Mark Cocker and Jack Hargreaves
What was to be a straightforward review of Claxton by Mark Cocker turned into an appreciation of that bespectacled, bearded countryman of my childhood, Jack Hargreaves... CLAXTON by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape) I have an extremely loose and tenuous connection to Mark Cocker - he attended the University of East Anglia with my birding chum Nick Gardener, so I was aware of, and met the pre-fame version of his being some time in the late seventies/early eighties. As I suggested, tenuous... Cocker has gathered a selection of his observational writings (as a columnist for various newspapers and magazines) and placed them in monthly (then chronological) sequence. The title comes from the Norfolk village of Claxton which Cocker calls home and from where the majority of the observations made in the book were made. He is mostly known as an ornithologist but the breadth of subjects tackled between these covers ventures heavily into the world of the all-round naturalist - for every bird you w...