Sweet Thames Run Softly

”If ever there was a saint on earth before me it was my father.” You do have to be careful reading this delightful yarner, although generally he holds to the truth with his history and research. Gibbings was, at the time of writing this book, already appearing on early television and with a war and several careers behind him, was now a senior lecturer at Reading University. He had travelled extensively …”over 50,000 miles on salt water” … when he decided to build a small punt and float down the upper Thames, from source to … well, back to his old home again as he fished out at Chelsea.

As he drifts, he muses and writes and produces those startlingly good woodcuts of his, and he looks and listens. From his gentle floating show more then we get this quiet charming book that wanders with his Celtic wit from bees to Greek fables. He actually packs a microscope aboard to inspect the smallest life he can find in the river’s mud.

Reading Gibbings on nature and the plants, insects and wildlife he discovers is like listening to one of the Bartrams, the great American father and son botanists, perhaps Puc-puggee himself but with his 18th century English updated into a more modern tongue. On hunting and big game fishing – both pursuits of which he was guilty of following when younger … ”By all means, Gibbings says, let us kill for food. I am even in favour of a mild form of cannibalism when necessary”!

There are several other touches of his “Oirish” wit among the clear facts of river wildlife, history of the villages and characters and several cheerfully suspicious yarns that must also be true, for, as he says “did I not just invent it myself?” show less