Innholdsfortegnelse for 08-Jul-2020 i Country Life

WHO really cares and understands about Nature and who is going to make the green recovery happen? Is it the uninformed masses, a radical minority of campaigners or those who already understand and do their best to care for the countryside? Since Covid-19 raised its ugly head, we’ve heard how wildlife has returned—emboldened by less human activity—and how we’ve become more at one with Nature, as life has slowed down. Unfortunately, some of these caring folk have been torching moorland, trashing national parks, polluting beaches and being rude to volunteers and wardens. There are so many contradictions flying about that it’s difficult to see who or what is going to bring any sense to the discussion about how the countryside—and its economy —should be restored. Our statutory bodies say they…

Country Life A stellar night at the PPA Awards (the magazine Oscars) saw COUNTRY LIFE remotely walk away with 3rd place in the Magazine of the Year category (to be fair, they couldn't let us win two years in a row) and 2nd place in the Cover of the Year category (with the entry pictured) Fans of the apocalypse Those used to watching films about the collapse of civilisation, whether at the hands of aliens, zombies or anything in between, are more suited to lockdown life, say psychologists at the University of Chicago Rosy starlings The gorgeous rosy starling has been seen in all four countries of the UK this year, says the RSPB. The birds, named for their pink ‘vests' on their front and back, rarely travel this far…

LAST week, after four months of living solely in Hampshire, I drove up to London. My children teased me that I was missing having a takeaway, which had a small ring of truth as, since recovering from coronavirus, I have lost much of my taste and smell. Fortunately, the curry spectacularly proved it hadn’t gone altogether—I will be back on the milder Madras next time. Barnes hadn’t really changed, although the swans have only one cygnet this year. Getting there was the exciting bit. Has everyone forgotten how to drive during lockdown? Nobody seems to be on their side of the road on the country lanes, having to swerve to avoid the seemingly endless potholes was akin to negotiating a constant chicane and the A3 up to London resembled the…

IT is a great pleasure to read the recent decision of the Large Black Pig Society to recommend that pedigree pigs of certain ages should be of certain minimum weights. Such a decision is one of the great landmarks in the breeding and sale of pedigree stock and will, I believe, have very far-reaching effects. Certainly every other pig society will have to follow suit. This new rule is the best protection that buyers have had against undersized and badly nourished pigs bought without inspection. It will be a guide to new breeders to indicate what their pigs should weigh at certain ages. It should automatically cull out unsuitable pigs for pedigree breeding, and raise the whole standard of the Large Black. 1) Possessions 2) George Orwell 3) Banksy 4)…

Beaten to the punch MY uncle, who is 93, has been living alone during lockdown. He stays in good humour, enjoys his subscription to your magazine and I take his shopping round for him. When I called today to check in and get his shopping list, he said he had some bad news. I immediately feared the worst, but it transpires that the undertaker with whom he had taken out a funeral package had died… he thinks it’s hilarious that he has been beaten to it! He has a great sense of humour and I learn many things from him during our conversations, which I cherish. I hope this may make it onto your pages. I know he would be highly delighted, as he would say. Roseanne Steedman, Northamptonshire…

AT 11am today, after 111 days of complete closure, the National Gallery is re-opening to the public, the first national museum to do so since the lockdown began to ease. Athena greatly looks forward to renewing her acquaintance with the collection. In a professional capacity, she is also curious to see the practical arrangements put in place by the gallery to make visitors feel ‘safe and confident’. From what has been announced about the opening, the experience of visiting will certainly be novel. The National Gallery remains free, but, to manage numbers, entrance will have to be booked online and in advance. New opening hours are seven days a week from 11am–4pm (11am–9pm on Fridays), to allow visitors and staff to travel outside rush hour. Staff will be issued with…

• Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Williams are (or were) two of Britain’s most famous beach-hut owners • Britain's most expensive hut, on Mudeford sandbank, Dorset, sold for £295,000 in 2018 • On beaches such as Hove, East Sussex, there are severe restrictions concerning what colour you can paint your hut • The last portable bathing machine operated at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1938 • For medical purposes, it was believed, in the 18th century, that the right dose was three total immersions in the sea…

