In conversation with Tim Frenneaux

Harriet Matthews: Thank you so much, Tim, for joining me on the Settle to Carlisle Line.

Tim: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Harriet: Can you start by introducing yourself?

Tim: My name's Tim Frenneaux. I am a bookseller, and I curate a book club called Adventurous Ink. It’s all about travel, nature, adventure, philosophy, poetry - all the good stuff. I also work as a regenerative business designer. I help people in business go beyond sustainability and do the inner work of sustainability practice. The two things sort of come together. I’ve curated the book club for the past decade, which has been amazing.

Harriet: Can you tell us what Adventurous Ink is and how it began?

Tim: Adventurous Ink is a seasonal book club to help people reconnect with themselves, each other, and the rest of the natural world. Four times a year, once each season, I choose two or three books for our subscribers. Hundreds of people trust me to choose them a book. It’s such a cool thing.

We all read the book, and then at the end of the season we get together with the author and talk about it.

Harriet: How does slowness fit into your work, and what do you think is driving the shift towards our cultural openness to slowing down?

Tim: I think it's people reconsidering what's important and really reacting against the pace of the modern world. We've gone through cycles of this. You can see it with the romantic poets at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Then there was the boom of national parks — people like John Muir saying that over-civilised people needed to rediscover what wilderness was all about.

Now, when we've got social media and AI and all those things that make us so busy, people are starting to appreciate actual stuff like books again. It is a completely different way of being in the moment. I think that's what people are looking for: ways of being in the moment. It's not about knowing stuff, it's about being.

Harriet: How does Adventurous Ink tap into that sense of ‘being’ you mentioned?

Tim: The thing I always think about our authors is that they've got this magical way of distilling their experience and their insights down into words. Particularly with travel writing and adventure writing, the authors often have this experience of adventure. They'll be walking or cycling, or travelling on a journey, and that gives them time to work things through.

Claire Nelson says walking is a way of metabolising her emotions, which is a beautiful way of capturing what happens when you take something slowly and steadily. Authors put all that down in a book, and then anyone can pick it up and be transported to that place.

The special thing about reading is that it draws out experience. You're immersed in that experience much longer than watching a film or listening to a podcast, and you get to enjoy it and reflect on it in a much deeper way.

As a book club, what we are trying to do is bring everyone together with the author so that we can talk about what they were trying to capture.

Harriet: How does this relate to your understanding of slow travel?

Tim: I think books and slow travel really do the same sort of thing. It's that slower, more reflective, more immersive way of being in a place.

Whenever I go somewhere, I'll always try to read some books about it before I go. It's like the anticipation. Not just the planning of it, but reading around it and hearing the stories of the place and the people, so that when you get there, the experience is much deeper. There's no better time to read a book than when you're on a train.

I think there's something really special about travel and adventure books in how they help you connect with other people. You’ll often find with travel writing an experience of being welcomed in. Judgments and preconceptions get dismantled, and the concept of the ‘other’ dissolves.

Harriet: How does being an advocate for slowness affect how you move through the world?

Tim: It’s an honour to be on Team Slow. I love Team Slow. And I changed my life to be on Team Slow.

I’m able to go for the same walk in the woods next to my house with the dog every morning. And every morning is different. So I don't have to do that one big trip a year. I can get a lot out of any experience, whether it is somewhere completely new or somewhere that I’m much more familiar with, because each time you go, it changes. Books, and observing the way that authors observe the world, has made me change the way I observe the world.

You can't go and "do" a place. All you can do is try and "be" in a place. And there's such a difference between being and doing. “Doing” is very much like, "I saw this on Instagram, and I wanted to come and experience it." So you drive there, and you go, "Oh yeah, tick, I've got that picture." And then onto the next thing. That is doing it. It's not being. You've not been in that place. You've just done that place.

Harriet: Does your slow philosophy affect the way you practically run Adventurous Ink?

Tim: When I first started the book club, we did a book a month, but it was exhausting for me. So then I started grouping them into two books every two months, and then eventually slowed right down. Now we just do eight books a year, four times a year - two books each season. That feels like the right sort of cadence, so readers can really engage with the work, sit with it, and think about anything they might like to ask the author.

Reading should never be about having to read it. It's got to be something that you come to at your own pace. Slowing down also meant that we sent fewer books each year, and we use less packaging. The outward manifestation of how the book club works is a manifestation of my inner state and my slowing down.

Harriet: Can you see any interesting trends in the contemporary literature you are featuring?

Tim: About a decade ago there was a real shift to these new nature writers. You had the likes of Helen Macdonald with H is for Hawk, Amy Liptrot with The Outrun, Robert Macfarlane with all of the books that Robert Macfarlane just spews out in his beautiful way. I could see that people needed these kinds of books.

Ten years on, as the world has changed, a lot of writers are trying to understand this moment that we are living through. We see more systems thinking starting to work its way through. There’s more reflection on colonialism, nationalism, and all the other parts of what's happening in this moment.

We’ve also featured quite a few poets recently. There’s something about people trying to take the essence of an experience and translate it in a way that is felt. We featured a beautiful book by James A. Pearson called The Wilderness That Bears Your Name. I think more people are open to poetry when it's introduced in the right way. It’s been such a privilege to be able to do that for so many Adventurous Ink readers. 

Harriet: What travel experiences have shaped you?

Tim: I came here a lot with my dad. He introduced me to the natural world. He absolutely loved train journeys. His dad was a train guard, and we grew up in Doncaster, which is a big train place.

I remember we did a holiday in Scotland and we were in Inverness, and he said, "Tomorrow we're gonna go to Kyle of Lochalsh on the train." It sounded really exotic. I can remember we’d gone all the way to the hills, and then you get right down to the edge and the sea loch runs alongside the train. And all of a sudden there was this turquoise blue sea underneath the train as we went right along the edge. It stuck with me forever.

For my stag, we went to Barcelona, and I got the sleeper train from Leeds all the way to Barcelona, and it was brilliant. It kind of stretched out the experience. I love a train journey, and I love a train journey in the mountains. And I've got my dad to thank for that.

Harriet: If you were stuck on a desert island, what book would you take?

Tim: I keep coming back to The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. It’s a really slim book. She wrote it at the end of the Second World War, and it wasn’t published until 1977. It really anticipates all of the slow movement and experiencing a place in a way that most books didn't at the time.

She says, “The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

She always said that there's more than one way to climb a mountain, because at the time everyone was obsessed with getting to the top. But she was obsessed with delving right into it. Most people think that travel is about going places. But really, it’s about being somewhere.

That’s why she’s coming to the desert island. I can just keep reading it, and I’ll never know it in its entirety. And I'll always have Nan with me.

Harriet: Long may it continue. Thank you, Tim.