Latest news with #AdamNicolson
Telegraph
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Nigel's fishy business
Nigel Farage has got his own reasons to hope that British fishermen get a good deal from quota negotiations with Brussels: he has bought a commercial fishing boat. He told me on GB News: 'I don't run it myself. I'm rather too busy. I have a skipper that runs that boat, and I'm not making any money on it. I can promise you, the rules and regulations put upon our small commercial fleet since Brexit are worse than they were as members of the European Union.' Will Farage's fishing boat be a line in the negotiations over access to UK waters when Sir Keir Starmer and EU president Ursula von der Leyen sit down for talks in 10 days' time? Nicolson vs York A spiky exchange between Adam Nicolson, the grandson of Vita Sackville-West, and Peter York, author of The Sloane Ranger's Handbook, at this week's Oldie literary lunch. Nicolson – who has written a new book, Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood – told guests of an 'awkward experience' with York at the start of the lunch. Nicolson said: 'I said I had written a book about birds and he said 'Hmm, All very good, I suppose, but I'm not interested in a book about nature'.' Nicolson added that he 'felt reproached by my friend', before explaining the prolific sex life of a wren. Afterwards, York tried to make light of 'a bit of sparring', but added: 'I'm here to represent the urban bourgeois point of view. Much as I love your work, Adam, I'm less interested in wrens than your book on the gentry which showed what it did to people back in the day, decapitation and ghastly things to your tummy.' Gentlemen, please! Greg's special K Happy Birthday to Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general and ITV breakfast television boss who turns 78 this month. Mystifyingly he has never been given a knighthood, unlike other BBC directors general. Boris Johnson tried his best, wrongly referring to him as 'Sir Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC' in his memoir Unleashed. Dyke tells me Johnson's surprise 'K' was news to him, adding: 'I've always assumed I'm on some blacklist for honours, not that I'm particularly bothered either way.' Johnson is sticking to his guns. 'I am surprised he doesn't have one,' he tells me. 'He certainly deserves it, if only for creating Roland Rat.' Mitchell and Widdecombe Students gathered at the Cambridge Union to debate the impact of Reform UK. The motion – 'Reform is the real Opposition' – was proposed by former Conservatives Ann Widdecombe and Marco Longhi, and opposed by ex-Tory Cabinet ministers Sir Andrew Mitchell and Sir Robert Buckland. Mitchell and Buckland won the debate and the biggest applause when Mitch explained that – while he had the good fortune to be educated at Cambridge, 'the greatest university in the world' – Widdecombe had made do with 'a second-rate university called Oxford'. Never underestimate the cunning of a former chief whip. Robbie's treasure Pop star Robbie Williams says he has not sold out his summer tour yet. 'People ask, 'Are there any tickets left for your stadium tour this summer?' Well, there's a few left for the second night of the Emirates at the Arsenal,' he said as he launched his new art exhibition at Moco Museum, in Marble Arch, London. He added: 'Some may call me a national treasure. Well, I say, 'What point is there being a national treasure if you don't give some of that treasure away in the form of merchandise and affordable yet aspirationally priced drinks?.'' Perhaps unsurprisingly, his new exhibition is titled Radical Honesty. Raising our caps to David Knowles
Spectator
30-04-2025
- Science
- Spectator
The complexities of the dawn chorus
'Tawny owls,' I tell friends and family, 'can't see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,' I burble. 'And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!' In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices in the detailed stories of some of the birds on his farm in Sussex. Its precursor, The Seabird's Cry, a love letter to a dozen species, soared over the coasts of Scotland, ablaze with sea light. The Sussex Weald on a dull spring dawn offers a claggier setting. Puffins seem more interesting than marsh tits. But in fact Bird School is even better. Nicolson makes like the bowerbird, which constructs elaborate artistic temples of seduction. Most of us, if we'd resolved to study local birds, would erect feeders and bird-boxes. Nicolson commissions an 'absorbatory' – a shed on stilts with nest boxes in the walls. He sets up his desk and brings birds, and an infinite world, to him. 'On moonlit dawns, each of the raindrops hanging from the tips of the birches and hazels held a bright white moon inside it like a fly in amber.' Later in the year, in summer, he notices fledgling wrens emerging from their nest: The little birds, as round as bumble bees, were dropping like drips from a tap out of the mossy cushion their parents had pushed into the gap in the brickwork. One after another they came, each one a gobbet of life. This is some of the best English prose of our time. Trees respond to a storm like 'horses on a halter'.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Bird School by Adam Nicolson review – where are all our feathered friends?
In the very English scene of a long-settled farm in the depths of the Sussex countryside, the nature writer Adam Nicolson has produced what amounts to an update of the traditional nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin?. The poem performs the obsequies for the poor redbreast but is also a roll call of the other birds of old Albion: the thrush, the owl, the dove and more. In Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood, Nicolson sets out to educate himself about these species and discover why avian mortality is a considerably bigger problem now than it was when the ballad of Cock Robin was first heard. Since the 1960s, numbers of song thrushes in the UK have fallen by 40%, from a population of approximately 100,000 to about 60,000, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. There are half as many tawny owls in our woods since the 1970s, and the decline of turtle doves is even more vertiginous: we've lost 90% of them in the past 60 years. (Though the robin is faring rather better: from a nadir in the mid-80s when fewer than 100,000 specimens were recorded, the ranks have swelled to a healthier 150,000 today.) In Nicolson's lifetime, the heavens have emptied of birds: though partly as a response to this, every new publishing season finds the skies black with books about our feathered friends. There has been a spectacular murmuration of birder-authors in recent years, including Tim Dee, Stephen Moss and Deborah Cramer. In a decorated career, Nicolson has written about wetlands, the Hebrides and rock pools, but admits: 'I had never paid any attention to birds. I had not cared about them.' However, it's an iron law of the book trade that a nature writer in need of a subject will sooner or later turn their attention to the treetops. A gentleman farmer, Nicolson enlists friends and farmhands to build him a hide, a bespoke treehouse, to pursue his research – an episode that delightfully recalls the squire-servant relationship of Ted and Ralph from The Fast Show. Of all the wild creatures that surround us, birds are perhaps the most appealing, the least wild. We are soppy about dogs and cats in this country, but we also fork out £250m a year on bird victuals. According to Nicolson, the feeders and bird tables in British gardens groan under 150,000 tonnes of treats including fat balls stuffed with insects – the mini-kievs of bird gastronomy – enough to fill up all the visitors who are ever likely to call in our back yards three times over. So how to explain their melancholy absence? Intensive farming, including the loss of hedgerows, is a major culprit in the plummeting bird population, as is the wider problem of the climate emergency (though rising temperatures may tempt long-lost species like the golden oriole back to the British landscape). It's not only ornithologists who have these airborne targets in their sights. At one time, Nicolson says, tens of thousands of birds perished so that their feathers could furnish women's hats, and now the commonest bird in the UK is not the homely sparrow but the pheasant. A staggering 28m or more game birds, bred for sport, fall to guns every year. The fate of Cock Robin, who met a violent death in midair, is re-enacted on our moors and estates to this day. Bird School is elegant and involving. Like one of the nests Nicolson finds on his property, it's been deftly assembled. The findings in his pages are also a little like birds' eggs: they wink up at you fascinatingly before you realise that some of what you're looking at is smashed. Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Bird School by Adam Nicolson review – close encounters of a feathery kind
It is apposite, then, that writer Adam Nicolson's love affair with birds began with a raven – a dead one – that he picked up from the side of a road. 'Holding its rigid form,' he writes in Bird School, 'was like exploring a derelict house. Rafters, furnishings, upholstery, timbers, abandonment. It had been shot and its bill was bloodied in gouts towards the point, yet the midnight blue of its back and wing shimmered in my hands … that moment of closeness to such an animal was the beginning of something for me.' Until that moment, Nicolson claims to have been relatively indifferent to birds. Brought up to love the landscape rather than the creatures in it, 'the birds in the wood or the garden at home remained a blank, a flicker of nothing much, like motes in sunlight'. He decided the time had come 'to look and listen, to return to Bird School and see what it might teach me'. Birds – as Nicolson discovers – are not necessarily the most willing teachers. For one thing, they freak out when we look at them. Our forward-facing eyes make them think we want to eat them. Nicolson solves this by hiding himself. In a wild corner of his Sussex farm, Perch Hill, he commissions a man-sized birdhouse: an octagonal hide on wooden stilts, covered in nesting boxes and spy holes. It's big enough to sleep in, with a bed, a desk, a wood burner and fold-down windows on all sides. He calls this construction his 'absorbatory, a place to take it in, to dissolve, if such a thing is possible, the boundary