Tamarix tetrandra ( left ) Tamarix has evolved to prevent excessive transpiration by absorbing salt and its pliable stems defy high winds, making the genus the perfect seaside plant. In late spring, the shrub is hung with racemes of blush-pink blooms. Left unpruned, it will grow to 12ft Salix lanata ( right ) W. J. Bean's Trees and Shrubs describes this as among the ‘handsomest of dwarf willows'. It's also one of the toughest and will shrug off high winds and temperatures as low as -20°C. The plant forms a dome of silvery, woolly leaves no more than 3ft tall, with small catkins in the spring Bupleurum fruticosum ( left ) Umbels of bright acid-green flowers against glossy…

Puppies The formula of seven years for a dog per one year for a human is wrong, say scientists, and your one-year-old puppy is actually 30. By analysing the genes of labrador puppies, scientists discovered that dogs age at different speeds during their lives; a one-year-old dog is about 30 in human years, but by the age of 14, dogs are in their seventies in human years. The new formula is very simple: it's Human Age = 16ln(Dog_Age) + 31 Hipster sparrows What started off as a song sung by a few white-throated sparrows in Canada has spread to become immensely popular in the population. The phenomenon offers insight into how birds learn; the song grew too quickly to be taught by parents, so it must have been ‘catchy'…

LAST Friday, we received an 11th-hour invitation to say that there was space for one of the children at school this week. We leapt at the offer. The return to a morning routine for the past five days has been strange for us all. One striking difference from the distantly familiar rituals (which used to begin with the inevitable struggle to extract the children from bed) is the eagerness to get off to school. It used to be my role to stand beside the front door and fulminate at the number of things that needed to be done in the minutes after we ought to have left. This week, however, roles have been reversed. Now, it’s the child, dressed in full uniform, with satchel on their back and packed lunch…

A novel idea Q Unknown to my wife, I have been penning a novel during my train commute—and, against my expectations, have found a publisher! The only trouble is, it’s quite racy and I’m not sure how she’ll react. I’ve no intention of keeping it secret, but I have no idea how to broach the topic. G. S., Northumberland A Oh, please—you live in Northumberland! I’ve never met a Northumbrian who isn’t racy! That’s why I adore the county. In the working men’s clubs of Sunderland, they have triumphed over adversity with Geordie bawdy. In the Borders (so named for good reason), they defy their climate by hopping in and out of bed with each other like frogs. The Angel of the North stands unflinching, watching the Babylon that…

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye... I Corinthians, chapter 15, verses 51–52 ‘To deserve the world that awaits us, we will need imagination and generosity of spirit’ ALTHOUGH I grew up in a land where scripture was planted into our mouths with our first set of teeth, the language of King James is no longer on the tip of my tongue. I feel about the loss the way Julian Barnes described his lack of faith: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.’ Still, on the bewildering journey of coronavirus, Corinthians has come back to me. Like all Biblical prediction, timing is more poetic than precise. Wise men…

ONE of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life’ was Charles Dickens’s verdict on Punch and Judy shows, in a letter written in the winter of 1849. Two centuries earlier, Charles II’s view had evidently been similar. In October 1662, the King rewarded one Pietro Gimonde, a puppeteer from northern Italy known as Signor Bologna, with a gold medal and chain valued at the considerable sum of £25 for a special performance of an ‘Italian puppet play’ at Whitehall. For generations of British children, Punch and Judy shows performed in striped canvas booths by travelling puppeteers at the seaside, on city streets and at country fairs have given just such respite from everyday reality. ‘It is an outrageous joke which no one would think of regarding as a model…

• Lime blossom is the queen of honey plants and a single tree is capable of producing 40lb of the sweet stuff. The bees can become so intoxicated after visiting lime blossom that they have to sober up on a landing board before being allowed back into the hive • The father of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, took his Latinised surname from a giant linden tree that grew in the garden of his family home • Feeding lime branches to cattle is said to improve milk production • The scent of a blossoming lime travels miles and can be stronger further away • When the immature fruits are ground up with the flowers, they produce an edible paste that tastes a bit like chocolate…

I WAS once told the tale of an old Sicilian Mafia don. We were wandering through the cathedral of Monreale, a few miles above Palermo, with Riccardo, a charming and well-connected local. As we glided down that cool nave, he was holding forth on this exquisite juxtaposition of Norman heft and Byzantine soul. But it was nearing noon and my thoughts, as ever, were turning to glories of a more edible variety. The tour ended and, as we walked outside, gazing over the great city, he suddenly stopped dead. ‘I remember one spring 30 years back,’ he declared, his eyes made owlish by thick glasses. ‘I was eating with the big Mafia boss, the capo, out in the countryside near here.’ He gestured grandly. ‘We had some good local…

