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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts
One November morning, Tom Jeffreys set off from Euston Station with
a gnarled old walking stick in his hand and an overloaded rucksack.
His aim was to walk the 119 miles from London to Birmingham along
the proposed route of HS2. Needless to say, he failed. Over the
course of ten days of walking, Jeffreys meets conservationists and
museum directors, ery farmers and suicidal retirees. From a rapidly
changing London, through interminable suburbia, and out into the
English countryside, Jeffreys goes wild camping in Perivale, ees
murderous horses in Oxfordshire, and gets lost in a land ll site in
Buckinghamshire. Signal Failure weaves together poetry and
politics, history, philosophy and personal observation to form an
extended exploration of people and place, nature, society, and the
future. In part, Signal Failure is the story of the author's
multiple shortcomings - his inability to understand the city he
lives in, to forge a meaningful relationship with his home-county
hometown, to emulate those great nature writers he admires so much,
to put up a tent or read a map.It is also a wide-ranging critique
of humanity's most urgent failures: of capitalism, of community, of
the city and the suburbs, of architecture and agriculture, of
bureaucratic democracy, and, in the end, of our age-old failure to
nd our place in the world we live in.
My name is Julian Reid, a gardener from Wiltshire, UK. The title of
this book, Totally Unexpected Poems, is based on my experiences,
from things that have happened to me, things I have seen or
listened to and people I have met throughout my life.
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