Innholdsfortegnelse for 15-Dec-2021 i Country Life

DECEMBER months in Salcombe seldom hold snow, but nevertheless, silver hues and low suns hang over the harbour, the sparsely populated beaches marking out Nature’s quieting of the seasons. Most yawls and yachts are back in boatyards, leaving the waters vacant for hardy surfers and persevering fishermen. Striking seascapes and close-knit communities make winter and especially Christmas in south Devon a glorious place to be. A solitary habit of mine is to rise early with a giant mug of tea and sit in our sea facing verandah to say the Psalms. With good timing, I can catch the winter sun breaking the horizon. Avoiding social media, opening emails, taking calls—before porridge and toast and even sorting out teenagers—this has to be the first duty of the day. If I forget…

Fruits of long labour After nearly three years, researchers at the Rijksmuseum have discovered the original sketch beneath Rembrandt's The Night Watch Dahlias The almost 2,000 individual plants (1,700 cultivars) that make up Cornwall's National Plant Collection of dahlias have been rescued and painstakingly moved by hand to a new home in the county Reusing your wrapping paper Google searches for ‘sustainable Christmas' have increased by 1,700% this month, the highest interest in the past five years Man’s best friend Some hate postmen, most love a scratch behind the ear, but new research shows that dogs recognise some 89 words or phrases, about equivalent to an 18-month-old child…

IT started in 2018, when the New Year’s Day Beaufort meet in Tetbury was banned from council-owned Old Railway Yard. Within a week, an alternative location in town had been found, but, since then and particularly at this time of year, the Countryside Alliance (CA) is kept busy lobbying councils in the face of similar complaints—often supported by people in the public eye who have little or no connection to these areas—regarding Boxing Day or New Year’s Day meets. ‘What they really want to do is take us out of villages and towns so they can hide us away, because it seems like a dramatic win,’ explains Polly Portwin, CA’s director of the campaign for hunting. ‘Common sense has prevailed in most cases, with local councils usually permitting festive meets…

READING ‘A house of cards’ (November 24), I began to think of another Christmas tradition: crackers. We have Tom Smith to thank for them, as he began selling almond bonbons wrapped in paper, which was twisted at both ends and contained a little strip of paper with a poem written on it. It’s said that he was inspired to add the famous bang to the ‘cosaque’, as it was originally called, when listening to a log fire. Some time later, the bonbons were replaced with tiny presents and the poems with jokes. It was Walter, one of his sons, who added the colourful paper crowns. Kinda Jane Evans, Anglesey The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne…

Before I melt, Come, look at me! This lovely icy filigree! Of a great forest In one night I make a wilderness Of white: By skyey cold Of crystals made, All softly, on Your finger laid, I pause, that you My beauty see: Breathe; and I vanish Instantly. ‘The Snowflake’ by Walter de la Mare SNOWFLAKE. The word is too clumsy for the white ice petals that tumble down the sky on wintry days. In righteous artistic protest, the American poet Emily Dickinson broke the noun delicately in two, to ‘snow flake’. Snowflake. Petals. Blossom. When snowflakes fall, the writers and the artists, the poets and the graphic designers try for the bon mot or the exact dab of Old Holland paint to stick snowflake to page, canvas and Christmas…

• The only bird that hibernates is the common poorwill (below), a nightjar species found in North America. Hiding in a hollow log or patch of grass, the bird enters torpor for weeks, even months • In extremely hot, dry countries some creatures avoid the high temperatures and drought by going into a similar state of sleep called ‘aestivation' or summer sleep • The dwarf fat-tailed lemur of Madagascar is the only known primate to aestivate; it lives off fat reserves in its tail during a long dry season • Bears practice a form of super dormancy termed ‘denning' (above), after the hibernaculum they excavate in earth or snow, in which they neither eat, drink, urinate, nor defecate. Although female black bears give birth during denning (which may last between…

