#80: Wilding at Knepp

Wilding is Isabella Tree’s account of how she and her husband Charlie Burrell gave their 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm back to nature. They started in 2001, initially since they could not make traditional farming pay, but discovered there was government funding for conservation. The subsequent transformation of the land has made Knepp one of the most important spaces for wildlife in Britain.

The book mixes delightful observation of the ever-changing activity of animals, plants, soil and insects, with information about the various species, as well as detailing the couple’s efforts wrestling with various bureaucracies to convince government of the importance of the project.

Purple emperors

Knepp is the site of the largest breeding population of purple emperor butterflies, for example, which, explains Tree, was always thought to prefer woods, because woodland was the only habitat humans had left to it. On the evidence of its behaviour at Knepp, it prefers the sallow, a type of willow – itself given space at Knepp by patches of earth thrown up by the rootling of pigs which were introduced in lieu of the wild boar which would have been present in the true wild. The video below shows a purple emperor emerging.

The ‘magic of rewilding’, she says, shows us how little we sometimes know about species:

… We forget that our landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its range. Naturalists believe the purple emperor was a woodland butterfly only because – with no significant areas of sallow left – that is where it has clung on.… And we can dwell on the delightful thought that, in times past, purple emperors would have been a feature of the English summer, present in huge numbers in every sallow-strewn county.

If they had set out to create a perfect habitat for purple emperors, says Tree, they would never have achieved the same numbers as flit among the trees now.

The episode shows the interconnectedness of plant and animal species – it is plainly difficult for Tree to describe one species without showing how others interact with it, as the pigs do here in preparing the ground for sallow, which nurtures the purple emperors.

‘Lettuce from hell’

The couple had to learn to leave nature to its own devices – to work with it, not against it. One of the most striking episodes for me was a spectacular outbreak of creeping thistle (also known as ‘cursed’ or ‘lettuce from hell’ thistle) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tree describes how the dusky pink flowered plant heads covered acres of the park. She says:

It was the biggest challenge yet to our rewilding ethos. We looked out on the day of the Triffids and knew what our neighbours would be saying and the threat the thistles could pose to our Countryside Stewardship Scheme funding with their unashamed invasion of the Repton Park. Less than a decade earlier, under the old regime, we would have been out with the toppers and weedkiller for all we were worth. It took all the courage we could muster to hold our nerve and do nothing.

But in May 2009 there was a ‘bonanza’ of painted lady butterflies migrating from Africa. They descended on the thistles:

That summer, spiky black caterpillars swarmed over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents, which soon filled with frass and inedible leaf spines. The whole area took on the appearance of a chaotic army encampment. By autumn, after the caterpillars had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown, our creeping thistle fields were in tatters, their stalks draped in dirty silk, the pink flower-heads nodding on skeleton stems – easy pickings for the ponies.

The thistles did not return, perhaps because the caterpillars’ devastation had admitted a virus or other pest. ‘Now,’ says Tree ‘when people stand shaking their heads in our fields of ragwort or – latterly – acres of the pioneer fleabane, we smile benignly and shrug off their concerns. Not even plagues of injurious weeds last for ever.’

Tree and Burrell also found that the thistles’ prickly cover had protected other butterflies, moths, lizards and insects: ‘gravid females with dark stripes scuttled between the thistle stems along tracks made by field mice, hunting for insects in preparation for the birth of their wriggling young.’ Anthills appeared, protected from animals’ hooves by the thistles. ‘Charlie watched for hours as, mandible by mandible, the worker ants cut down thistle and grass stalks to add structure to the new mounds. By the time the thistles died back in autumn the anthills had gained height and stabilised, capped by a coating of living moss and grass like the rind of a cheese.’

So they were able to observe nature’s natural boom and bust, ‘thanks to sitting on our hands and keeping the diphosphate under lock and key’.

Horses at twilight on the estate

Wrestling with bureaucracies

She comments that management of nature to keep it static in order to benefit a particular species may miss the larger picture, only available when nature is allowed to take its dynamic course. Indeed, this was a long-term frustration for the couple in trying to get funding. English Nature, she says, wanted ‘computer modelling, targets, safeguards, setting parameters for the number of animals and vegetation cover, and lots and lots of further research’. But targets and parameters made no sense: ‘the only way to test the impact of freeroaming grazing animals in a landscape was to put them into action…The idea of constructing a computer model to identify the outcomes of self-willed land seemed like trying to predict the lifetime achievements of an unborn child.’

Throughout the book a bewildering plethora of organisations, departments and schemes pops up – Natural England, English Nature, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, the Environment Agency, Rewilding Britain. It is clear that rewilding needs subsidies. But then farming itself is heavily subsidised, as are other estate parks. One wonders about the rewilding potential of other grand estates. Knole Park in Kent, for example, is maintained carefully for its deer populations. What would it look like under a scheme like this?

Help from others

It is clear from the book how much the couple depended on others’ expertise and influence to advise on developments and assess and argue for Knepp’s importance in Britain, Europe and worldwide. Naturalists and academics gave the project credibility and boosted morale. Tree singles out naturalist Ted Green, who visited them early on to advise on tree care and pointed out how a tree’s life-support system includes a vast underground network of fungal filaments which may even span entire continents. Another early inspiration was Frans Vera, who had started a pioneering rewilding project in the Netherlands which had attracted, among other creatures, white tailed eagles.

Beavers

One of the most moving passages is when Tree describes seeing beavers released into the wild in Scotland:

Two of the beavers slid down river and disappeared within seconds but the largest, a pregnant female, after a lap of honour, emerged onto the sand-spit in front of us to preen. The size of a portly spaniel, she sat up, whiskers diagnosing the air and, balanced by the flat scaly tail on the ground behind her, began to comb through her long, slick fur with a back claw. Perhaps the dream of having beavers at Knepp was not so far away.… Our concrete dams and Lego block slipways would be things of the past, the floodplains punctuated with woody debris blockages not of our own making, our clumsy, artificial scrapes a staircase of pools, Spring Wood a resurgence of coppice. And with this watery refinement a whole habitat would spring to life, an aqueous kingdom such as Knepp has not seen since the early Middle Ages, a place of vegetative complexity where even water voles would have a sporting chance to outwit the mink. 

Knepp does indeed now have beavers, introduced in 2020, two years after the book was published. Not only that, but stork chicks hatched that year for the first time, and 45 hatched in 2025. Some of these will be transferred to an open aviary in Dagenham this year.

Words such as ‘ecosystem’, ‘sustainable’, ‘diversity’ are so common these days as to be unremarkable, but Wilding shows how delightful, unpredictable and essential they are in practice. Rewilding is spreading, partly thanks to Knepp and Tree’s optimistic, joyful, skilful writing.

Knepp offers safaris, tours and workshops as well as accommodation and events. There are also public footpaths through the estate.

The kitchen garden

#79: John le Carré: Tradecraft

 

John le Carré

Le Carré, who died in 2020, left 1,237 boxes of documents to the Bodleian, and this exhibition delves into them to try to show his writing and thinking processes. It touches on many of his 26 novels, from the early ones such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy establishing George Smiley, MI5’s insider-outsider mole hunter, to the later post-Cold War work like The Little Drummer Girl, set in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and The Mission Song, about a Western-backed coup in the Congo.

Beyond the Cold War

We can clearly see how le Carré fearlessly tackled big issues, placing his characters in war zones, hospitals and in the middle of corrupt and criminal processes worldwide, whether as protesters, participants or somewhere in between. He didn’t hesitate to move beyond his Cold War novels, which made his name, to other conflicts. On display is a pithy typewritten summing up of geopolitics, describing how ‘Third World potentates’ buy guns instead of butter, adding to the ‘near-total poverty of their countries’ and how ‘We embargoed South Africa for decades, put a real tight ring around her. What was the result? The Israeli arms dealers had a field day, the South Africans built up their own industry, and now they are out there in the marketplace, the absolute leaders in crowd suppression.’

Who helped him?

Le Carré used a network of ‘friends and lovers, journalists, academics, authors, politicians and others’ to help with his research (not to mention his wife Jane, who typed everything out). There is a handwritten list of contacts for The Little Drummer Girl, given him by an Israeli journalist, which includes the Israeli ambassador in London and Knesset members who were the Minister of Police and and a former chief of Mossad (the latter has ‘articulate’ next to his name on the list).

Also on display is a letter to a friend, Ruth Halter, asking for help in finding out if there are controls on First World countries’ manufacturing of drugs for the Third World, and particularly: ‘… If there are any instances where there is a suspicion of dumping unserviceable pharmaceuticals on Africa, or using Africans as human guinea pigs to test drugs out for the Western market’. This query became The Constant Gardener. One may remember Tessa Quayle in the book or film resolutely refusing to go to a Western hospital, preferring the basic hospitals which most of the native population used in a country where indeed ‘guinea pigs’ are found and used to test an anti-tuberculosis drug.

How did he decide research questions?

A draft for The Mission Song shows clearly how le Carré identified research questions. The main part shows the ‘premise’, introducing Salvo, son of a Congolese woman and a Northern Ireland Catholic missionary. Questions in the right margin, to be researched, ask: ‘Is this broadly feasible? What was happening in the Congo around the boy as he grew up? Did the missionaries stay under Mobutu? Did the boy witness atrocities? ‘ One can see how these questions come to form the story itself.

The premise for The Mission Song on the left, research questions on the right

Getting to know his characters

Le Carré wanted to get to know his characters in depth. A document here shows him writing about the Cold War as Jim Prideaux, the brave agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: ‘the divisions of our time produce divided men and women on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain,’ says le Carré in Jim’s voice. ‘So many divisions, in fact, that one can hardly speak of sides. We have to ask ourselves what the real war is… A war between the divided ones and the absolute ones…’.

But by the time we get to the novel such explicit avowals disappear – Jim shows his loyalty in action, not words, agreeing to undertake a mission which he suspects is ‘poppycock’, for reasons which are unclear, perhaps even to himself. ‘What the hell does my motive matter in a damn mess like this?’ he tells Smiley. This shows le Carré’s judgement that questions like motivation cannot be easily summarised. It also shows the submerged work le Carré did on his characters which never makes it explicitly into the novels but which, on this evidence, was needed for him to understand and present them as individuals. Is this depth of research partly why Tinker Tailor is such an intelligent book?

Le Carré's best novel, IMO

Matters of geography

And research was not only into psychology – here are painstaking evocations of geographical locations, perhaps more important in the pre-cyber days of dead letterboxes and paper. There is a partly fictional map of a few blocks next to the Berlin Wall, with a Turkish café which readers of Smiley’s People will recognise as where Smiley and Toby wait, over too much coffee, to see if arch-enemy Karla will appear over Checkpoint Charlie to surrender himself. Here too is a snap of the building at Cambridge Circus where in Tinker Tailor policeman Mendel waits at night for the mole to emerge from the building opposite, standing in the darkness ‘the way coppers stand the world over, weight on both feet equally, legs straight, leaning slightly backward over the line of balance’.

Partly fictional map of an area near the Berlin Wall

Could have been more literary

Generally I would have liked more of a literary element in the exhibition – for a writer who so often describes what happens when ideology and humans meet, there could have been more on literary craft, plot, characterisation. More on humans, less on ideology and politics, in other words. (The exhibition is called ‘Tradecraft’, after all). However, one display does focus more on the craft of writing and le Carré’s feelings about it. Speaking of Smiley’s People, he says: ‘it made me very sad to write it somehow – the spiritual death of a marooned Brit administrator, Smiley as a doomed anachronism, me as author – it all seemed so hopeless. Then somehow it became funny and somehow Toby helped.’ He is referring here to one of the MI5 bosses, the slightly dandified Toby Esterhase, who after being implicated in the admission of the mole to The Circus, moves on to run a gallery selling fake artefacts, but returns two novels later to play his part in Karla’s downfall.

The alchemy of the writing process

But perhaps it is less easy to trace the alchemy of the writing process, the repeated ‘somehow’ in le Carré’s comment above, than identify political stances. One example of this alchemy, for me, is in the description of Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor, after an informal interview with Smiley, walking back through a country church graveyard to the school where he teaches:

    The last Smiley saw of him was that lop-sided shadow striding towards the Norman porch as his heels cracked like gunshot between the tombs.

 The ‘Norman’ church hints at the result of earlier, long-ago battles, the incessant military struggles which go way back before the Cold War. Perhaps ‘gunshot’, as well as describing Jim’s curtness, hints at the threat of aggression, necessary abroad in order to protect peaceful country schools and churches at home.

