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Red Sky at Night is full of fascinating country wisdom and facts.

Jane Struthers’ Red Sky at Night is a delightful compendium of countryside wisdom. Filled with fascinating facts, Red Sky at Night covers weather prediction, tea leaf reading and everything in between. The back cover asks whether you had “ever wondered how to navigate by the stars? Or wanted to attract butterflies to your garden? Is there a knack to building the perfect bonfire? And how exactly do you race a ferret?”. Now, I can honestly say that I’ve never wondered or wanted to do any of these things. That is, before I read this book.

In spite of being born in London, I’m really a country girl through and through. I physically need grass and actually don’t mind the smell of a farmyard, but I’m no countryside expert. I know the difference between a tree and a shrub… but my knowledge sort of ends there.

Reading Red Sky at Night, however, made me want to know more. This wonderfully evocative book, filled with instructions, lists, customs and old wives tales, aims to reconnect its readers with the world around them. Struthers’ book is painfully nostalgic for the Britain that existed before, as she puts it, “we went inside and turned on the TV”.

Nowadays we rely on weather girls and the internet to tell us whether we should wear flip-flops or a pac-a-mac, but a hundred years ago we would have been a lot more in tune with what the skies were telling us. Read Red Sky at Night and you’ll be able to identify high cloud from low cloud and determine whether that dark shadow on the horizon is signalling heavy rain or approaching cold weather. Keeping an eye on your surroundings could also prove infinitely useful when on a summer picnic; if daisies start to close up and all the bees and butterflies disappear, it’s time you did too.

Now, though I’ve saluted a fair few magpies in my time, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an especially superstitious person. But after reading Struthers’ Red Sky at Night, I’m afraid to say I’ve adopted a few strange habits. I’ve started throwing salt over my shoulder, bashing holes in empty egg shells, and feeling strangely suspicious of owls.

These are the notions and traditions that our fore fathers lived by. Old wives tales were the old fashioned equivalent of the NHS website, folklore were our ancestors’ version of online dating and the stars, when understood, are as good as a satnav. If you’ve ever argued over the true rules to Pooh sticks (If you’ve never played… you really really should) or worried that you’ve hung a horse shoe the wrong way round (Keep it pointing upwards or all the luck will fall out) Red Sky at Night is definitely for you. After reading Struthers’ book you’ll know how to tell if an egg is fresh, how to brew your own beer, and which flowers make the best honey.  You never know, sometime in the future I might take to bee keeping, start making my own jam or dabble in a bit of harmless witchcraft… and this book will certainly be the first I reach for.

Red Sky at Night, RRP. £7.99, is published by Ebury Press and is available now online and in bookstores.

 Ellie Walker-Arnott

Extract from The Book of Universes

John D. Barrow

1. Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

“I know it’s all in our minds, but a mind is a powerful thing.”

–  Colin Cotterill

Two men walking

“I am always surprised when a young man tells me he wants to work at cosmology; I think of cosmology as something that happens to one, not something one can choose.”

– William H. McCrea

The old gentleman walking down the street looked the same as ever – distinguished but slightly dishevelled, in a Bohemian style, a slow-walking European on an American main street, sad-faced, purposeful but not quite watching where he was going, always catching the attention of the locals as he made his way politely through the shoppers and the contra-flow of students late for lectures. Everyone seemed to know who he was, but he avoided everyone’s gaze.

Today, he had a new companion, very tall and stockily built, a little the worse for wear, untidy but in a different way to his companion. They were both deep in conversation as they made their way, walking and talking, oblivious of the shop windows beside them. The older man listened thoughtfully, sometimes frowning gently; his younger companion enthusiastically pressing his point, occasionally gesticulating wildly, talking incessantly. Neither spoke native English but their accents were quite different, revealing resonances with many places. Intent on crossing the street, they stopped, lingering at the kerbside as the traffic passed. The traffic lights changed and they continued quietly across the street, both momentarily concentrating on light, sound and relative motion.

Suddenly, something happened. The taller man started to say something again, making a dart of his hand. The traffic was moving again now but the old man had stopped, dead in his tracks, oblivious to the cars and the hurrying pedestrians. His companion’s words had consumed his thoughts entirely. The cars roared past on both sides leaving the two of them marooned in their midst like a human traffic island. The old man was deep in thought, the younger one reiterating his point. Eventually, resuming contact with the moving world around them, but forgetful of where they had been going, the older man led them silently towards the pavement – the one they had stepped off a minute ago – and they walked and talked their way from whence they had come, lost in this new thought.

