Simon Barnes Author and Journalist

June 8 The heronry is a couple of hundred yards away, on our neighbour’s land. I had taken on the job of counting the nests this year, because of lockdown: three definite nests in there and one probable. They were up there, high in the trees, big spreading structures of twigs and small branches. You… [Read More]

June 7 The thing about hares is that they are really good at running away. It’s the one big thing they know. Speed is at the heart of a hare’s world: the certainty that they can outrun and out-turn anything that lives. Turn a corner, enter a field with two or three hares in it:… [Read More]

June 6 There is a strange illusion that comes just before a thunderstorm. The sky has gone dark, but certain birds seem to have been lit up: caught in a single tiny spotlight of impossible candle-power, making the bird the one bright thing in a murky old world. Not just bright. Impossibly bright, glaringly, bright,… [Read More]

June 5 We are having a wild old social time during Lockdown. Every evening, round about six, we all meet up for Evening Drinks. All four of us who live in the house. It’s been a nice addition to routine: making a good thing out of being shut in together.  We are of course absurdly… [Read More]

June 4 There’s no excuse for ever doing a stroke of week here. I may have said that before… writing the words once again from a desk that overlooks seven or eight acres of Norfolk marsh, land we manage for wildlife. I was putting a together a piece for a newspaper when I was called… [Read More]

June 3 We are all heirs — and our inheritance comes to us in two ways. It comes in the genes we inherit from our parents and it comes in the culture we inherit from our parents and everybody else we encounter. I was always taught that the great division between humans and “animals” is… [Read More]

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]