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Guardian Country Diary

Image by Alan Parkinson

A great source of writing about the landscape and our relationship with it can be found daily in the Guardian's COUNTRY DIARY column, which has been going for over 100 years.
These are also available in an ONLINE ARCHIVE, which has over 3000 entries.

As a taster for how good these are, I read a small section of some recent entries at the Suffolk Literacy session I have blogged about earlier on this blog.
There are 2 recent entries: one on the Lake District by Tony Greenbank, and one on Wenlock Edge by Paul Evans, which were written at the time of the Cumbrian floods.
The Paul Evans diary entry has a wonderful description to start it off:

"It's raining.
There's a saturation point where the soil can't hold any more water and turns to gravy.
We're past that.
There's a point where boots and jackets that were once waterproof let you know they are no longer.
We're past that.
There's a kind of equilibrium, where the amount of water in the environment seems equal to the amount of water in your own body.
We're past that tipping point too....."

Wonderful writing...


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