The two men had been talking about universes. The place was Princeton, New Jersey, and the time was during the Second World War. The younger man was George Gamow, or ‘Gee-Gee’ to his friends, a Russian émigré to the United States. The older man was Albert Einstein. Einstein had spent the previous thirty years showing how we could understand the behaviour of whole universes with simple maths. Gamow saw that those universes must have had a past that was unimaginably different to the present. What had stopped them both in their tracks was Gamow’s suggestion that the laws of physics could describe something being created out of nothing. It could be a single star; but it might be an entire universe!

Funny things, universes

“History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.”

– Konrad Adenauer

What is the universe? Where did it come from? Where is it heading? These questions sound simple but they are amongst the most far-reaching that have ever been posed. Depending upon how much you know, there are many answers to the question of what we mean by ‘universe’. Is it just everything you can see out in space – perhaps with the space in between thrown in for good measure? Or is it everything that physically exists? When you draw up the list of all those things to include in ‘everything’ you start to wonder about those ‘things’ that the physicists call the ‘laws of Nature’ and other intangibles like space and time. Although you can’t touch or see them, you can feel their effects, they seem pretty important and they seem to exist – a bit like the rules of football – and we had better throw them in as well. And what about the future and the past? Just focusing on what exists now seems a bit exclusive. And if we include everything that has ever existed as part of the universe, why not include the future as well? This seems to leave us with the definition that the universe is everything that has existed, does exist and will ever exist.

If we were feeling really pedantic we might take an even grander view of the universe, which includes not only everything that can exist but also everything that could exist – and finally, even that which cannot exist. Some medieval philosophers were drawn to this sort of completeness, adding everything that has existed, does exist and will not exist to the catalogue of what was, is and will be. This approach seems bent upon creating new problems in an area where there are enough already. Yet recently it has re-emerged in modern studies of the universe, albeit in a slightly different guise. Modern cosmologists are not only interested in the structure and history of our universe but also in the other types of universe that might have been. Our universe has many special and (to us at least) surprising properties that we want to evaluate in order to see if they could have been otherwise. This means that we have to be able to produce examples of ‘other’ universes so as to carry out comparisons.

This is what modern cosmology is all about. It is not just an exercise in describing our universe as completely and as accurately as possible. It seeks to place that description in a wider context of possibilities than the actual. It asks why our universe has some properties and not others. Of course, we might ultimately discover that there is no other possible universe (whose structure, contents, laws, age and so forth are different in a way we can conceive of) apart from the one we see. For a long time, cosmologists were rather expecting – even hoping – that would turn out to be the case. But recently the tide has been flowing in the opposite direction and we seem to be faced with many different possible universes, all consistent with Nature’s laws. And, to cap it all, these other universes may not be only possibilities:  they may be existing in every sense that we attribute to ordinary things like you and me, here and now.

John Barrow

John D. Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the current Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. He is the author of many highly acclaimed books about the cosmology, and The Book of Universes was published by Bodley Head on February 3rd 2011, priced £20.

Litro First Look

Extract from Across Many Mountains

Yangzom Brauen

1. Trapped

For fear of Chinese soldiers, they only dared walk through the freezing nights, with no light to guide them but the stars. The mountains were black towers before the dark sky. The group, numbering a dozen or so, had set out shortly before the Tibetan New Year festival, which, like the beginning of the Chinese calendar, usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice. New Year was deemed the best time to escape. The high passes were covered in snow, and icy winds whistled across them, but the snow was frozen hard at night and was sometimes even stable by day, in contrast to the warm season, when trekkers sank knee or navel-deep into a mixture of snow, ice, water, mud and scree. It was common knowledge that the Chinese border guards preferred to keep warm in their barracks during the winter rather than go on patrol in the biting cold. Everybody agreed that the soldiers would sooner spend the New Year festival, the most important Chinese holiday, celebrating, drinking and playing cards than doing their actual duties.

My mother Sonam’s heart beat wildly as she struggled to keep up with the adults. She was only six years old.

Soon they caught sight of danger looming in the distance. In the valley far below their path, they saw large, brightly lit buildings. They could only be housing Chinese soldiers; Tibetans had no such huge and uniformly built houses as these, with such bright lights. Shouting voices, crashes of music, laughter, sometimes terrifying screams emanated from the buildings, echoing off the mountain. The Chinese soldiers loved chang, Tibetan beer made from barley, and they presumably had plentiful supplies. The sounds Sonam heard were blood-curdling, like a herd of wild beasts gathering in the distance. But her mother whispered to soothe her. ‘It’s good that they’re celebrating,’ she said. ‘They won’t come up here if they’re cosy and warm and drunk.’

The refugees’ path was narrow and stony and barely visible in the darkness. Often the group had to pick their way through thorny scrub and fields of scree, and then carry on between low trees. The roots of the trees protruded from the ground, tripping them up, and the dry branches scraped their hands and faces. All of them were covered in scratches, their feet bleeding and their clothes torn. The higher they climbed, the more often they had to cross snowfields.

