18 September

“…my eye fell on a news story about an unresolved murder; a torso of an African boy had been found in the Thames and, after several years of forensic research, they had been able to track down the region of Africa from which he had come. They had analysed the build-up of minerals in his bones, accumulated in minuscule quantities from the water he drank and the food he ate. It was powerful material evidence of how we are, literally, made by place. This sense of place is not just a product of imagination and memory, it is also physical; the elements of the land, its rocks, earth and water, are measured in our bones.” — The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre by Madeleine Bunting