.' Mail On Sunday, Books of the Year
For seventeen years, as part of his daily writerly routine, the author and naturalist Mark Cocker has taken a two-mile walk down to the river from his cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. Over the course of those 10,000 daily paces he has learnt the art of patience to observe a butterfly, a bird, flower, bee, deer, otter or fly and to take pleasure in all the other inhabitants of his parish, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
In turn these encounters have then been converted into literary epiphanies that are now a widely celebrated part of his work. In A Claxton Diary he has gathered some of the finest short essays that he has ever written on wildlife. They range over almost everything he can see, touch or smell, from the minute to the cosmic, from a strange micromoth called yellow-barred longhorn to that fiercest of winter storms the so-called ‘Beast from the East’.
From the marvellous to the macabre, Cocker tries to capture nature without flinching and in its entirety. In so doing he provides us with a vision of an English country parish that for intimacy and precise detail is comparable with Gilbert White’s diary on Selbourne. Above all he reminds us that we are all just members of one miraculous family, fashioned from sunlight and the dust from old stars.
'If you’ve never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.' Mail On Sunday, Books of the Year
For seventeen years, as part of his daily writerly routine, the author and naturalist Mark Cocker has taken a two-mile walk down to the river from his cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. Over the course of those 10,000 daily paces he has learnt the art of patience to observe a butterfly, a bird, flower, bee, deer, otter or fly and to take pleasure in all the other inhabitants of his parish, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
In turn these encounters have then been converted into literary epiphanies that are now a widely celebrated part of his work. In A Claxton Diary he has gathered some of the finest short essays that he has ever written on wildlife. They range over almost everything he can see, touch or smell, from the minute to the cosmic, from a strange micromoth called yellow-barred longhorn to that fiercest of winter storms the so-called ‘Beast from the East’.
From the marvellous to the macabre, Cocker tries to capture nature without flinching and in its entirety. In so doing he provides us with a vision of an English country parish that for intimacy and precise detail is comparable with Gilbert White’s diary on Selbourne. Above all he reminds us that we are all just members of one miraculous family, fashioned from sunlight and the dust from old stars.
- GenresNatureNatural History
224 pages, Paperback
Published July 16, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 12, 2019
Every day possible, Mark Cocker has taken a walk from his home alongside the Norfolk Broads National Park, down to the river near his home. These two-mile walks get him outside in the natural world and away from any screens or other distractions. It also gives him time to see the minute daily changes that happen, the imperceptible way that a tree changes from skeletal branches to the first flush of leaves, glimpsing the first of the spring flowers, spotting the first of the butterflies and noticing the arrival of the migrants after their long journeys. These are the things that flit through his vision and are then written about.
We know that at some level there is no such thing as season or month or week or even a day. There is just the liquid passage of time flowing across our lives that we chop and segment with these invented names to give it all clarity and structure.
He has distilled these walks into a series of columns that first were published in the Guardian and have now appeared here in a month by month diary. They are reproduced in day order, so the years jump around, but for me, that adds to the charm. You have the sense that these columns show the way that the world is changing too. His subjects vary from badgers to owls, to bees and flowers, as well as trees, climate, weather, bees, deer, fungi, frogs, oh, and bees again.
He doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of life; that the hedgerow full of juvenile birds are more than likely to be the next meal for the sparrow hawk that he has just seen, the spiders catching and wrapping wasps and bumblebees and the swifts cutting through the sky eating the insects that are never going to get out of the way in time. But this is about the beauty of his regular haunts too, seeing the first flush of wildflowers, hearing the dawn chorus and the smell of summer rain. He does occasionally venture further afield and there are columns from Greece, Scotland and elsewhere in Norfolk.
This is another wonderful book by Cocker. He has been writing about the natural world for the past fifty years and while he has seen some of the world great creatures, he gets as much pleasure from the exotica that we can find around us if we care to look for it. It is a worthy continuation to his first, Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet, which I can also highly recommend along with this.
We know that at some level there is no such thing as season or month or week or even a day. There is just the liquid passage of time flowing across our lives that we chop and segment with these invented names to give it all clarity and structure.
He has distilled these walks into a series of columns that first were published in the Guardian and have now appeared here in a month by month diary. They are reproduced in day order, so the years jump around, but for me, that adds to the charm. You have the sense that these columns show the way that the world is changing too. His subjects vary from badgers to owls, to bees and flowers, as well as trees, climate, weather, bees, deer, fungi, frogs, oh, and bees again.
He doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of life; that the hedgerow full of juvenile birds are more than likely to be the next meal for the sparrow hawk that he has just seen, the spiders catching and wrapping wasps and bumblebees and the swifts cutting through the sky eating the insects that are never going to get out of the way in time. But this is about the beauty of his regular haunts too, seeing the first flush of wildflowers, hearing the dawn chorus and the smell of summer rain. He does occasionally venture further afield and there are columns from Greece, Scotland and elsewhere in Norfolk.
This is another wonderful book by Cocker. He has been writing about the natural world for the past fifty years and while he has seen some of the world great creatures, he gets as much pleasure from the exotica that we can find around us if we care to look for it. It is a worthy continuation to his first, Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet, which I can also highly recommend along with this.
December 3, 2022
Reliably beautiful nature writing from one of the best.
2 February 2016
Owl sounds are a language purified of all visual nuance and gesture. They are intense on the ear no impenetrable to our understanding and like a flash of lightning in the night storm they manage paradoxically to make the darkness clearer but more unfathomable.
17 February 2014
The Covid roost at Buckenham Carrs is an extraordinary phenomenon. Every night from October to February……a sweep of winter trees foliated with birds and softened by the velvet darkness of their voices.
2 February 2016
Owl sounds are a language purified of all visual nuance and gesture. They are intense on the ear no impenetrable to our understanding and like a flash of lightning in the night storm they manage paradoxically to make the darkness clearer but more unfathomable.
17 February 2014
The Covid roost at Buckenham Carrs is an extraordinary phenomenon. Every night from October to February……a sweep of winter trees foliated with birds and softened by the velvet darkness of their voices.
September 9, 2021
Subtitled Further Field Notes from a Small Planet, this book contains essays about nature in the form of diary entries, almost entirely written about the area of Claxton in Norfolk where the author lives. The diaries are arranged month by month, mixing up observations from different years but following the chronology of each month.
In his introduction, Cocker discusses whether his nature writing engages enough with people and quotes writers who insist that nature writing is only worthwhile nowadays if it foregrounds the human experience. While I agree that we cannot separate ourselves from nature, we are not and should not be the focus when we look at nature. Too much modern nature writing in my opinion focuses on the human to the detriment of the natural. We need more writers like Cocker, who can look closely at nature and value it for itself.
And for all that he puts nature at the centre of his writing, Cocker is not indifferent to the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. He devotes time to considering the value we give to human endeavour vs that we give to nature, in his comments about the situation in the 1980s when politicians were giving tax breaks to foresters to cover Scotland's Flow Country in conifer plantations, while ignoring that the Flow country contains the world's largest portion of valuable peat bog habitat.
He also analyses how our relationship to honeybees can be detrimental to nature's balance:
"..it is depressing that honey bees get almost all the attention.... for the incredibly important gift of pollination. In truth, those (pollination) services .... are performed by hundreds if not thousands of insect species in the UK alone. There are for example more than 250 bee species in this country."
But what Cocker is best at is his chronicling the changing seasons, his close observation and careful description of the nature he sees, for example describing the song of the wren as: "the workman trill of wrens as they hammered and drilled those invincible phrases into the enfolded gloom."
In his introduction, Cocker discusses whether his nature writing engages enough with people and quotes writers who insist that nature writing is only worthwhile nowadays if it foregrounds the human experience. While I agree that we cannot separate ourselves from nature, we are not and should not be the focus when we look at nature. Too much modern nature writing in my opinion focuses on the human to the detriment of the natural. We need more writers like Cocker, who can look closely at nature and value it for itself.
