As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Serendipity plays heavily in Lee's wanderings, and it made me keenly aware of how jam-packed my life is with work, and chores, and family and everything else -- and how little room there is in it for serendipity. Perched on the sharpest of these, and scattered along its crumbling edge, Toro looked like dried blood on a rusty sword. Just a day’s walk from the Cotswolds village where he grew up, Lee noted fine alterations in local speech patterns.

Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - BBC Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - BBC

But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water? The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings.He has a vivid and original way with simile, which began by pleasing but wore out its welcome after a few chapters. For three or four days I followed the track through the hills, but saw only occasional signs of life – sometimes a shepherd’s hut, or a distant man walking, or a solitary boy with a flock of goats; otherwise no sound or movement except the eagles overhead and the springs gushing out of the rocks. Walking changes the way we experience our world, awakening wonder in places that could seem otherwise, well, rather pedestrian. The names of Velásquez, Goya, El Greco, Lope de Vega, Juan de la Cruz were unknown to me; I’d never heard of the Cordovan Moors or the Catholic kings; nor of the Alhambra or the Escorial; or that Trafalgar was a Spanish cape, Gibraltar a Spanish rock, or that it was from here that Columbus had sailed for America.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Waterstones

Then as the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the estuaries and around the many islands. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. Spain is the biggest feature of the novel and Lee describes it incredibly: the heat, the setting, the people, it is all drawn beautifully.

Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. I bathed, as he did, in the blue streams that tumble off the high peaks, the water of which was “snow-cold, brutal and revivifying”. I saw the small white ship, my last link with home, flare like a taper and die away in the darkness; then I was alone at last, sitting on a hilltop, my teeth chattering as the night wind rose. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. Galician peasants, women and Spanish, unknown and doubly inscrutable – their thin bent bodies knelt over the water, jerking up and down like drinking hens, and as they worked they shrieked, firing off metallic bursts of speech that bounced off the rocks like bullets.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern

Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. He decides to turn west and follow the Guadalquivir, adding several months to his journey, and taking him to the sea in a roundabout way. He also perfects the local requirements for busking - checking if he needs a permit, making sure the coins don't pile too high in his hat, playing the right tunes. Towards the end of the book, near the end of 1935, Lee finds himself in Castillo, on the Mediterranean coast and becomes aware of a split in the people, and trouble brewing. Lee is a young man and certainly isn’t chaste, but there were some issues, particularly in relation to women.Where sunshine pooled, I found boulders to rest on; once I watched a pert red fox nose patches of frozen earth.