Skip to main content

Why there's a buzz about Helen Jukes' beekeeping memoir

Ground down by office work, the author took up beekeeping to find a new purpose … and love. She explains why honeybees are good counsellors

‘I was facing the bees, but I also ended up facing myself in that relationship, and once you begin facing stuff maybe things begin opening up.” The writer Helen Jukes trails off, shrugs apologetically. “I’m being really inarticulate about this and I’m not sure why.” She’s happy enough to talk about the bees she kept in her back garden, to explore the changing symbolism of the hive throughout the ages. But when the conversation shifts to the relationship whose first steps she charts in her memoir, she’s not sure what to say. “I’m a bit wary about it being billed as a love story. It’s true, all of this stuff did happen, but I haven’t quite found the right words to describe it.”

The story of this burgeoning relationship is only one strand of her captivating debut, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings. In it, Jukes charts how a year spent looking after a beehive helped her throw off the deadening grind of her working life and reconnect with friendship and the natural world. As the bees buzzed back and forth, her growing fascination with the changing rituals of the insects living in her garden offered new perspectives both on her job and everything outside the office walls. What she saw when she lifted off the lid of the hive was so alien that by looking at them intently she became steadily more attuned to her own humanity.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LyAUcl
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more