A long-awaited biography of the late, great writer, environmentalist and moat-dipper [...] This is a mightily accomplished biography [...] a skilful piece of theatre"

Barkham S James". Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers . http://dove.cccbr.org.uk/detail.php?searchString=Barkham&DoveID=BARKHAM . Retrieved 17 July 2010. From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: Barkham said: “Roger is one of the most interesting members of the most distinctive and compelling generation that ever lived – those who came of age in the 1960s and brought about a cultural, sexual, musical and ultimately environmental revolution. It has been a joy to inhabit Roger’s world and listen to the memories of so many of his generation. I hope I’ve given true voice to the spirit, the love and the struggles of Roger and his friends here.” Like many readers, I imagined he would be a dream dinner party guest but, in the end, I never met him – he died, suddenly, aged just 63, in 2006. For years, I enjoyed his writing but also pondered the distinctiveness of his generation and its value – my parents were the same age and, like Roger, had moved at the end of the 60s to seek a new kind of life in the East Anglian countryside.

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Brodie, Antonia; Felstead, Alison; Franklin, Jonathan et al., eds. (2001). Directory of British Architects 1834–1914, A–K. London & New York: Continuum. p.375. ISBN 0-8264-5513-1. What we have to decide is whether life is a little, cautious, grasping affair, or whether it is wonderful’. There is a picture in The Swimmer of Roger as a toddler sitting in a pram staring at some pigeons. He is frowning with the intensity of it and a line of adult men stand behind admiringly. The present manor house is a late 18th century [2 ] Georgian building of two wings of differing dates. [4 ] Barkham had two moated farm-houses. [2 ] One of these survives, having been divided into two cottages. [2 ] The Swimmer is a new book on the writer Roger Deakin; a well known character and formative influence on wild swimming and nature writing. It charts Deakin's life from school days, all the way to his untimely death at the age of 63. If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us

A] remarkable book, an extraordinary insight [...] The Swimmer is an unconventional biography of an unconventional person [...] A tapestry-like life of the influential nature writer"Bell Founders". Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers . http://dove.cccbr.org.uk/founders.php . Retrieved 17 July 2010. There is a sense that Roger was making notes for a memoir throughout his life. The set pieces in his notebooks about his childhood; his uncle Laddie, the anarchist and Grandpa Wood; and at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hampstead school, the camps at Beaulieu Road organised by Barry Goater, the biology teacher’ who infected us all with his wild enthusiasm’. It surfaces again in 1975 at 23 Queen’s Gardens in London after he had left Cambridge and worked as an Ad Man for a few years — ‘the flat of a rampant entrepreneur’, where friends (chums) came and went and Roger earned enough money to decide what he really wanted to do. After a desert island trip to Formentera he thought he knew. Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues, lovers and neighbours. The earliest known record of the Church of England parish church of Saint James [5 ] dates from 1220. [2 ] However, the present church building was built in 1860-61 [4 ] or 1862. [2 ] It was designed in a 13th century Gothic Revival style [2 ] by the architects J.B. Clacy and Son [4 ] of Reading. [6 ] The chancel and transepts were added [4 ] or rebuilt [2 ] in 1887. The bell-tower has a ring of four bells cast in 1863 by John Warner and Sons [7 ] of Cripplegate in the City of London. [8 ]

I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it. Simon Prosser, publishing director, acquired world volume rights, including audio and serial, to The Swimmer from agent Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown Associates, now at CAA. It will publish on 25th May 2023.

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He would love to see more green spaces for all children to play, with everyone, whether growing up in the countryside, town or city, living just a short walk from mini reserves. The resulting Frankenstein’s narrative is in some places intercut with verbatim contributions from Deakin’s friends – ‘chums’, invariably – and acquaintances. Barkham explains that these testimonies ‘provide multiple interpretations of the same events, and cast doubt on the idea of life as one simple flow’. For a little while, there’s some fun to be had here, as this or that romantic recollection butts up against some other chum’s flat contradiction. ‘My childhood unfolded during an era of austerity … Money was a constant worry for my parents,’ says Barkham as Deakin, only for Deakin’s cousin John to chip in: ‘He never went without, I’m sure of that … I remember an awful lot of stuff at their house.’ Later we hear about the Waterlog launch party, which was either ‘a buzzy, great event’ where ‘we did really naughty swimming’ or a not ‘really riotous evening’ where ‘we were all standing around rather awkwardly’. Let’s create more,” he said. “We are not going to take prime farmland. With regenerative farming you can have a good business and care about the land. Another prominent farming family, that of Ball, is erroneously said to be that of George Washington's mother, Mary Ball Washington. They lived in the parish from the late 15th to the mid-17th century, but William Ball, the man once thought to have emigrated to Virginia and become Mary's great grandfather, actually died in London and his family lived in the East Berkshire area for at least two more generations. [3 ]

The last Act covers the funeral and the memorial a year later at Walnut Tree Farm. Everyone made a contribution, names which are familiar to me now, eloquent and deeply, deeply moving in their recollections. Most of all, Rufus Deakin saying “Tony Axon and Robert Macfarlane made the best speeches. Mum (Jenny), Margot and Serena got up together and spoke together which made me cry” (me, too). These are the three women with whom Roger experienced the longest, most ecstatic and most painful relationships.

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Deakin likened the tendrils of the tumour that killed him to tree roots penetrating his brain and lived just long enough to be delighted by the concept of the wood wide web, a fitting mycelial metaphor for his relentless urge to make connections of his own. That mission has outlasted him, and this extraordinary insight into his life will lend new complexity and reach to the network. My dad could name every species of bird and every plant, he seemed to be a wildlife superman, but he didn’t have superpowers with butterflies. We learned about them together.” Roger was best known as a wild swimmer but he was much more besides. He was an ad man in Swinging Soho who moonlit as an upcycler selling stripped pine furniture to hipsters (including a young Judi Dench) on Portobello Road; he embraced self-sufficiency in Suffolk then became an inspirational English teacher; he was a filmmaker, a musical impresario, and he co-founded Common Ground, a prescient environmental charity which championed “ordinary” nature – verges, hedgerows, orchards. Despite finding the role that best suited his creative mind in his 50s – a writer – he never published another book in his lifetime, succumbing to a brain tumour that quietly grew as he struggled to finish a book about trees, Wildwood, which was published after his death. The toponym "Barkham" is derived from the Old English bercheham [2 ] meaning "birch home" referring to the birch trees on the edge of Windsor Forest. [3 ] The name evolved via forms including Berkham' in the 14th century and Barcombe in the 18th century. [2 ]