The waves are gently rolling in, my hair feels crusty from salt water, and both those things make me happy. I’ll do my best to make you happy with this newsletter in return! (Although I am also going to share 3 books that I hope will profoundly depress you!)

A big thank you to everyone who filled in the form about how to improve my newsletter. Although much of it was inevitably contradictory (Make it shorter, you windbag! Make it longer, you shirker! You should charge for this, you fool! Stop asking for money, you charlatan!), I hope the small changes I’ve made today match the general consensus of requests. Thank you also to the 70 of you who help support these newsletters via Patreon (either monthly or annually) and keep the metaphorical lights on and the newsletters going out to 17,000 readers.

• Dervla Murphy, Ireland’s most intrepid and fearless travel writer has died aged 90. She was one of my earliest adventure inspirations, through her book Full Tilt, and I wrote a chapter about her in my book for children about my adventure heroes. I am sorry I never got to drink a pint of Guinness with her.
• If you’re feeling cheerful today, can I tempt you to become furious, frustrated, heartbroken and hopeless instead? (But then also hopeful and determined, too.) Three books I’ve read recently have really rocked me. The Trespasser’s Companion laments that we have the right to adventure through just 8% of England and 3% of our rivers. An Uninhabitable Earth warns that climate change is much, much worse than you think. And Regenesis is about the catastrophic way the world feeds itself.
• In a more cheerful vein, I made a short video about why I love running (and why I hope you might, too).
• The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape.
• I love this piece about a ludicrous 3100 mile race around a single city block! It captures so much of the allure of long, difficult, seemingly-pointless expeditions. “It offers no prize money, so those who enter the race are of a special sort: They are some of the world’s best athletes, but they are not sponsored, or famous, or anything other than willing to move and dwell in one place for an extended period of time.”

• Today we’re cheering on 82-year-old Gina Harris as sets off from cycling the length of Britain from Land’s End to John o’Groats.
• Charting Worlds: Five long reads about maps.
• Sign up for Atlas Obscura newsletters to discover unexpected stories and amazing places around the world.
• If you are a teacher looking for adventurers to come and speak in your school, there’s some great candidates here.
• A creative Instagram account that will make you smile.

Let me know if you have a relevant project that my readers would appreciate. Here’s what you guys have been up to recently:

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Cheers,

Alastair