Who is your aesthetic hero? David Hicks, whose approach to interior design was so chic. He often used dark colours and had an amazing ability to mix old and new. He used Perspex furniture with antiques and was extremely bold in the way he approached decoration. As a teenager, I used to spend hours outside his shop with my nose pressed against the window. Which book have you found inspiring? Living by Design is the story of John Stefanidis's house in Dorset. It was a group of cattle sheds that he transformed with brick floors, heavenly colours (in particular, strong pink) and inexpensive fabrics made up in a way that is extremely stylish. An exhibition that has really impressed you? The Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy (RA)…

THE popularity of the mid-20th-century artists who coalesced around Great Bardfield in the 1930s, and Dedham, both Essex, where Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, continues to grow and Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet is well placed to exploit it. As recorded here on November 13 last year, Foxgloves, by artistplantsman Morris, took £204,160 against a £30,000–£50,000 estimate. A portion of the proceeds was donated to the Benton End House and Garden Trust, which preserves Morris’s studio and home where the school was based. The same auction included a first tranche of the contents of Hill House, Sudbury, Suffolk, home of Tony Venison, for many years COUNTRY LIFE’s Gardens Editor, who died soon after the sale. Tony was not only a…

MANY have fallen. O’Driscoll, tailors, founded 1880, whose premises were painted a washed-out green that would be the envy of Farrow and also of Ball and where, when I was a child, it was still possible to have a hardwearing suit made in hand-spun tweed. Fallon’s, established 1904, only traded in items of interest to its family members, so, at one time, it specialised in clocks and fishing tackle. O’Driscoll, confectioners, where Kathleen Susan sold homemade boiled sweets in twists of paper and served tea and clappers (two biscuits stuck together with jam) at a wobbly table behind the counter. Many have, however, survived and flourished. O’Connolly, the electrical shop, the whitewashed walls and worn wooden floor of which speak of an age long before the modern technology it sells.…

AFTER 30 years researching the work and life of the great Edwardian garden designer Harold Peto (1854–1933), gardener and garden historian Graeme Moore seems to have finally struck gold. It was back in 1983 that he first saw Peto’s notebook, a handsome blue folio album with Garden Designs embossed on the spine. The book is kept at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Centre in Washington DC, US, where Moore was doing a summer fellowship. He pored over this treasure trove of more than 270 photographs and postcards of gardens, garden architecture, statues and ornaments with cuttings from journals—including plenty from COUNTRY LIFE —wonderful pen-and-ink sketch studies and designs on scraps of paper that he either pasted in or left loose. All were eventually linked to specific sites, but the places…

Town & Country TIME is of the essence, as we all know, and two upcoming sales from Sotheby’s and Bonhams show that a decent watch or clock is, well, timeless. On July 14, Sotheby’s is to offer what curators say might be the first Tourbillon watch ever sold by Abraham-Louis Breguet, ‘the man who made time portable’. The watch (below right) was discreetly sold by Breguet to George III in 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, and is ‘testament to the King’s fervent support of the sciences and horology,’ says Sotheby’s. ‘Abraham Louis-Breguet watches were the theory of everything in the early 19th century, incorporating all the scientific discoveries of the past centuries, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the great vision of a man who revolutionised watchmaking and placed time…

THE property market has had an interesting year so far. First came the ‘Boris Bounce’, swiftly followed by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. Now, as we emerge blinking into the sunlight, you’d be forgiven for wondering what will happen next. Fear not, as next week, on July 13, Lindsay Cuthill, head of Savills’s country department, will be taking part in an #asktheagent on the COUNTRY LIFE Property Instagram page (@countrylifeproperty), and will be answering your questions on the new trends in the market, how to buy, how to sell and everything in between. For more information and to submit your questions, turn to…

Quiz of the week 1) The old legal term ‘chattels' refers to one's what? 2) Englishman Eric Arthur Blair is better known by his pen name-what is it? 3) Which pseudonymous artist's works include Ballerina with Action Man Parts, Pulp Fiction and Parachuting Rat? 4) Kale, kohlrabi and collard greens all belong to which family? 5) Aspirancy, postulancy and the novitiate are stages in becoming what? Time to buy Rock Pool Abalone Cushion, £50, Voyage Maison, from Maison White (01865 891773; www. maisonwhite.co.uk) Unisex Vierzon Vibram Jersey Lined Boot, £160, Le Chameau (01572 772444; www.lechameau.com) The Original Dog Shampoo bar, £15.99, See Change Now (07713 497455; www. seechangenow.co.uk) Book of the week British Summer Time Begins, Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Little, Brown, £18.99) Hilarious, nostalgic and tragic in turns, this…

Serve with salad Aldi, Exquisite Collection, Crémant d’Alsace, France 2017. £8.49, Aldi, alc 12.5% Crémants are great value alternatives to Champagne and they offer similar creamy textures and flavours to their more expensive cousins. This interesting blend of Auxerrois, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Riesling is a good match for salads. Nutty finish Cramele Recas, Solara Orange Natural Wine, Romania 2019. £9.99, DBM Wines, Field & Fawcett, Noble Green, The Fine Wine Co, alc 12.5% This Feteasca Alba-Sauvignon Blanc blend shows marmalade, bruised-apple, smoke and herb aromas. The grapey palate has apricot, apple and orange-peel bitterness, with an interesting, nutty finish. Dangerously drinkable La Tunella, Pinot Nero, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy 2017. £13.50, Corney & Barrow, alc 13% The grapes for this are grown on high terraces in the…

• In the 18th century, Dr Johnson associated Punch and Judy shows with medieval morality plays: ‘The modern Punch is descended from the ancient Vice' • Punch made his first appearance in England in Covent Garden. An annual Covent Garden May Fayre & Puppet Festival celebrates his association with the area. Performances were long popular in London, as in the 1930s ( left ) • In 1985, a group of leading ‘professors' founded The College of Punch and Judy Professors ‘to promote and encourage the highest standards in performance and presentation of the show' • ‘Professorship’ often runs in families. Punch and Judy dynasties include the Codmans (Liverpool, the north Wales coast), the Staddons (Weston-super-Mare) and the Maggs (Bournemouth, Redruth)…

Method Pod the beans and cook them in lightly salted boiling water until tender—about six to 10 minutes, depending on your beans. Drain them and cool under running water. Pop the beans out of their skins by pressing them between thumb and finger. If the beans are very small and tender, or you particularly like the skins, you may not need to do this. Make the dressing by adding a small pinch of salt to the sherry vinegar, stirring to dissolve, then whisking the olive oil in with a fork. Tear the parsley leaves and add them to the dressing with the broad beans and a little ground black pepper. Shred or tear the ham into small pieces and toss gently with the broad beans.…

The chief executive of the National Garden Scheme recommends places to visit Chygurno, Lamorna, Cornwall Three miles from Land's End, Chygurno occupies one of the most memorable positions of any NGS garden. Spectacular views over Lamorna Cove are matched by a wonderful array of plants Slade, Southerndown, Glamorgan Hidden away in the Vale of Glamorgan, the garden tumbles from terraced lawns down a slope protected by beech woods on one side and leads to the beach at Southerndown, with views across the Bristol Channel to north Devon Craster’s Hidden Gardens, Alnwick, Northumberland A trio of small cottage gardens that were once allotments for fisherman's cottages, planted to cope with challenging conditions and enjoying views to the romantic ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle perched on a nearby headland Heron House, Aldeburgh, Suffolk…

The present generation of East Anglian artists is represented in the forthcoming exhibition at the John Davies Gallery, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, from July 16 to August 15 (www.johndaviesgallery. com). Gerard Stamp is Norfolk by birth, education and love of predecessors such as J. S. Cotman. Together with Turner, Bawden, Constable, Piper, Seago and, of course, Cotman, he provided the illustrations for Peter Tolhurst's excellent Brilliant Beacons: Portraits of East Anglian Churches (2019; Black Dog Books, £30) and Mr Tolhurst has written an introduction to the catalogue for the show, which travels beyond East Anglia. The 25 large watercolours are mostly interiors of the Three Choirs cathedrals, Gloucester (right), Hereford and Worcester, with other views and details of Ely, Exeter, Norwich and Wells. Also included are some delightful studies of English parish…