Or back with Mendel at Cambridge Circus, watching for the mole:

    From his window he covered most of the approaches: eight or nine unequal roads and alleys which for no good reason had chosen Cambridge Circus as their meeting point. Between them, the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque.

Here again are the faint influences from past imperial power struggles, present now only in decorative details, part of the same process of political rise and fall that has made Smiley ‘a doomed anachronism’.

My other criticism of the exhibition is my recurrent gripe about literature exhibitions – where are the books (apart from in the gift shop)? Let visitors pick them up and leaf through them, or project a quote on the ceiling, or put an extract on a text panel – let’s read the final magical product, which all the research was in aid of.

John le Carré: Tradecraft is open until 6 April 2025.

#78: Park Run

Sizewell Park Run. Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations in the background

Park Run is great. A 5km circuit in the company of a few hundred others with your time recorded and emailed to you soon afterwards. Marshals cheer you around the course, dogs are welcome and mums and dads run with buggies. People wear ‘milestone’ T-shirts – 100 runs, 250, even 500. There's also an event for children. Some GPs even prescribe Park Run.

I’ve notched up 20 Park Runs so far, the first in the grounds of Bristol’s Ashton Court last June, the latest last month at Alexandra Palace in North London. Along the way I’ve run in other places like Oswestry, Cheam and Sheffield. As well as a burst of positivity and feeling of achievement to start the weekend, you learn something about the local area. For example, that Birkenhead Park in Liverpool influenced the design of New York’s Central Park. Or that Sizewell C power station, currently being built, is enormous already, maybe over twice the size of Sizewell B. Anyway, it’s a brilliant way to start the weekend.

Banbury Park Run's 10th anniversary celebrations

Is Park Run good for you?

Research with over 76,000 Park Runners just published by Sheffield Hallam University shows I am not alone. About 90% of participants thought it had improved their fitness and sense of achievement. On almost every measure their experience was more positive than they had expected when they signed up. Volunteers who help organise said it made them feel more part of the community, and just over 72% of volunteers said they were happier because of taking part. However, the research authors admit that since only Park Runners answered the survey, it could be biased towards the positive, and it didn't include people who dropped out or never ran after registration.

Reading the journal article reporting the research I learnt a new word – eudemonic, conducive to happiness. There is overwhelming evidence that physical activity improves physical and mental health and ‘substantial evidence’ that vigorous activity (like Park Run, for most people) is even better than moderate activity. Looking forward to the next one.

Find your local Park Run here.

Nonsuch Park, Epsom

#77: Withymead Nature Reserve

The Thames Path accompanies the great river from its source in Gloucestershire (where ‘an infant Thames runs shyly through its meadows’ says my guidebook), to the Thames Barrier 184 miles later. For the past two summers I’ve been walking it. One of the loveliest stretches so far has been between Goring, (11 miles west of Reading), to Cholsey four miles upriver. I was captivated by the trees leaning over to the riverside and delighted to see a kingfisher flash by.

The Thames path between Goring and Cholsey

It turns out the opposite bank holds a secret – Withymead Nature Reserve (not marked on my OS map). A backwater there provides a secure home for those kingfishers, and the 13-acre reserve hosts other flora and fauna such as foxes, bats, deer, grass snakes and slow worms. It is known for its Loddon Lilies, like snowdrops, in spring.

Reserve warden Pete lives as a volunteer on the reserve half of each week, cutting rushes, repairing the boardwalks and generally keeping it in order. He tells me he has seen a family of four otters playing ‘which is quite special’ and that the 7 mile strip of land between Wallingford and Goring makes up 14% of Oxfordshire’s fenland.

As so often happens with nature reserves, it was a farsighted public spirited individual who established it – in this case Anne Carpmael, who lived in the area for 60 years and bequeathed it to the public as a place for people, especially the young, to enjoy nature. It opened in 2004.

Slip rails from when it was a boatyard

Boattbuilding hut, now a bats' home

Before that it had been a boatyard and one can still see the winch and slip rails, as well as the boatbuilding hut, now a home for bats. It is well worth a visit, with winding paths and carefully constructed nooks for opening a thermos and maybe catching a glimpse of a whiskered head in the water or an iridescent fluttering wing.

Withymead Nature Reserve is open on Sundays from April to August, and for pre-booked visits on Fridays throughout the year, depending on availability.