It was the winter of 1959, the same year the Dalai Lama went into exile and a prophecy made by Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, was being fulfilled in a terrible way. This ostensibly 1,200-year-old prophecy says: ‘When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth and Buddhist teachings will reach the land of the red man.’ The iron birds, or Chinese planes, were flying over our land, and the horses on wheels, or Chinese trains, had brought troops to the border, forcing my mother and grandparents to set out on a perilous journey.

Although the Chinese had invaded and occupied our land in 1950, it was not until years later that they dropped their initial false friendliness and began systematically arresting, torturing and imprisoning Tibetans, especially Buddhist monks and nuns, and aristocrats. As my grandmother was a nun and my grandfather a monk, they were in great danger. Their monastery was attacked and pillaged by Chinese soldiers. The Chinese ran riot in the village below the monastery. They dragged aristocrats across the village square by their hair and beat them, made them clean latrines, destroyed their houses, stole their sacred statues and gave their land to the peasants. They stole livestock, hurled insults at venerable lamas and trampled on centuries-old village traditions. It was this barbarism that made my grandmother Kunsang Wangmo and my grandfather Tsering Dhondup decide to flee to India with my mother Sonam Dolma and her four-year-old sister.

They planned to cross the Himalayas on foot, with little money and no idea of the trials and tribulations they would meet along the way. They were equipped with nothing but home-made leather shoes, woollen blankets, a large sack of tsampa – ground-up roasted barley – and the certainty that escaping to the country that had taken in the Dalai Lama was their sole chance of survival. This conviction was based solely on their unshakeable faith. My grandparents couldn’t speak any Indian language, they knew not a single person on the Indian subcontinent and they hadn’t the slightest idea of what awaited them – apart from the knowledge that the Dalai Lama, whom they had never seen in their lives but who for them was the supreme authority, had been granted asylum there.

My mother’s shoes were hardly adequate footwear for climbing mountains in the winter. The smooth leather soles slid across the snow, sending her slipping or falling to the ground every few feet. The snow gradually soaked through the roughly-sewn seams, making the hay she had stuffed into her shoes in place of socks cold and slimy. She wanted only to sit down and cry, but she had to concentrate all her willpower on placing her feet, one step at a time, into the footprints left by the adults ahead of her. Just don’t get left behind, she repeated to herself. She knew it would be the end of her.

Yangzom Brauen

Yangzom Brauen is an actress and political activist. Born in 1980 to a Swiss father and Tibetan mother, she lives in both Los Angeles and Berlin and has appeared in a number of German and American films. She is also very active in the Free Tibet movement, making regular radio broadcasts about Tibet and organising public demonstrations against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Across Many Mountains will be published by Harvill Secker at £16.99 on 3rd March 2011.

You can read our exclusive Q&A with Yongzom by visiting our Author Q&A section, or by following the link below:

Litro Q&A with Yangzom Brauen

Tracey Cox is an international expert in sex, body language and relationships and is well known not only for her best-selling books on relationships and sex, but as a TV presenter.

What is your earliest childhood memory?

Walking down the street from playing with a childhood friend and feeling utterly humiliated because I’d peed my pants. I was convinced everyone walking past would be able to tell.

What makes you happy?

Lots and lots of things. Writing. Being with friends. Snuggling up with my boyfriend to watch a great film. A fantastic book. Food. Great wine. Sex. The list is endless.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

I can remember ever not wanting to write. Even as a little girl my favourite thing to do was make up stories. Writing is like a drug for me. I go into a lovely trancelike state and get completely engrossed.

What are you reading at the moment?

I have just finished ‘The Cloning of Joanna May’ by Fay Weldon. It was up to her usual standard of brilliance.

What advice would you give to a first time writer?

Write the way you speak. So many people are great storytellers but then freeze when they try to put pen to paper. Try dictating it, then transcribing.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

It used to be cigarettes but I gave up a month ago. I’m still smoking in my imagination though.

How do you relax?

The worst way possible – by having a drink!

What is your favourite book?

I don’t have a favourite. There are so many talented writers out there it’s impossible to choose. I do love Siri Hustvedt though. Anything by her would be up there.

Which author is underrated or deserves to be better-known?

Zoe Heller. ‘Notes on a Scandal’ was amazing and I loved ‘The Believers’ as well.

What’s the worst job you’ve had?

I was a DJ at my brother-in-laws restaurant when I was growing up. I was absolutely dreadful. The clientele was mid 50s and I was 20 and played all top 40 stuff – really loudly. I cringe when I think about it. No wonder he sacked me in the end.

What is the most important thing life has taught you?

The past can dictate the present and the future if you let it. You have to fight any past demons and stomp on them continually.

Find out more about Tracey at www.traceycox.com