And for all that he puts nature at the centre of his writing, Cocker is not indifferent to the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. He devotes time to considering the value we give to human endeavour vs that we give to nature, in his comments about the situation in the 1980s when politicians were giving tax breaks to foresters to cover Scotland's Flow Country in conifer plantations, while ignoring that the Flow country contains the world's largest portion of valuable peat bog habitat.
He also analyses how our relationship to honeybees can be detrimental to nature's balance:
"..it is depressing that honey bees get almost all the attention.... for the incredibly important gift of pollination. In truth, those (pollination) services .... are performed by hundreds if not thousands of insect species in the UK alone. There are for example more than 250 bee species in this country."
But what Cocker is best at is his chronicling the changing seasons, his close observation and careful description of the nature he sees, for example describing the song of the wren as: "the workman trill of wrens as they hammered and drilled those invincible phrases into the enfolded gloom."
January 23, 2020
(2019) Excellent book - better even than the first Claxton Field Notes. Mark Cocker is now a favourite nature writer of mine. He seems to feel he is a part of nature, rather than a human creature who is above, outside, and better than the rest of nature. His musings also add much to the book.
June 25, 2021
I was pleased to find this in stock in our local public library, after reading favourable reviews of this author. Very enjoyable natural history writing, mainly based round his Norfolk home on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. (For readers outside the U.K., this is a remarkable historical wetlands habitat, well worth reading about and visiting.) Mark Cocker follows the usual diary format, from January to December, and often the essays have previously appeared in ‘The Guardian’ as part of their ‘Country Diary’ series.
Cocker uses the particular to comment upon the more general; for example, the very last essay, written December 2015, draws upon his observation of a swarm of insects in his garden, commonly known as ‘winter gnats’. These humble and often unobserved insects lead him to finish
‘Collectively flies and their like drive the natural order of life. In transmuted form they are the salmon’s leap, the otter’s splash and the sparrowhawk’s dive but also the song thrush song from our holly tops once April comes.’
We do well to remember the pyramid of life, and how vulnerable we are at its apex, and how dependant on the unobserved forms of life that form its basis.
Cocker uses the particular to comment upon the more general; for example, the very last essay, written December 2015, draws upon his observation of a swarm of insects in his garden, commonly known as ‘winter gnats’. These humble and often unobserved insects lead him to finish
‘Collectively flies and their like drive the natural order of life. In transmuted form they are the salmon’s leap, the otter’s splash and the sparrowhawk’s dive but also the song thrush song from our holly tops once April comes.’
We do well to remember the pyramid of life, and how vulnerable we are at its apex, and how dependant on the unobserved forms of life that form its basis.
May 3, 2021
Mark anticipates some of the criticisms that might be levelled against this book, and his work in general, in the introduction. Of the three points he mentions the one which is most relevant is the point about repetition. Whilst he says he makes no apologies for this, the fact that the daily entries are pieces that have previously been self-contained newspaper / magazine articles does become a bit of an issue in the end, as the same points get made.
The writing is often excellent. If you have already read the first Claxton book though it may feel like more of the same, other reviewers have said the writing is better but I am not certain it is. From making me revisit how I perceive hares and flying flamingos to highlighting the interesting and under-appreciated writings of Arthur Patterson there is however much to enjoy.
The writing is often excellent. If you have already read the first Claxton book though it may feel like more of the same, other reviewers have said the writing is better but I am not certain it is. From making me revisit how I perceive hares and flying flamingos to highlighting the interesting and under-appreciated writings of Arthur Patterson there is however much to enjoy.
September 7, 2021
I bought this thinking it was ‘Clayton: Field Notes from a small Planet’
But it’s some kind of sequel to that. It’s ok. A diary of the year, culled from his articles. Some days are better than others. Curious as to whether the original culled all the best pieces, and this one was a ‘why not just throw the rest in?’
Not as good as Crow Country.
But it’s some kind of sequel to that. It’s ok. A diary of the year, culled from his articles. Some days are better than others. Curious as to whether the original culled all the best pieces, and this one was a ‘why not just throw the rest in?’
Not as good as Crow Country.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews