Simon Barnes Author and Journalist

June 2 Gary has been back with his tractor. He’s mowed the paths that run around our eight acres of Norfolk marsh. Done a great job. It makes an extraordinary difference to the place. The idea is that the marsh runs wild, so that marsh harriers can hunt over and deer can lie up in… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 9 Our guests had gone ahead of us, all save one; Jane did the last leg with us. She, Chris and I were the last ones to fly out of North Luangwa National Park: heading by light aircraft down to the South Park where we would all spend the last… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 8 Here are two subjects to avoid when you are in conversation with me. The first is human exceptionalism, and the second is haiku. That’s if you have any ambition of making this a dialogue. Once either subject comes up, I am likely to go spiralling off into a monologue:… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 7 You travel hours and days to get here. You spend two weeks walking, sitting, driving, thinking, looking, listening. And sometimes the thing you came here for – the experience you had been seeking for months, for years, all your life – lasts for perhaps three seconds. Or less. When… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 6 Throughout human history there have been increasingly frenzied attempts to find things that separate human and non-human animals for all time. Tool use? No. Tool-making, then? No, not that, either. Culture? Sorry, no, that doesn’t work. So what about religion? But some of the more intense studies of apes… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 5, Part 2 At the end of the walk we sat on the banks of the Mwaleshi River in North Luangwa national Park. The idea was sundowners, but the sun was already as down as it was going to get; we had been delayed by kudu, three fine males with… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 5, part 1 I heard a leopard in the night: the roar that sounds like a saw. It’s a good sound to hear: you congratulate yourself on picking it out, and you go back to sleep easily, because it doesn’t have that menacing quality of a pride-chorus of lions.  You… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 4, part 2 It’s about this stage of the trip that our guests start to realise that one of the finest things this kind of safari offers was not mentioned in the brochure. It couldn’t be. It’s not only impossible to describe, it’s different for every single person. Time. Time… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 4 Many years ago, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in the course of their 60s television programme Not Only… But Also, used to put on their cloth caps and morph into Dud and Pete. Funny, I thought, funny… so they always said, anyway, and on one of these occasions they… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 3 It’s different in the north. We made the 30 minute hop by light aircraft from South Luangwa National Park in Zambia to North Luangwa National Park, a place that gets no more than 500 visitors a year. So naturally things are different. They still don’t know what to make… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 2, part 2 Telling a Bob story is always a challenge. And on every trip to Zambia, there comes a time – there come several times – when Bob stories have to be told to our guests. He is the hero of a thousand camp-fire tales; he’s also the hero… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 2 Our guests were now all settled in the splendid riverside accommodation at Tafika. Chris and I were in staff quarters, but this time we were sharing a small house, and it was great. The walls of the separate rooms didn’t reach the top – there was a metal roof… [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 1, part 2 I had to make a decision on behalf of our guests, and all I had done so far was say hello and welcome. I had to take a punt on what kind of guests they were and why they had chosen to come to the Luangwa Valley. … [Read More]

Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 1 Try and get there before the guests. At least a day. Like a good warm-up before the big match: get your eye in, get your ear in, get tuned in to the sights and sounds of the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. So we – that’s me and Chris, co-leader… [Read More]

It was the 26th day of Wild June and I was running out of days to be wild on. But there I was, catching a train to London even though it was promising to be lovely weather. Even the Stour estuary seemed short on wildness that morning: just a cloud or crowd of gull and… [Read More]

Wild June is best enjoyed from the back of a horse. Like most other months. We had walked down the shallow slope to the flood-plain and as we reached the grassy path we rolled into a canter without discussing the matter, for Miakoda, my American Paint mare, knows both the place and the routine as… [Read More]

22nd of July

f you sit out in a wild place with a birder, birds will be noted, no matter how big the subject you are discussing. You could even be talking about England’s chances in the women’s World Cup or England’s defeat in the cricket World Cup — but if a nice bird appears, it will be… [Read More]

A butterfly mind. To us, that means silly, inconstant, flighty, unable to concentrate on one thing for more than a second, always flying off to look at something more interesting – and then going back to the first thing, or maybe another even newer thing.  I seem to have spent most of this Wild June… [Read More]