Ian Tattum

A piece I wrote about having a nature deprived childhood. There don’t seem to be enough articles about working class childhoods which were just a bit dull because you didn’t get out much , and family members were not very enthusiastic. But you did have picture books of stuffed birds.😊

Country diary: Jackdaws carve up the sky as dusk descends on the moors | Richard Smyth www.theguardian.com/environment/...

💔Tragic: swifts are finding their chicks dumped in skips and their nests blocked up by building work. 🚨We need an emergency system that forces police & councils to act IMMEDIATELY when nests are threatened. Sign the petition now 👇 you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/sa...

#promptcombo #geopoem Choose an intimate human theme (e.g., grief, a childhood memory). Write 16 technical geological terms. E.g: subduction, calcification, standard strata, erratic boulder, Write the human theme, Don't use standard emotional prose. Use yr geological word list to act as metaphors.

An excerpt from #ThePathlessLand in today's Irish Times. It's not that Ireland *never* had a network of rights of way, comparable to those in France or Wales; it's that it *lost* them... How it lost them - and whether there's any hope to get some of them back - is what I'm trying to figure out.

🚨 Impressions alert ~ Richard Burton reading ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ 💎 #richardburton #thebeatles #impressions #poetry #beatles

Rothko moon

The Starbeck Orion Special Edition on Workplace Verse Day One featured Artworker Dora D’agostino the880.substack.com/p/the-starbe...

Durlston this morning.

Stinking iris and the Isle of Wight

Grouse moors are still being burnt - and it's killing us (guest blog by Bob Berzins) raptorpersecutionuk.org/2026/10/23/g...

I spontaneously bought a Wordsworth edition of Arthur Machen’s Weird Tales. Could be the switch to autumn , the imminence of Halloween, or the gloom and the wind shredding the trees and keeping me indoors. Influential on an entire genre and brilliant on place, whether Wales or London.

My latest book to review for @reaktionbooks.bsky.social . By a botanist who was Director of Conservation at Kew and Director of the Botanical Gardens in Sydney . An opinionated and not entirely reliable memoir , partly inspired by I Claudius, related to one the oak regards as a ‘fungal biped’😊

Swanage’s Peveril Point

Cherry trees are not just for the spring

Morning! Here is my #fragmentsfriday Thanks @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and guest judge @helenlaycock.bsky.social Have a wonderful Friday. #poetry #micropoetry #18words

Birds in Olney water meadows

It's cliché, but I do indeed write to think. However closely and precisely I plan my writing, however much I study, analyse and reflect in advance, it's the process of writing itself which reveals meaning to me. It can be hard. But it's a gift, and the insight is in the process itself. #AI #writing

Across Poole Harbour

Across Poole Harbour

The Janus like nature of autumn

Evidence that today there was a Little St Luke’s Summer

Elms casting shadows

Wasp on the ivy

A couple of hummingbird hawk moths including one in close up

‘People’s dignity, and democracy, is at stake’: meet the economist ditching ideology for reality www.theguardian.com/business/202...

I don't follow this account, because I can't bear to, but it shows up in my feed every day, and I'm so glad it exists, because we need to be told, and shown, *every damn day*, exactly where all this shit leads us. Exactly where. Down to all the little kids' birthdays and all the little shoes.

Another ivy bee

Today’s Bee

Just published by @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

A brilliant introduction to Buddhism , its origins, beliefs and practices. Suitable for practitioners of contemporary Western Buddhism , general readers , and students . Not forgetting those, like me, who need some reminders . iantattum.substack.com/p/the-buddha...

Today’s poem for Top Tweet Tuesday has been influenced by recent reading and experience

This arrived on Saturday and I finished it today. But I think it merits a re read before I write a longer review. When I retired, due to space , I had to jettison all my books on Buddhism, so I am relying mainly memory to evaluate this book. It is balanced , scholarly and highly readable 👏

Around Swanage this morning

Lovely to be back in Oxford. Here’s the old Ashmolean Museum where William Buckland lectured and discussed the fossils found by Mary Anning in the 1820s.

In my local park

Good books continue to be published. This is one such.

A new publication from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social that I found fascinating and gripping. Fantastic read.

iantattum.substack.com/p/a-short-re...

Small Copper

Every time the Cimmerians are mentioned the inevitable happens 😊

Some pictures from Vergina and Prespa

Wonderful light this evening for our tree warden meeting

My two current reads. Two revelatory studies. One of a people much mythologised , the other of a poet much admired but not so well understood. I particularly liked discovering that Elizabeth Jennings wrote at least one poem attacking Mrs Thatcher 😊

Flying, not drowning

Zebras

No way I can compete with the major poetry publishers who get collections stocked by bricks-and-mortar bookshops But I do have word of mouth and all you wonderful people here on Bluesky, pushing the numbers of readers of Whatever You Do, Just Don't far beyond the sales of the big boys. Thank you!

Apparently not a leopard.😊

Flying, not drowning