#76: Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home

Radio did change the home, though not enough for the Bodleian Libraries, apparently. It was once ‘the disruptive new technology’, they tell us, which ‘transformed, or sometimes failed to transform, domestic and class dynamics, and in 1939 would unite households on the brink of war’. One senses a certain underlying disappointment that it did not wholly revolutionise the home, if not society. However, once past the rather heavy-handed political gloss, there is plenty of evidence of radio’s unifying, sustaining, educational power in this beautifully curated exhibition at the Bodleian’s Weston Library.

This, for example, is from a letter from a Birmingham clerk in the January 1928 Radio Times:

I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It’s a real magic carpet. Before it was a fortnight at Rhyl, and that was all the travelling I did that wasn’t on a tram. Now I hear the Boat Race and the Derby… There are football matches on Saturdays and during the week music and talks by famous men and women who have travelled and can tell us about places…’

This listener actually felt physically transported through his set. He seems to listen alone, which was unusual – people usually listened together, and a picture in The Broadcaster magazine of December 1922 shows two couples in Christmas hats ‘listening in on a marconiphone’. When radio started, it was sometimes intimidatingly technical – and in fact, that is where the word ‘set’ comes from, as owners sometimes assembled radios themselves:

In its early days radio meant the BBC (amazingly, no commercial stations were allowed in the UK until 1973), and so one of its missions was to educate. These pamphlets (what design and typography!) accompanied broadcasts which were meant to be listened to and discussed in places like schools, libraries and working men’s clubs by people who had probably left school at 14:

One can’t help seeing this tradition continuing today in the impressively low-tech In Our Time and its reading lists.

So plenty of evidence that radio brought people together – any fears that it would inhibit or even replace conversation, like a 1920s smartphone? Fascinatingly yes, in this pair of cartoons:

Other documents in the exhibition are this early guide to BBC pronunciation (try ‘exquisite’ with the stress on the first syllable):

and this listing, showing how random early programming could be (interesting to see an early version of celebrity gossip):

There is some audio in the exhibition – excerpts of early 1920s broadcasts: ‘Hello Marconi House, London calling’, ‘Hello children’, and an SOS message asking Mrs May Dibble to go to Burton-on-Trent Infirmary ‘where her son is dangerously ill’. There’s also a lovely early bakelite radio (what curves!) and lots of technical equipment.

On the basis of this exhibition one could imagine radio as an old-fashioned technology, now superseded by multimedia. The amazing thing is that it is not. Eighty-six per cent of the UK population aged over 15 listened to radio in the three months to June 2025. This is even more than the figure of 77% in 1939, when the UK population was much smaller and TV yet to arrive.

Why does it remain so popular? The exhibition comments that ‘wireless was (and is) astonishingly inclusive, cheap, and accessible’. But this is only part of the story. Practically, one can listen to it while doing other things – driving, cooking, working. But does it not also allow you to use imagination while listening – encourage you to make your own connections, muse along with the music or commentary, in a way which TV does not? It’s also amazing how much can be done purely through audio – even topics which you would think demand a visual element, such as A History of the World in 100 Objects. There’s something about the auditory.

Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home is at the Weston Library until 31 August.

#75: More or Less

 

I'm very happy every time I hear that the BBC radio four programme ‘More Or Less ‘ is returning to the airwaves. The programme fact checks statistics in the news, from whether cutting the winter fuel payment to pensioners causes excess winter deaths (answer: possibly, but it’s impossible to put a number on it), to whether South-Eastern Railways clears 50 million leaves from their line each year (answer: unverifiable, file it in the ‘silly drawer’).

There are also year-round weekly podcasts with longer interviews, coverage of new books on numbers and statistics, and lately fact checking claims made by Donald Trump, which seems rather an easy target.

What’s it like?

The programme is non-polemical, light and often jokey in tone, and made up of varied voices. However, this does not stop it paying attention to the complexity of statistics and the questions being grappled with, showing how click-bait headlines often mislead (and occasionally don’t), how correlation does not mean causation and the results you get depend on the questions you ask and the factors you consider. Sounds pretty basic research practice, but as the programme shows, researchers don’t always follow best practice, and even if they do, journalists often don’t when reporting the research.

But it goes beyond fact checking; if a statistic is shown to be false, the researchers try to establish the real answer, and if not ask whether a real answer is actually possible. Along the way they dip into statistical principles such as different kinds of averages and sample sizes.

