Hay Festival Bookshop manager and garden designer Gareth Howell-Jones has released a new book that explore a new way of looking at the world. The book has the novel and intriguing title of ‘Do Not Call the Tortoise’.

The book is a collection of essays about ignorance, Coleridge, Darwin and the meaning of life and more.

Discussing the essays, Gareth said: “They’re all written from one particular viewpoint, this STA viewpoint.

“It’s a slightly different way of looking at the world, which occurred to me when I was standing just below the [Hay] Castle walls. On one winter’s morning, I was looking out across the car park at a low morning sun firing through the fog and I suddenly realised these things I could see;  the sun, the fog, the grass, and the trees have got a sort of basic bed rock reality that all the little thoughts buzzing around in my head about the news, about work, and about whether I had upset somebody, all these little busy thoughts in my head didn’t have quite the same reality.”

Gareth had previously written a larger  book called STA, which was 85,000 words long and is now being put out online for free bit by bit each week, and will last until March.

STA comes from a latin quote in the Bible, ‘STA et considera miracle dei,’ and it means ‘stand still and consider the wonderous works of God.’

“In other words, just stop and look at things and try and take them for what they are,” explained Gareth.

Most of the thoughts and beliefs in the book came to Gareth as he was walking in the hills.

Do Not Call the Tortoise provides a response to Darwin’s ideas.

Gareth said: “Thinking about the implications of evolution and Darwin is quite a big thing because what we tend to think of, and what gets publicised a lot now in evolution is the natural selection idea.

“The idea that everything is in competition and fighting against each other, which isn’t really a very accurate picture of what happens overall, although some of that goes on.

“What Darwin absolutely proves is what’s called common ancestry. Four billion years ago there was one cell and now everything, including the trees, the grass, the bacteria between your teeth , have all descended from that one cell and so we are all actually related. The divisions that we like to draw up toput things into differnt categories are quite helpful, to help us sort out information, but they are not actually true.”

Gareth told the Brecon and Radnor Express about the unique title of his book.

“It’s a good title, but nobody understands it!” he said.

“It’s catchy. I was delighted nobody had come across it before, I thought someone was bound to have used it.

“It’s actually a quote from a 19th-century American poet, Walt Whitman, ‘Do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else’. It’s the business of accepting things for what they are and not thinking they ought to be something else, which we often do criticise something for being what it wasn’t meant to be in the first place.

“A tortoise is meant to be a tortoise and if what you want is a cat, or a hare, or a news presenter, then you want something else. A tortoise is just a tortoise, nothing else, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Explaining the STA viewpoint further, Gareth said: “One of the most important things about this STA, is stand still and consider. That’s the only thing I ask people to do is that. I say repeatedly throughout the book, ‘don’t take my word for it, you need to stand still and look at things yourself. These are just my ideas. I think everybody needs to work things out for themselves and not take my word for it, not take anybody’s word for it.”

Gareth is doing a talk with Welsh poet and author Owen Sheers at Hay Festival Winter Weekend, about his new book, this coming weekend.

You can buy Do Not Call the Tortoise by visiting: www.hayfestival.com/p-19730-do-not-call-the-tortoise.aspx