Pun based title, when I think of one

... "with" William Fotheringham ! There, that, is a tiny part of how this book seeds tiny bits of mistrust throughout. (And beyond, as we will see.) Yes, there is a ghost writer at work; to be fair, it's not often that the presence of one is so upfront. It still nudges one into suspecting some image massaging. Overall my reading has been quite eclectic, but I must admit I've very rarely ventured into the sports genre. These books are almost always the work of journalists, which doesn't mean they're poorly written, not at all, but stylistically they tend to fall into a narrow range. William Fotheringham is a good writer, by the way, I've read some of his pieces in the Daily Telegraph if I remember correctly. As for other sports books, I certainly liked Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy , all about clubs and fans in odd places around the world; but the biographies, usually published to cash in on recent achievements, have been a bit lik...

The entertainment never stops! Yet another entry in this unique unmissable series on 'Finnish names for utterly ordinary birds'! Here's another temporary visitor to the pond up the hill. Except for a handful of mallards and moorhens, the pond is just a pitstop for birds having a short rest on their way to somewhere else. This one is known as the naurulokki in Finland, which sounds like it means 'laughing gull'. It's common, with 80,000-130,000 pairs there. It's Latin name is larus ridibundus , known in Britain as the black headed gull . Like the others I've recently featured, it's probably already gone. But past experience suggests there'll be more now and again, as the summer goes on. Who knows what else will turn up? As far as overall bird numbers is concerned, that's down to available food , and there won't be much until the fishermen return, the pond is restocked, people in general start feeding the ducks again and also the reeds...

I probably don't need to translate kanadanhanhi for you, but yes, kanadahanhi is the Finnish name for the  Canada Goose . I've just been up to the pond for my legal allowance of coronavirus exercise, and I was surprised to find another visitor, so soon after the tutkasotki/tufted duck . It's by itself and I'd be surprised if it hangs around. There are only a few mallards after all, and I assume there just isn't enough nutrition available. Also, in normal times, people often come and feed the ducks, but not at the moment. I often wonder why certain species thrive and others don't. True, we did give the Canada Goose a major free leg up when it was brought over here for ornamental purposes, but even so, you still have to take your opportunities, don't you? And this bird certainly did. I hadn't realised it had also got to Finland too. According to my Suomalainen Lintu-opas (Finnish Bird Guide), the kanadanhanhi only arrived there in 1964, and it now ...

Tukkasotka? Yes, it's become a bit of a thing for me now, to check whether a visitor to the pond up the hill is also familiar in Finland. As you can see, the tukkasotka is what we know as the tufted duck . It's not uncommon in either country; apparently they have between 100,000 and 150,000 breeding pairs, while in the UK it's "numerous" . It just so happens that I haven't seen one up on the pond before. Or two, because this looks like a pair. In general the wildlife there has diminished over the last year, so it's nice to see these birds around, however long they stay. The thing is, from what I understand, the ownership of the pond is up in the air, and there's even the possibility of it being filled in, which would be a bitter outcome because it's the one natural amenity visible between a new housing estate and the services area with MacDonalds, KFC, Starbucks etc which I've mentioned before. It's actually an outlier of the much la...

Yes, I have just finished reading Moby-Dick . This particular copy here, with JMW Turner's picture of whalers on the front. Not one of his best paintings, but the scene is roughly contemporary with Melville's great opus. It's a very thick volume, over 1,000 pages. The story itself makes up over 600 of them. The rest? Mostly the commentary , ie. notes on Melville's text, shedding light on all the references and allusions, on the extraordinary scope of the novel's vision. This great and famous American novel. Possibly one of the great unread novels, along with James Joyce's Ulysses , and that Stephen Hawking book, that guy who invented time (that's a Big Bang Theory joke). I've recently mentioned it to several friends, and the few who had tried reading it had all given up on it, even the Literature students. (I'm not going to cast any aspersions there - one time I was supposed to read Richardson's Clarissa , another standby of Lit courses, a...