between self and world' – or, he admits, what others might term a 'shed'. Typically, when men move into the garden shed, it suggests that all is not well at home. But Nicolson – who is married to the gardener and writer Sarah Raven – keeps his personal life out of the classroom. After the publication of so many nature books that shoehorn in ill-fitting narratives of personal crisis and growth, this makes a refreshing change. Wrens, robins, buzzards, blackbirds and tits come to bird school to teach lessons about themselves alone: how they breed, fly, navigate, why they sing. Nicolson is a good student – a fine observer of the natural world – and for a while, he lives a bird lover's dream. A wren skitters across his desk; tits nest in the walls; ravens tumble in play flight overhead. He piles up carrion for the meat-eating birds and attempts to entice nightingales with welcome mats of blackthorn. But there are missing voices in the choir of the wood. Those nightingales never show up, and the scant few migrants who eventually appear in late spring are like 'elegists for a previous world, singing their anthems for the lost'. Nature today, Nicolson points out, is 'residual, what is left over after what we have done to it. The large and overarching story of English birds in the last century is mournful.' Migrating birds are caught and shot by the million long before they reach our shores. Bird-friendly habitat is eaten up by intensive farming. Even our bird-feeding habits can be harmful, spreading disease and skewing the evolutionary odds against the more timid species. Britain, it seems, is a nation of bird lovers who don't know how to love. Bird School is not a bad place to start learning. Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scots dad with incurable cancer saved by life-saving new trial treatment
A dad who was "practically dead" with incurable cancer has been saved by a miracle treatment. Adam Nicolson, 55, was told in summer 2023 that he had reached the end of the line in treatment for the blood cancer myeloma and to prepare for a final Christmas with his wife and three daughters. But at the 11th hour, he was offered a pioneering new treatment called CAR-T through a clinical trial, becoming the only Scot to receive it. He is in remission 18 months later and getting back to as near normal a life as possible. READ MORE: Dozens of Edinburgh customers queue in sunshine outside award-winning bakery READ MORE: Edinburgh driver pulled over by 'unmarked police car' as residents concerned Adam, from Stirling, is calling for CAR-T to be made widely available on the NHS and for more treatments for myeloma in Scotland, reports the Record. He said: "I've been so lucky. I'm only here because my consultants put me forward for the trial. "They really pushed for me to get it. I've a good standard of life now, when I was practically dead before. I was in a wheelchair, I couldn't walk. That's how much of a difference it has made." He is back gardening and doctors are confident his remission will be measured in years. Myeloma is a relapsing-remitting cancer, which means that although many patients will experience periods of remission following treatment, the disease will return. Adam said: "At the beginning of the summer I was told that was it, that the last course of treatment was going to give me until Christmas. "All the lines of treatment had failed – they would work for about six months and then the cancer would come back. It took a toll, not just on me but on my family. "Then they said, there's this trial at the Queen Elizabeth in Glasgow called CAR-T that could prolong your life." Cells were removed from his body and sent to the US for analysis and genetic modification, then returned and retransplanted. The treatment took a toll on his body and he was in an extremely weakened state. He said: "I couldn't walk. My recovery has been extremely hard but, touch wood, my myeloma is in complete remission. I'm alive and getting stronger." Join Edinburgh Live's Whatsapp Community here and get the latest news sent straight to your messages. Now he is focusing on making new memories with his wife Linsey and daughters Jennifer, 23, Rosie, 22, and Julia, 18, who he credits for helping him through the treatment. Careers adviser Adam was 50 when he was diagnosed with myeloma at the start of lockdown in March 2020 but by the time it was discovered, the disease had started eating away at his bones and his hip was like "Swiss cheese". He also had tumours on his shoulder, spine and hip. He had gone to his GP the year before when he started noticing a big drop in his fitness levels. A blood test found nothing concerning but when he later fell ill, struggled to walk far and began vomiting bile, his cancer was found at Forth Valley Royal Hospital. Adam has teamed up with blood cancer charity Myeloma UK to call for greater access to new life-changing treatments in Scotland, including CAR-T. Shelagh McKinlay, its director of research and advocacy, said: "CAR-T is unavailable on the NHS in the UK but we understand it will soon be available privately. We firmly believe there should be no financial barriers to accessing treatments."
