Derek Turner

Stag at bay, today

Lincolnshire weathervanes

VERY honoured to be featured as part of this long-running series put together by the enviably erudite and admirably public-spirited Mathew Lyons!

Musica universalis The eye did not always have primacy over the ear. Humanity once valued spiritual hearing over spiritual seeing.

My 'Engelsberg Ideas' review of 'The Sound Atlas' by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen - engelsbergideas.com/reviews/musi...

Musica universalis The eye did not always have primacy over the ear. Humanity once valued spiritual hearing over spiritual seeing.

The eye did not always have primacy over the ear. Humanity once valued spiritual hearing over spiritual seeing.

Musica universalis | @derekturner.bsky.social

engelsbergideas.com/reviews/musi...

Thanks, Clive. You're a gent!

England’s forgotten county Topical comment and travel writing

With #Lincolnshire making headlines recently as a hotbed for the so-called right wing Reform party, now is a good time to revisit my review of Derek Turner's @derekturner.bsky.social‬ evocative book.

Read on - there's more to it than you might imagine!

simcomm.blogspot.com/2023/01/engl...

Used Books and Rare Books from Antiquarian Booksellers Biblio offers nearly 100 million used books and rare books for sale from professional antiquarian booksellers around the world. Uncommonly good books found here.

A quick acknowledgement of the invaluable nature of Biblio.co.uk, which has sold me a book for £3.79 (inc. postage) that was advertised for sale on Amazon for ten times that amount

Fog over Lincolnshire

The Louth Canal, Sunday - a well-mannered brick house set amid foggy and sopping fens and watercourses, like a vignetter from the 18th c. Netherlands

Graveyard-sharing churches - St Adelwold's, Alvingham (L), the only church dedicated to Adelwold - and St Mary's, North Cockerington, burial place of Barnabe Googe. Nearby are the mounds of Alvingham Priory, a Gilbertine foundation (Gilbert was the only Englishman ever to found a monastic order)

I was always conscious of the deficiencies of my Concise DNB (3 vols), so when I saw for sale a complete set of the 1908-1911 edition (22 vols), plus 11 supplements taking me up to the 1990s, I was not going to leave without several extremely heavy boxes (although I did haggle successfully)

The front garden is seething with small lives eating seeds and suet - blackbirds, chaffinches, collared doves, dunnocks, goldfinches, jackdaws, robins, sparrows, starlings and wood pigeons, all periodically scattering to make way for promenading magpies, putting all to flight by sheer presence

For sale. We are told it is an "ornament," which was wise of the vendor, because otherwise we might not have known

Halfway through my book! Farewelling Michael Drayton, and his excellent 'Poly-Olbion' (1611-1622)

They were statuesque birds (I sometimes had to 'rescue' frightened passers-by from them), yet also wonderfully comical; unfortunately, our local foxes developed a taste for them (they were free-ranging birds, of course), so I reluctantly had to give up keeping them

Domesticated - Norfolk Bronzes. They weren't the brightest birds (unlike their wily wild counterparts, which I have seen in the Appalachians) but they weren't stupid. They followed me around, and liked gardening, when they would stand nearby hoping for beetles and spiders. Good guard-animals too!

I used to keep turkeys as pets - very likeable (and strictly inedible!) animals

Fantastic birds. By chance, yesterday I discovered the first appearance of 'goosander' in the language was in a 1611-1622 topographical poem called Poly-Olbion, by a now largely neglected poet called Michael Drayton

My review of Giles Sparrow's 'Phaenomena: Doppelmayr's Celestial Atlas' www.derek-turner.com/2024/11/27/s...

Good luck! I began writing a dystopia set in or around the 2070s, but got distracted, and now it sits reproachfully in my 'Books' folder - a great and shapeless lump of circa 100,000 words...

Hello back! I have not yet given much attention to this, because bogged down in the 17th century (although there are worse places to be). But very good to see some familiar faces

A too much taken-for-granted bird in characteristically perky mode

Ponderable ephemera found in a charity shop - souvenirs of a 1971 trip to Andorra by one Raphael Caves and family (the paper wallet also contained a leaflet on St George's Chapel, Windsor)

Revisiting 'Poly-Olbion' by Michael Drayton, mythmaker for Jacobean England

Presently with Izaak Walton (imaginatively, for my book) on the banks of the Dove in summer - not a bad place to be when it's 0 degrees outside

A third of the way through my book! Time for lunch