ALMOST exactly 955 years ago to the day, on Christmas Day 1066, William, Duke of Normandy was crowned King of the English in the abbey church of St Peter at Westminster. The ceremony set divine seal on his victory at the Battle of Hastings less than three months earlier, but it was an ominous affair. William was presented to his people for acclamation and when the nervous guards outside the church heard shouts in an unfamiliar language they imagined treachery and began firing houses. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis (d. 1142), in the pandemonium that ensued, William, perhaps for the only time in his life, completely lost his nerve and sat trembling uncontrollably on the throne. ‘When William had proved the legitimacy of his own rival claim, he pointedly…

SO it is that we are given our first glimpse of Edward Bear, appearing in A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, published in 1924. The previous year, Alan Alexander Milne, a playwright and novelist, had sent several of his children’s poems to E. V. Lucas, a writer at Punch magazine and soon to become chairman of publishing house Methuen. Keen to eventually publish a full collection of Milne’s poems, Lucas determined the few he had could run as a series in Punch and set about finding a suitable illustrator, suggesting that his colleague E. H. Shepard give it a go. Shepard’s drawings won over an initially sceptical Milne and they worked together on the ensuing book—it was the start of an extraordinary collaboration. When We Were Very Young…

As well as the resident mute swan, two species known as ‘wild swans' (whooper and Bewick's) are mainly winter visitors to Britain. They can be told apart from their familiar cousin by their yellow-and-black bills, which lack the black knob on the top, giving them a rather ‘Roman-nosed' profile. The larger whoopers (Cygnus cygnus) arrive from Icelandic and Scandinavian breeding grounds in autumn and overwinter mainly in the north of Britain; the smaller Bewick's, Cygnus columbianus bewickii, which fly here from Siberia, spend the winter further south. At the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slim-bridge in Gloucestershire, Bewick's swans have been the subject of a long-term study for six decades-ever since conservationist and bird artist Peter Scott and his daughter, Dafila, realised they could identify individual swans by the exact…

THE connection between Odysseus —erstwhile hero of Homer’s Odyssey —and gravy, the meaty lifeblood of British food, seems tenuous to say the least. Whereas the first battles gods, monsters, sorceresses and sirens, the second adds succour to a Sunday roast. Yet in George Chapman’s 1615 translation of the epic poem (the one so beloved by Keats), he talks of goats roasted ‘with all their fat and gravy’. So, there we go. Gravy. Not merely a liquid so luscious that I slurp it straight from the jug, but one beloved by ancient heroes, too. Because gravy is no mere sauce and far less a condiment, but rather the very essence of meat and also an essence of Britishness. It’s a word that sings of joy and plenty, ‘something desirable, easily or…

MINING in the Durham Dales? You may be forgiven for thinking that this ended years ago. The North Pennines is now a centre for tourism characterised by heather moorland, big skies and glistening reservoirs, where any treasure beneath the earth will surely remain undisturbed for another 1,000 years. Yet this isn’t quite the case—outside the market town of Stanhope are two recently established fluorite mines, owned by geologist Ian Bruce and his wife, Diana. Traditionally, as far back as Roman times, it was lead that was mined in this region. The sparkling, multi-coloured mineral named fluorite was merely a by-product. It remains unknown to many, but there is a small band of international collectors who will pay as much as £100,000 and upwards for the best specimens. One of the…

DESIGNER of elaborate, heritage-inspired prints, Sabina Savage painstakingly illustrates her wildly imaginative designs, which then feature on beautiful fabrics such as the silk scarves for which she is known. ‘Stories are woven through each hand-illustrated collection, meandering across continents and delving headfirst into the depths of history,’ enthuses the designer, who recently collaborated with Cleave & Co on this limited-edition fountain pen, featuring one of her illustrations inspired by the Royal Menagerie kept at the Tower of London from 1200 to the early 1800s. The Royal Striped Horses Artist’s Pen, limited to three pieces, £4,250 (020–7254 2403; www.sabinasavage.com)…

MOIRA BUFFINI’S Manor at the Lyttelton has had a rough reception. Seizing on its failure, The Times rather extravagantly asked ‘Is it curtains for the National Theatre?’ The truth is that Miss Buffini has simply written an overloaded play in which a run-down manor house becomes a symbol of modern Britain. But, whatever its faults, the play set me thinking about the crucial role that the country house has played in drama down the centuries. In an excellent article in the programme for Manor, Louis Wise writes that: ‘We tell so many of our stories through country houses because they can seem to assemble the whole country under one roof.’ In short, the manor acts as a metaphor, which was clearly Miss Buffini’s intention. Her debt-ridden house, during a storm…

EVERY year, the Victorian Society compiles a list of the most endangered Victorian and Edwardian buildings in the country to draw attention to their plight. The latest, announced on Monday, includes an ornate former ‘lunatic asylum’ owned by the NHS in Cardiff, a Peckham department store on a ‘Golden Mile’ that once rivalled Oxford Street and a derelict flour mill on the River Avon. Once part of the extensive Hampshire estate of French-Gothic Minley Manor, Minley Home Farm was built in 1896 when new farms were rare, after the agricultural depression, and the attractive farmstead, with its dairy, pigsties and bull, calf and cow boxes, was on land acquired by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1935. Both SAVE and the Victorian Society oppose the MoD’s plans to demolish the…

FOR the creative, lockdown presented a chance for innovation. Clare Brownlow, who paints with pheasant feathers, found a new way to exhibit that she will continue when all whiffs of Covid have dissipated. Clients may tour her virtual gallery (www.clarebrownlow.com), zooming in on paintings and clicking on each for more information, as well as ‘visiting’ her Borders studio in Hawick. ‘I filmed a walk-round first, but I realised I wanted people to be able to go at their own pace, so invested in 3D scanning,’ explains Mrs Brownlow. ‘The reaction has been incredible; I sold far more than I thought I would. My reach is global now.’ Instagram has been ‘phenomenal’ for her, too, and is increasingly a place to find new artists. As COUNTRY LIFE Executive Editor Giles Kime,…

Tenacious, sheltering and the subject of much folklore, ivy makes itself known in winter-and not only when we sing about it or twine its pliable stems into Christmas decorations. Outdoors, Hedera helix's evergreen presence is audacious when all around has burned or cooled to shades of brown and grey. Often, its polished, leathery leaves catch and reflect the low sun's rays, usefully scattering more light into the surroundings. Numerous birds find ivy's clustered, black berries a life-saving larder in frosty weather; a frequently encountered scene of winter waysides is the rustling of wood pigeons crashing through its branches, trying to achieve the delicate balancing act of reaching the fruits so temptingly held aloft at the wobbly stem tips. Insects, birds and small mammals roost and hibernate among the dense foliage…

1930 Unpublished About St Thomas's Hospital, London SE1. Given in 1896, the Doulton wall tiles were a hygienic, but colourful solution to the decoration of nurseries and hospitals. Visible here are panels of Dick Whittington, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Boy Blue. Some survived the demolition of the building in 1968. The nurses and children are aware of the photographer. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www.countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

IN the Bible, shepherds watched their Christmas flocks by night, while seated on the ground. In the winters of medieval Britain, shepherds crouched in convenient, weather-proof shrubbery (hence ‘Shepherd’s Bush’). The modern English shepherd in December tends to haul him or herself off the sofa for a quick late-evening check of their charges. So, coming up to 9pm yesterday evening, I put on a head torch and the Barbour, went outside, grimaced at the cold, went back into the hall, put a gilet on top of the Barbour. It was two-coat cold. Only a single dog, my labrador Plum, could be budged from in front of the fire, but, then, she is my shadow. ‘On the sheeps’ backs, the starlight had settled, spinning a white corona around every one of…

‘At the least generous house, the featherless corpse was buried’ CHEERFULLY, British households celebrate the feast day of the first Christian martyr with a notable lack of religious observance. Better known as Boxing Day, St Stephen’s Day sees meets and family shoots across the country, eager sales shopping in town centres and, in many cases, quantities of cold turkey. Historically, the day was marked dramatically: wren hunts avenged the saint, boys dressed as girls, unmarried men wore costumes made of straw and some—such as the Bohemian King Wenceslas in the popular carol—braved winter weather to give alms to the poor. This is one explanation for the name ‘Boxing Day’, in which the box in question is an alms box. Who knows what St Stephen would make of it all? One…

‘We play for hours on end, often with about 24 people in a room designed for nine’ ONE ibble-dibble with four dibbleibbles calls four ibble-dibble with five dibble-ibbles!’ Ah, ‘ibbledibble’, the classic Christmas parlour game, best served after lunch—and preferably with a glass in hand. Many of the parlour games we think of today —‘wink murder’, ‘charades’, ‘blind man’s buff’ —have pleasingly ancient origins. During the Victorian era, the popularity of the parlour game grew exponentially, as affluent families were introduced to the concept of free time. ‘A manual of parlour games has long been a desideratum among the social and family circles of town and country,’ wrote Catharine Harbeson Waterman in her 1853 book The Book of Parlour Games: Comprising Explanations of the Most Approved Games for the Social…

AMONG Britain’s birds, the swan is the epitome of grace and beauty. Like a ship in full sail, this striking creature floats serenely downstream, occasionally stopping to dip its bill into the water to feed. Yet although this may look effortless, its feet are paddling rapidly beneath the surface; indeed, we use this image as a metaphor for someone who appears to be doing a task with ease, but is working frantically to maintain that deception. This could be a metaphor for the life of a swan: it may appear superficially easy, but is often much harder than it looks. Like all birds, swans face challenges every day of their lives: to find food, seek out a mate, breed and raise a family—and, at times, simply survive. We may assume…

URBAN life and landscape—London, above all—is the essence of Dickens. A statement of the obvious. Both fiction and nonfiction tap the capital’s inexhaustible supply of locales and landmarks, outlandish characters and outrageous evils, observed on Dickens’s mammoth municipal footslogs at all times of the day and year. ‘Even so, Dickens had a love-hate relationship with London,’ notes Mark Frost of the University of Portsmouth. ‘He loved the city and all those long walks, but also needed to retreat from it all.’ Multiple ‘out-of-town’ locations provided Dickens with crucial breathing space in which to write, plus vital access to recreation, and a substantial portion of each year was spent as a refugee from city stress. Those London walkabouts have their counterparts in myriad rural and coastal rambles and the author was…

12.05am Father Christmas, making his annual visit to Fir Tree Farm in Dorset, realising he has forgotten to drink the milk and force down the cold mince pie left out for him, stubs his toe and emits muffled swear word. Upstairs, an ever-vigilant Sprout manages to stifle a rumbling growl, realising that this will alert people to the fact that he is comfortably and illicitly ensconced beneath Mary’s duvet. 5.30am Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse, when Nanny, in hairnet and nightie, but minus teeth, tiptoes downstairs to put the turkey in. Parsnip wags his tail feebly in case this means food, but, like so many before him, is quelled by a ‘look’ from Nanny. Back upstairs, she pretends not to notice the torchlight shimmering under Joseph’s…

Fresh cranberry and brandy mince pies Makes 12 Method Soak the currants, raisins, sultanas, mixed peel and glacé cherries in a bowl with the brandy and set aside. Make the pastry by hand or in a processor. By hand: rub the flour and butter together and, once the butter is evenly distributed, add the salt, sugar and orange zest. Rub again. Add the yolks and water, bring it together in your hands and place on clingfilm. Cover it up and refrigerate for at least half an hour. If using a processor, simply add the ingredients as above and pulse until just combined. Tip out onto cling-film, enclose and chill. ‘Fresh cranberries needn’t be reserved only for cranberry sauce, as they make a deliciously tart addition to cakes and bakes, too’…

Never in Nature was there a more visual example of symbiosis, possibly the first such relationship to be remarked by Mankind. Birds ate berries growing on a strange bush up in a tree, defecated the seeds onto a branch and another strange bush grew there. The process seemed mystical, but Anglo-Saxon ancients found a bluntly honest name for the bush. Their word for dung was mist, a branch or twig was tan and out of the two emerged mistletoe. We may presume that the process had been forged long before Homo sapiens apprehended it. Fossil remains of the mistle thrush found in Poland and Sicily date from some 2½ million years ago, although those of a mistletoe unearthed in the Czech Republic are two million–five million years old. Propagation is…

• The Diana Maria and Lady Annabella mines in Durham are the only fluorite specimen mines in Europe • The most sought-after stones are emerald and bright leaf-green, such as the ones found in the Diana Maria and Lady Annabella mines • British fluorites from Co Durham are the most consistently fluorescent, whereas those from Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cornwall, if they fluoresce at all, are generally only feebly fluorescent • Fluorite (commonly known as ‘fluorspar') is used in steel and aluminium production and in the manufacture of glass and enamels • crystals are sought-after for their healing properties; they are also thought to boost mental clarity and promote peace of mind…

Argyll & Bute, £250,000 With a barrel-shaped turf and glass hat, hobbitesque The Ice House sits in a one-acre plot on a peninsula at the fringe of Loch Crinan, near Kilmartin, and offers an exciting opportunity. A Victorian ice house-originally built to store ice in which salmon could be packed for market-its south gable is complemented by a frameless ‘light loft' made from heated glass panels, a warm spot from which to enjoy far-reaching views. Planning permission and listed-building consent has been granted in the past and a new application for a detached property is currently awaiting approval. gardens , by a on one terraces, and there's a stretch of private foreshore on the River Add's tidal estuary that provides direct water access. Anyone wishing to know more should…

TOO old to be conscripted, Aldin kept the South Berks going as sole master and, as did so many of his ilk, including Alfred Munnings and Edwards, served as a remount officer. He staffed his stables with women, ‘their horses were often better “done” and… more and more of my depots were placed entirely under woman control’. The war, inevitably, took a terrible toll. His only son, Dudley (of whom his sister, Gwen, said ‘had he lived, would have been a better than average artist’), was killed at Vimy Ridge in 1917, leading a company of sappers, and of the Berkshire Regiment officers who hunted with him, only one returned. He laid down painting materials for four years, except for two major war works, one showing the remount stables, its…

NEXT autumn, the Lindisfarne Gospels—‘the most spectacular manuscript to survive from Anglo-Saxon England,’ says the British Library—will go on display at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery and, to mark the loan, a year-long cultural explosion is planned across the North-East. At Auckland Castle, Northumberland, ancient bishops’ palace and site of the Auckland Project, a Faith Museum will open—a first for England—occupying the Scotland Wing and a new extension. Looking at stories and artworks from today to 5,000 years ago, visitors may consider the meaning of faith and how it has shaped Britain. Also in the autumn, the Ad Gefrin Visitor Experience and Whisky Distillery will open at Wooler, focusing on the Northumbrian Golden Age and and its kings and queens in their 7th-century summer palace discovered at nearby Yeavering—a time when…

THE long-lost grotto tunnel built by William Beckford (1760–1844) has been discovered, turning our attention once more to the eccentric recluse who amassed treasures enough to enhance collections at the National Gallery, V&A, Tate Britain and Wallace Collection, among others. Accompanied by a pack of spaniels, Beckford would ride daily from his home at Lansdown Crescent through a mile-long series of gardens and paddocks to what is now known as Beckford’s Tower—a landscape acquired by the Bath Preservation Trust (BPT) earlier this year, thanks to a donation by the current owner of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, which Beckford also built (Town & Country, April 21). Armed with little more than a 19th-century print (left), a BPT team of experts and volunteers searched patiently, until, finally, they uncovered the top of…

Very hip indeed WE were making wreaths for a church fair recently, most of which were sumptuous and bountiful. In a moment of Hygge inspiration, my mother went for more of a minimalist approach, using only rose-hip branches. The elegant result (right) now hangs on our front door. Alice Loxton, Warwickshire Nothing like a free lunch THE other day, we decided to jump on the train from Durham to Newcastle to do some Christmas shopping. Our first priority was to book lunch at the Saltwater Fish Company in Fenwick. Our haul of Apple earbuds, a handbag, facial cleanser and a bristle hairbrush came to a total of £180—the same bought online would have cost £405. Our lunch of oysters, lobster, pudding and wine came to £200, so we effectively had…

IT’S Christmas—a Christmas in some of the oddest circumstances any of us can remember. A nation in disarray, a world unravelling and a pandemic still threatening to undo every plan we’ve dared to make. Undeterred, Agronomes is determined to be cheered by good news from around the world. The season of goodwill should lift our hearts and here are recent events from very different places that give us reason to rejoice and be glad. The first is from England, where, after years of closures, there is something of a renaissance in village pubs. Who would have thought that, amid the Covid conditions that have hit the hospitality industry so hard, people in all parts of the country would have become determined to rescue and even re-open their pub? ‘Who would…

THE world in winter: when the earth is cold and unforgiving, the days short and food scarce; when the mind of the animal is preoccupied by a single thought—survival. Some, such as the swallow, flee to warmer climes; some of the less fleet-of-wing enter a state of diapause or dormancy: the winter sleep of forgetting and sanctuary. Birds don’t do it, but ladybirds do, likewise the bumblebee, the painted lady butterfly, the grass snake, the frog and three of our mammals—the bat family (all 17 types of them), the hedgehog and the dormouse. Hibernate is from the Latin hibernationem, ‘the action of passing the winter’, although the dry logic of Latin fails pitifully to encompass the mystery and the miracle of the suspended animation by which the tiny dormouse can…

AS soon as I heard the name, I had a sense of foreboding. I don’t know any Arwens and, not having read any Tolkien since prep school, I had forgotten Aragorn’s wife. If asked to picture one, I would have visualised not an elf-maiden, but a tiresome Celtic separatist with militant vegan tendencies. I suppose the people who name storms have to come up with something provocative; we would hardly be likely to ‘avoid inessential travel’ for a Julian or an Emily. I was caught napping by the BBC issuing severe weather warnings for the Aberdeenshire coast, diametrically remote from us in Galloway. It was only when I ventured up the drive and saw several trees across it that I realised what we were up against. Our trees were wrong-footed…

So that was 2021 1) Which high-street retailer went into administration after more than 200 years in business, closing its last department store in May? 2) Footballer Marcus Rashford was awarded an MBE in recognition of his campaign to support vulnerable children—to whom did he dedicate it? 3) Self-driving shuttle buses were trialled for the first time in the UK in which city? 4) Born on September 18, what did Princess Beatrice and her husband, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, name their baby girl? 5) Piers Morgan quit as presenter of which television programme after regulatory body Ofcom received more than 50,000 complaints about him (the body later ruled that no regulations had been breached)? 6) The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference took place in Glasgow during which month? 7) Which…

IT’S all too easy to destroy a heritage that has taken centuries to build. In the case of Britain’s parish-church pipe organs—a rich and glorious element of our history, both musical and artistic—the statistics are stark. ‘About one organ per week is being thrown into a skip,’ says Martin Renshaw, organ-rescuer and unwilling expert on the Church-sponsored vandalism going on across the country. ‘Organs are far from worthless boxes of pipes. They are objects of beauty’ The matter was much publicised this summer when BBC presenter Huw Edwards wrote an impassioned piece in The Times calling for a halt to the casual destruction of pipe organs, particularly in Wales, where he learned the organ in his teens. The chapel in Llanelli in which he played, and its ‘lovely two-manual Nicholson…

‘There’s nothing new in the desire to spend as much time outdoors as possible’ IF any positives have emerged from the experience that we’ve lived through over the past 24 months, it’s a renewed appreciation for spending time outdoors; eschewing our inclination to hibernate in centrally heated warmth throughout the winter, we’ve met friends, had drinks and even hosted Christmas lunches in temperatures hovering around freezing. Together with the food, there are two vital ingredients. One is clothing, which requires strict adherence to the Wainwrightian philosophy there’s no such thing as cold weather, only unsuitable clothing. The other is attitude—or simply a capacity to remind yourself that you could be on the ski slopes. For Paola Solares-Urnes, there’s nothing new in the desire to spend as much time outdoors as…

WHY don’t more people know about Bedgebury? Britain’s National Pinetum in Kent spreads across 320 acres and holds the largest collection of conifers in the world. It is also one of the best places in England for a winter walk. The 19th century was a good time for conifers. New species were flooding into Britain, especially from the Americas. The Victorians were smitten by travellers’ tales of redwoods and wellingtonias growing to unimaginable heights in California and they gasped at the strangeness of Chilean monkey puzzles, first known as fossil plants and bearing seeds that were 2in long. Many British landowners, from Bicton in Devon to Benmore in Argyll, began to make collections of them. Bedgebury belonged to Field-Marshal Viscount Beresford, a hero of the Peninsular War, and his collection…

‘Even horses, dogs and wives have to be fed sometimes. They devour the monetary results’ RARE is the country home without a Cecil Aldin print somewhere on its walls, of a terrier on a sofa or a venerable gentleman out hunting. In a few lines, Aldin could capture character and circumstance to comic or dramatic effect, from a tumble over a facer or a mail coach at full stretch. He illustrated dozens of books, including his own, and earned a well-deserved reputation as a sporting artist. He could have been even greater, had it not been for his insatiable appetite for sporting pursuits. ‘I have no pretensions to Art,’ he wrote in his engaging autobiography Time I was Dead. Painting ‘has had to provide the wherewithal to enable me to…

Leaping the Dragon Gate Teresa Canepa and Katharine Butler (Paul Holberton, £175) THIS catalogue is a fitting memorial to the other life of Sir Michael Butler (1927–2013), one of Britain’s most remarkable diplomats. Between 1980 and 1983, when working 80- or 90-hour weeks with all-night sessions to negotiate Margaret Thatcher’s rebate from the European Community budget, he found time to buy 156 pieces of 17th-century Chinese porcelain throughout Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He had bought his first pot at Sotheby’s in 1961 and, at his death, he left 850 objects, constituting the world’s most important collection. He had also rewritten the scholarship of the subject, although there is more still to be ascertained and research continues. In 1972, accompanying Edward Heath to Britain’s first European summit, he slipped…

PAUSE for a moment, if you will, and contemplate the films of Christmas past. When I was a nipper, the BBC could only afford to buy very old or very unpopular films. Thus, according to my diary, we watched ‘The Crosican Brothers’ (1941) in 1966, ‘The Last of the Mowhecans’ (1936) in 1967 and ‘Captain Blood’ (1935)—note how my spelling was improving—in 1968. According to my 1967 Radio Times (me, a hoarder?), we were also treated to The Flute and the Arrow (1957), a decade-old ‘Swedish drama film that was entered into the 1958 Cannes Film Festival’. Yet although I remember laughing at the director’s name —Arne Sucksdorff (no, really)—of either the flute or the arrow, I have no recollection. Of course, rather like Dickens’s ghost, anything one watched on…