Into The Secret Heart Of Ashdown Forest
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Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest: A Horseman's Country Diary
Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest is a love letter after a forty-year affair. Wry, funny, moving and vivid, this memoir chronicles the life of the author and the ten square miles of country he calls his Kingdom. This book is as good as a brisk walk in the woods on an autumn day. Written with love and passion, it is a hymn to landscape and freedom. It is a close and deep observation of the writer’s adopted country, the fabled Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, (the home of Winnie the Pooh), where he has lived and ridden for the past forty years. His gift is the ability to take you deep into the landscapes that make this place resonate in his heart: its streams, woods, heathlands. You meet its literary residents, A.A, Milne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. You get beneath its skin among the networks of fungi that allow the trees to speak. You taste its foods, meet its locals, both the living and the ghosts, and see its huge importance during the plague year 2020-21 through the pandemic lockdowns. His passion for horses shines through these pages and his writing is, as he himself says, a form of ‘moving meditation’. He takes you under the soil of this place and he leaves a soft glow on the landscape when he is gone.
A Fisherman in the Saddle
A Fisherman in the Saddle is a meditation on joy; it is a return to those things that have given me the greatest pleasure in life – horses and fishing. Both have been lifesavers in their time, like medicine in their effect. Horse riding is cheaper than seeing a shrink and I find contemplation or meditation as a by-product of riding or fishing, life enhancing. This book was born out of the death of a horse, Sebastian. To commemorate him I started writing and soon found all my other horses appearing on the pages of this book, like milestones to my life. They carried me into beautiful landscapes on three continents and offered solace when everything else failed. When I am in the saddle I’m home, wherever I may be. And the sea has never failed to provide fish and the best kind of companionship. I have always been seawitched. If you love the outdoors and find solace under the sky, then this book is for you. And if you love horses and landscape, or the sea and fishing, then you will find a bonus here.
Boerejood: One Man’s Quest to Understand the Miracle of Democracy in South Africa
“Brilliant: engaged, intelligent, personal… and funny” – Financial Times Ten years after democracy arrived in South Africa here is a book that gives a voice to the Afrikaner, speaking in English about the ‘Miracle’ of the peaceful transition to majority rule – their worst nightmare. This is a book that goes beyond politics with the very human story of one man, giving insight into the hearts and minds of a people struggling to find their identity as white Africans trying to secure their place in Africa. They are seen through the eyes of a Boerejood – a half-Afrikaans, half-Jewish writer – who struggles himself with issues of identity, reflecting the struggle around him. In the final analysis Boerejood is about the universal human struggle between good and evil, black and white, justice and injustice, love and hate – all that defines us as being human. It takes the reader on an astonishing and remarkable journey of discovery, the destination being the soul of the Afrikaner, and an answer to why these people accepted black majority rule with relatively no struggle, after years of racist persecution of their black and brown neighbours. “Reading Boerejood is like being a voyeur at a hugely animated dinner party where you sit and listen to highly charged debate with intelligent people locking horns. They make fascinating points and then incredibly inane and naïve remarks. Then they dazzle with astute observations. You are hooked and hang on to every word.”- Cape Times