8 quotes found
"Though few other countries had Britain's unique combination of advantages for a — island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic — almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for . In the , wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage."
"Seven years ago, I moved into a farm on a hill near Wales. Rise Farm was run by Bert and Alison Howell, a couple in their seventies whose son had gone to live in Spain and whose main source of assistance was now their two s – Bryn and a dog who for a long time I genuinely believed to be called Come Here You Useless Bugger. Rise was one of a declining number of small farms making the best of the high places in the , places which would once have represented a generous living but which now struggled by on rents, subsidy and the heart-attack price of lamb."
"At this time, in 2004, I am deaf. Not completely deaf, just down to about 30 per cent of normal hearing. I had started to lose my hearing in both ears about seven years ago and it has been declining ever since. I wear s in both ears and when I take them out, I can hear individual fragments of sound but not really the links between them. Certain words in a sentence or specific sounds are audible, but music is only a beat and a voice is just a chain of broken s."
"Any very loud may eventually damage or disrupt the and lead to the death of s, whether that's an always on full volume or . Sometimes that damage results in hearing loss and sometimes it results in , where true sound is replaced by sounds the brain itself has made. Some people hear hissing or fizzing or clicking, or a steady like an internal . Tinnitus can be loud or soft, constant or intermittent, but of all the different kinds of s it's often considered the worst because it covers over the sounds that people want to hear with a drizzle of sound that they don't."
"In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the . Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a where, thanks partly to a parallel and partly to the "bizarre" notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100 cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK."
"It seems that publishers have awakened to the realization that the history of technology can provide some very good stories. Six years ago we had 's colorful account of 's epic struggle to make a , . Now Bella Bathurst has made an excellent yarn out of the careers of the who built most of the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. The story was told with more solidity in 1978 by Craig Mair as A Star for Seamen. But not to worry: there is a splendid archive of Stevenson family material, much of it now in the , and Bathurst has drawn on this and other primary material to construct her story."
"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer, and she interweaves the story of her own experiences with imaginative research around hearing and sound. She interviews people who were and those who have , from army veterans to s to s. She visits an ear-splitting shipbuilders’ yard, and sits in an anechoic chamber; she interviews a professor of and an . In every chapter she comes up with gems of information. ... Bathurst’s story provides a satisfying narrative arc. After 12 years of her hearing gradually deteriorating, she was diagnosed with a disorder called , which can be cured by means of a delicate operation to the . Results are variable but in Bathurst’s case the operation was a success, and her hearing was almost completely recovered."
"Field Work’s aim is to broaden and insert nuance into our understanding of farming. Bathurst moves to live in a attached to Rise Farm, a 180-acre Welsh hill farm run by Bert and Alison Howell. ... Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her about the land. ... I thought often of ’s glorious agricultural novel All Among the Barley while reading Field Work. Partly it’s the engagement with a dying way of life. Partly it’s the fact that both books understand how important accurate and specific language is to bringing this rural existence alive on the page. Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her honestly and movingly about the land and their place within it. One passage, in which a young farmer describes night-time with her father, is among the loveliest pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere."