Tim Dee

Tim Dee is a BBC radio producer. His most recent book is Four Fields, about a fen field in Cambridgeshire, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie battlefield in Little Bighorn and a meadow in Chernobyl.

There​ was a primed plastic water pistol, yellow or green, on every table at Derek Walcott’s 84th birthday lunch at the Ladera hotel on the west coast of St Lucia. The Walcott entourage had taken over the restaurant and after we’d dined on saltfish with green bananas, the staff gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a...

Diary: Twitching

Tim Dee, 11 March 2010

From the first time I first looked through a pair of binoculars, aged seven, I wanted to be a bird-spotter, even though I’d picked the binoculars up because I was a bird-lover, intrigued by the ways birds’ paths crossed with mine. Nowadays bird-spotters are known as birders while bird-lovers are more commonly called birdwatchers. In terms of etymology and ornithology, there is...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences