Innholdsfortegnelse for 17-Mar-2021 i Country Life

Hand gel A bottle of sanitiser will continue to be invaluable, particularly if there is a revival of handshaking and other activities that efficiently distribute viruses and bacteria. Greeting strangers Many of us have found it’s possible to chat to strangers without implying there’s an ulterior motive. Northerners have long known this, but southerners have seen the light, too. Hugging Adopted long ago by millennials as the greeting of choice, this could be a less formal, more sanitary alternative to kisses and handshakes. Long phone calls Mobile phones do so many whizzy things that it’s easy to forget that they can be used to talk and put the world to rights. Winter picnics What could be nicer than a cheese and pickle sarnie, a packet of Hobnobs and a hip…

Moths Numbers in Britain are down one-third in the past 50 years, finds a new study, probably due to light pollution, chemical farming, agriculture and climate change Pyjamas Sleeping in the nude produces the deepest REM sleep, at least 26.5%, finds a new study. But socks are better on than off Swimming swans Residents were puzzled when the moat at the Bishop's Palace in Wells almost dried out overnight, until the estates manager admitted he'd left the sluice gate open expecting heavy rain, which never came…

Quiz of the week 1) The flowers of forget-me-not are most commonly what colour? 2) Which household staple was originally called ‘Wonder Jelly'? 3) In Roald Dahl's Matilda, what relation is Miss Trunchbull to Miss Honey? 4) Which river flows through the most countries in the world? 5) With which art movement is Salvador Dalí associated? Word of the week Acephalous (adjective) Lacking either a head or a leader Time to buy Another log on the fire By Oliver Preston…

Boozy birds THERE has been correspondence in the national press referencing the presence of lead shot in game birds when brought to the table. As an impecunious research fellow in Cambridge in 1970, I would regularly visit the main agricultural market in the city to buy pheasants in season. The vendor was a portly fellow from the fen village of Feltwell. ‘No shot in these, doctor!’ he would say. I enquired why this was. It transpired that, in the evenings, he and his friends set alcohol-soaked grain trays at the foot of the trees where they knew pheasants roosted. Before dawn the following morning, they would return and wring the necks of the inebriated birds on the ground. F. D. Skidmore, London A matter of priorities IT was disappointing…

KINMEL HALL is one of Britain’s great Victorian trophy houses, offering a taste of France in North Wales. Remodelled by W. E. Nesfield in the 1870s, it is faced in the same glowing red brick and creamy stone as Louis XIII’s original hunting lodge at Versailles and the steep roofs and soaring chimneys create a festive silhouette as rich as any châteaux on the Loire. As such creations languished in critical fashion, it was reassessed in a powerful pair of articles by Mark Girouard (Country Life, September 4 and 11, 1969). When those pieces were written, Kinmel was a thriving girls’ school, the owning family having sold the house in 1934. Alas, following a fire in 1975, the school decided to move to Haynes Park, Bedfordshire, illustrating a common problem:…

FIRSTLY, we have the Irish question. No, not that one, this one: what is shamrock and what is clover? The sentimental claim of the Emerald Isle to the exclusivity of shamrock was never better expressed than in the 1914 song A Little Bit of Heaven by American songwriter J. Keirn Brennan, which features the lines: So they sprinkled it with stardust, Just to make the shamrocks grow, ’Tis the only place you’ll find them, No matter where you go. Pure blarney. Shamrock and clover are botanically the same and there are 245 recognised species worldwide. To my mind, if there’s a collective noun for clover, it’s a complexity. Shamrock derives from seamair, from the old Irish semar—meaning clover—and og, meaning small or young. The first published reference to it in…

1860 Born Port Glasgow 1876 Trains in Edinburgh under Sir Robert Rowand Anderson 1884 Moves to London as assistant to Norman Shaw, where his colleagues included William Lethaby, Ernest Newton and Edward Schroeder Prior, who, that same year, set up the Art Workers' Guild 1886 Starts work at the London office of Harold Peto and Sir Ernest George 1890 Joins the Art Workers' Guild; sets up his own practice in Gray's Inn. He is helped by the 3rd Marquess of Bute, for whom he completed many works, including his first garden project at St John's Lodge, Regent's Park in 1892 1897 Makes a formal garden at West Green House, Hampshire 1898 Buys land at Phoenix Green near Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, and begins creating his future home and garden 1906–12 His…

DRIVING across Hampshire, it is noticeable that the grass is now beginning to grow and the hedges are starting to turn green. One of my favourite plants, cow parsley, is starting to sprout on the verges alongside the yellow flowers of the celandine. I like verges. V for verges is possibly the best clue of all if you are playing I-spy on a long car journey: you are rarely without one by your side. In total, there are about 300,000 miles of verge in the UK and they provide one of the most important networks and corridors for Nature in Britain. Except often they don’t. Extraordinarily, councils choose to cut them down wholesale instead of managing them for road safety at junctions. That figure, 300,000 miles, is the equivalent of…

HISTORY is quite unable to decide when the glass wine bottle became a general institution in the cellar of the English country squire. It is a matter of speculation as to how a host in the 18th century, when the glass industry was little developed, could possibly find bottles to stock a cellar capable of entertaining the large dinner-parties of the period, when guests had a now unheard-of capacity for putting away wine: Pitt, I believe, being among the five-bottle men. The story is told of Swinburne at a dinner after which he held the whole company with one of the most masterly dissertations upon the French poets. On the following morning his hostess received a letter of apology to the effect that a cold had kept him prisoner in…

I AM writing to you with reference to the most interesting article about famous writing desks (February 17). I was very fortunate to be able to acquire, from his son, the desk of Maurice Wilkins, who won the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1962. This desk (above) is all the more interesting because his son told me that Wilkins, who used it daily in his private study, had inherited it from his own sister, whose rooms it furnished in Oxford before the war (she was an academic and a translator of Kafka, among others), and that he had personally carried out repairs to it as an amateur and skilled craftsman. A nice handover story. Marc Matthys, Brussels, Belgium The writer…

LAST year, John Goodall memorably described the architectural revelation of the empty City of London (‘London in lockdown’, April 22, 2020). However, the pandemic has also left a legacy of discovery through familiarising the famous London parks—in this case, central London’s linked St James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens—their secrets revealed and knowledge amplified. To buy a picnic in Westminster’s Petty France from the Royal Artisan Bakery, with its irresistible window display, was an obligatory start. A stroll to the 1841 Swiss Chalet in St James’s Park provided a delicious waft of January winter sweet from one of John Nash’s ‘floriferous’ Regency shrubberies. The chalet, once the bird keeper’s house, now a meeting venue, has a garden that is (usually) open to the public. A path, dividing formally…

• Iconoclastic historians suggest that St Patrick’s clover was actually oxalis, which shares the three-leaf configuration. It is known colloquially as false shamrock. With small, pink-purple leaves and yellow flowers, Oxalis corniculata is a member of the extensive wood sorrel family. Also called sourgrass because it contains oxalic acid, it is edible and was widely used by native North American tribes to alleviate thirst and to treat sore throats, cramps and nausea, as well as being considered an aphrodisiac. It spreads by spitting ripe seeds from the pods and is the bane of those with gravel paths • Of indeterminate origin and popular with rugby clubs and the licentious soldiery of two world wars, the bawdy song relating to a romp Roll Me Over in the Clover couldn't offer…

Has lockdown accelerated the move towards multi-functional kitchens? Definitely. Spending more time at home has encouraged us to consider how our spaces can be improved, especially the kitchen, where so much of our living at home takes place. Increasingly, the kitchen is the space for working, family dining and socialising (when we can) and for relaxing, perhaps with a sofa and television. How do you design with several functions in mind? Begin by identifying zones for each specific task. Protect the cook-prep zone and avoid getting it mixed up with areas for socialising or a through route, because it is not a good idea to be attempting to drain a boiling pot of pasta as children are running past. For this reason, we are seeing a shift towards double islands…

Mike regrets never fulfilling his childhood ambition to join the police. He's an omnipresent figure in the village, querying anything from ramblers' cars to empty bottles in the recreation field. The rise during lockdown of unfamiliar delivery vans meant he's been working far harder than he ever did at IBM. A few second-homers have received a gimlet stare and, although Mike is never petty, his zealotry means it hasn't all been plain sailing. The man ‘casing the joint' at the manor turned out to be a Jehovah's Witness and, since an embarrassing incident involving two villagers of mature vintage, he's careful not to investigate steamed-up cars. That said, he feels some moral justification; they were married, but not to one another. GK…

In common many lovers of etchings, I find liking may turn to distaste when they are colour-printed. This was the view of Michael Blaker (1928–2018), too, a fine etcher to whose work I have recently been introduced by Elizabeth Harvey-Lee. His 1986 autobiography began: ‘An etching should, of course, traditionally, be in black and white. It has “always been” and to the mind... leaps the image of a thin black frame enclosing a vast white mount in which the print-ideally rather small-sits enshrined… There is, and always has been as Sickert inferred, something about an etching.' Blaker's own rather 19th-century black-and-white work would not sell and his dealers implored him to colour, but he would not, until his wife suggested a compromise: to tint the prints with delicate colour washes…

Staying indoors When the Wilcock family of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, heard a thud last Sunday, they had little clue that a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite fragment had landed outside, whizzing through at 30,000mph-‘a major event for UK science' and a major black splodge on their driveway Ducks and geese The Government plans to ban imports of foie gras, created by force-feeding birds, a practice banned in the UK Rus in urbe For the month of June, the Somerset House courtyard will be overgrown with a forest of 400 trees, the centrepiece of the London Design Biennale Park life Homes near Europe's national parks are worth up to €596,714, or 35%, more than equivalent properties in the closest city. In the UK, the premium is 25% (€531,296) A wise old bird A 70-year-old…

WE had two very different experiences of the return to school last week. There was a carnival atmosphere on the streets on Monday as we walked our youngest child to the gates for the first time in three months. It raised our spirits after the predictable, but vexing discovery that, in the interim, their uniform had largely ceased to fit them. The pavements were busy and full of smiling and familiar faces. Everyone had cause to be elated: the children to see friends again and adults at their release. Feelings ran high and some parents spontaneously punched the air in triumph as they retreated from the school gates. It was another three days before our eldest child followed suit. Their journey demands an early start, but we are all out…

Extraordinary Orchids, Sandra Knapp (Natural History Museum, £25) Stories behind dracula orchids, rattlesnake plantains, fairy orchids and other fantastical forms come together in this beautiful tome by the Natural History Museum's senior research botanist and president of the Linnean Society Sandra Knapp, with artwork by Ferdinand and Franz Bauer, Arthur Harry Church and Sydney Parkinson. Striking a balance between informatively captioned illustrations and essays, this is as much a visual treat as it is an academic one.…

Hint of red liquorice House of Dreams, Grenache, Swartland, South Africa 2020. £9, Marks & Spencer, alc 13.5% M&S by Leon Esterhuizen of Journey's End. Unoaked, light-bodied and succulent, it is packed with red berries, pepper and herbs with mouthwatering acidity and a sweet hint of red liquorice. Flint on the nose Famille Perrin, Studio Blanc by Miraval, Rhône/Var, France 2019. £12, Co-op, alc 12.5% Ripe peach, pear , plus a hint of white blossom and reductive flint on the nose. Made from 100% Rolle in tulip-shaped concrete vats, which has an effect similar to bâtonnage. Oily and textured palate, with crisp apple and lime fruits. Gooseberries and hay Palacio de Bornos, La Caprichosa Verdejo, Rueda, Spain 2019. £13.95, The Vineyard Dorking, alc 13% Four months of lees…

THE Queen doesn’t deserve these past two weeks. She has given her all to a role she did not choose, but which was thrust upon her, and she has not been found wanting. Whether it’s countering Covid-19 or encouraging the Commonwealth, entertaining President Trump or welcoming Polish statesman Lech Walesa, as a young woman in wartime uniform or an old lady leading the commemoration of those who died, she has served her nation and done her duty. In just over a year’s time, God willing, she will celebrate her Platinum Jubilee—the first British monarch to do so. In a threatened and threatening world, she has anchored the nation and given us confidence in our institutions that no politician could have achieved. You’d have to go back to Edward the Confessor…

Lord Mendoza is provost of Oriel College, Oxford, commissioner for cultural recovery and renewal at DCMS and chair of The Landmark Trust and of the Illuminated River Foundation ‘It’s always such a treat to see “A Rake’s Progress” in its hidden place at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, WC2. But, of all Hogarth’s paintings, this self-portrait cuts straight through. Look at his stare, his dent of a scar, his Shakespeare and his dog, Trump. The trick of painting a portrait of a portrait. I wonder why he took 10 years to finish this picture. It’s hard to ignore his voice and personality looking straight out of the canvas, ready to take on a discussion or an argument and then lead you around 18th-century London’ APPROACHING 50, William Hogarth re-worked…

IT may not be canoeing remote waterways or trekking jungle trails in Belize, but basket weaving in Wales contains a thrill of its own for Anna Stickland. She’s more used to leading adventures, school groups, biking tours and more around the world, as well as hosting wet woodland days closer to home in the shadow of the Brecon Beacons. These days, however, she gets her kicks from the more prosaic-sounding rural craft. ‘I occasionally do woodland work with the army and get plenty of stick about my basket weaving, believe me,’ Miss Stickland laughs. ‘It amuses them to refer to me as a basket case!’ After deciding to have a go at weaving via a short course a few years ago, she is pleasantly surprised to find her order book…

IN Switzerland, Easter eggs are delivered by a colourful cuckoo, but we prefer the Easter Bunny (originally a hare), a tradition brought by German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the 1700s, from whence it spread. Historically, eggs were forbidden during Lent and considered a treat on Easter Day. The origin of the Easter-egg hunt comes from Germany, where men would hide eggs and women and children would find them—a nod to Jesus’s tomb being discovered by a woman.…

The parsnip is a prince among winter vegetables, but it needs a long growing season to perform at its best, so we should start now. Choose ground that has been deeply cultivated, but not manured. Make a level seedbed with fork, rake and shuffling boot. Set a tight line and draw out a shallow drill against it. Sow the flat seeds with care, spacing them a couple of inches apart, then sow radish seed along the same drill. Cover and lightly rake out your footprints. Parsnips are slow to germinate, but radishes are quick and will mark the row so you can get on.…

DO you know about the South Somerset Hum? It isn’t the sound of bees in a cider orchard or Morris men girding up on the village green, nor the buzz of an instrument, like the homely humstrum of William Barnes’s dialect poem, whose ‘ingan-ing_ did ring the string,/As ang-an-ang_ the wires did clang’. I’m talking about a relentless ‘low-frequency humming’ that, according to a recent headline in the Western Gazette, is keeping local residents up at night. Nobody knows what it portends, but Rory Manton gets it in Yeovil and Ann Gilbert in Taunton; each explains how they hear a low and awfully persistent drone as they settle down to sleep. Investigations are fruitless. Steven Martin, from Over Stratton, describes it being mostly like a tractor ticking over, but sometimes…