Three items

Here are three items from the programme which have stuck in my mind:

Have about one in three women in the UK had an abortion? (Answer: probably yes; 21.53 minutes into the programme).

Are black mothers five times more likely than white mothers to die during childbirth in the UK? (Answer: they are about four times more likely to die during pregnancy or up to 6 weeks afterwards. This is due to underlying health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes; also to behaviour, such as whether they attend antenatal classes. There is no evidence that it’s due to race per se, or mothers being treated differently because of race. The risk of dying during pregnancy or up to 6 weeks afterwards is very low for all women in the UK – about 60 women per year.

Can you divide 1 by 0? (Answer: it can’t be done; 22.25 into the programme; and the answer isn’t infinity; 14.15 into the following week’s programme after a storm of replies).

It’s very BBC, or should be

The programme hits all three targets of BBC founder Lord Reith’s vision for the corporation: ‘inform, educate and entertain’. In fact, I would like to see BBC content in general more like this – focused on fact-finding and checking, resulting in a valuable archive of programmes, educational not only in content but in investigative method. Fewer shock headlines and more measured findings. Less impact short-term, more long-term.

I would like them to look at…

And what statistical question would I like the programme to investigate? Well, Professor Brian Cox stated on Radio 3’s Private Passions that worldwide, more is spent on peanuts than on science; and, perhaps more verifiably, that more is spent on mobile phone ring tones than on meteorite defence systems. Sounds suspicious. Get onto it, More Or Less!

 

#74: Candlemas

                                    

Coming to the end of this cold, wet month, I’ve enjoyed Eleanor Parker’s book Winters in the World, an exploration of the Anglo-Saxon experience of the seasons through Anglo-Saxon poetry and historical and religious works.

Close to the weather

Several things struck me (apart from the beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry such as The Seafarer, which I haven't read since my undergraduate days). Firstly, how dependent on and close to the weather people were then, since it could make the difference between famine or plenty. Also, the seasons gave meaning and structure to people’s lives much more strongly than they do now. Thirdly, how important communal celebrations were, and the sheer number of them that existed.

The origin of Candlemas

Often newly-introduced Christian celebrations were meshed into the year’s weather cycle. This happened with the 2 February Christian festival of Candlemas. The festival commemorates Mary and Joseph taking the 40-day-old Jesus to be presented at the temple. They were met by the elderly Anna and her husband Simeon, who recognised the baby as the Messiah. Simeon took him in his arms and spoke a prayer which became the Christian Nunc Dimittis: ‘Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation’.

Says Parker:

This means that Candlemas is a festival which has at its heart a meeting between childhood and old age, birth and death, and winter and spring. The dating of the feast was fixed by its biblical origin, because the period of purification appointed in the law of Moses meant it must take place 40 days after Christ’s birth. However, 2 February coincided with a significant point in the solar year: midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, it’s a time when the days are getting longer, daylight is growing stronger, and in northern Europe the earliest spring flowers are starting to appear. It was a natural time for a festival of light, and that was what Candlemas became.

So Candlemas fuses Christianity (and before that, Jewish law) and the natural rhythm of the year. People celebrated it, Parker tells us, by taking candles to church to be blessed, so echoing Christ being presented in the temple. Then, after a procession, people took the candles home and kept them all year.

Periods of dearth and plenty have disappeared in our age of supermarkets and year-round strawberries. But do we not still create them, showing that such rhythms are important, even if artificially-induced? For example, I’m just coming to the end of Dry January, which strikes me as a secular version of Lent.

Book recommendation

As for the book, it is scholarly but accessible. It explains clearly which sources are used and what they allow us to say, as in a two-page discussion of whether the modern word ‘Easter’ does come from the pagan goddess Eostre, the only evidence for which is one statement in Anglo-Saxon historian Bede’s Reckoning of Time, a discussion of the medieval church calendar. Parker thinks that on balance the festival may have been named for a Kentish goddess, and explains why she thinks so, briefly surveying the history of the argument and sources involved. It is brave not to fear losing the general reader by detailing sources and uncertainties.  

This is a good read for a chilly time of year. It encourages celebration or at least a marking of lean times, before the first blossoms appear. Happy Candlemas!