New Thoughts on Place, Community and Culture
October 26, 2026Reading time: 5 minutes
Since I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival, I have been reading three very different books dealing with the intersections of place, migration, difference and connection. My current preoccupations fall somewhere in the overlap between these books, which I can't recommend highly enough.
The Book of Mysteries: Wild Time and the Ritual Year Rebecca Tamás, Pushkin Press
I have looked out for anything by Rebecca Tamás since an article she wrote for the White Review about magical language and feminism, and The Book of Mysteries was on my TBR list before it even hit the printers. I am not disappointed. Based on the wheel of the year, it deals with rituals of connection in folk culture, and though it centres mostly (not exclusively) on English events, she draws on a very wide base of scholarship, and most importantly, lets indigenous cultures speak in their own voices. It operates on a personal level, philosophical and psychological, arguing convincingly that the remedy for our current malaise is connection, both to the earth and to our communities, and it is enacted by rituals – personal, or spiritual rituals, of meaning to individuals, but also communal and celebratory rituals like the Beltane festival in Edinburgh, or the solstice celebrations at Stonehenge. The research is through, and wide-ranging, as I expected. What came as a surprise, however, was the beauty and clarity of the writing, and the careful construction of the book. It is poetic even more than academic.
Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain Zakia Sewell Hodder Press
Zakia Sewell’s book is a more relaxed read, more journalistic, more concerned with the political and social. Of Celtic and Caribbean heritage herself, her take on a connection to a country currently dealing with its identity primarily by means of racism and insularity is complicated. Her writing is lively, both individual and urgent, but neither polemical nor angry, and the book is a delightful read. Inspired by an early enthusiasm for the music of Pentangle (which I shared, though in a previous generation), she discovers a vibrant and inclusive British culture, that has always been open to renewal from outside, that is as willing to embrace the strange as it is to cherish the familiar, and that allows new celebrations and communities to emerge from the melding of the new with the traditional. She doesn't flinch from the latent (and occasionally overt) racism in some folk traditions, but she successfully establishes her opinion that the folk scene has much more to offer than nativist nostalgia.
The New Eden: Wildlife in the City and Discovering our Shared Home JC Niala Gaia
A big strand of Comrades of Dark Night was about sharing space with other living creatures (whether other generations, other nationalities or other species), so the questions raised by this book matter a lot to me. However, JC Niala is head of Research at the History of Science Museum in Oxford, and as I am not a scientist, I was at first a little intimidated, and wary of whether I would find myself on the same wavelength. I need not have been. A bubbly, warm personality emerges, as full of wit and humour as well-ordered and dexterously handled learning. She writes about the kinds of creatures we share our living spaces with, yes, including rats and pigeons and snakes, and, at one point, even lions. She draws from the experience of Kenya particularly, but also Japan, New York and London, and this is a useful reminder of how provincial our ecological perspective has become in this country. In particular, the discussion of how Masai hunters have adapted their attitudes to hunting lions has made me think a bit more about our attitudes towards deerstalking in Scotland. She reminds us that we, and the animals who live closest to us, have become adept at finding ways to share spaces and lifestyles, and that this is to our advantage.
In other reading, have also been inspired by recent publications by Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Alice Oswald, but poetry will have to wait until next time, when I want to think about how we approach poetry in a time of fire.
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