Innholdsfortegnelse for 10-May-2023 i Country Life

Come queen of months in company Wi all thy merry minstrelsy The restless cuckoo absent long And twittering swallows chimney song And hedge row crickets notes that run From every bank that fronts the sun… Lines from May, from The Shepherd’s Calendar by John Clare THE poet John Clare was right. ‘May’ and ‘Merry’ are as conjoined as ‘Love and Marriage’. Merrie May is the exuberant month of fertility and bursting green, when finally, happily, the land, sea and air are warm with spring. Shakespeare’s ‘darling buds of May’ are everywhere, from copse to park, from riverbank to heathery moor-top high. The flowers of field and hedgerow ring loud the full blooming of spring. If dandelions are now puffballs, the meadow is brilliant yellow with buttercups and, along the lane,…

Letter of the week Bedtime reading ALTHOUGH I appreciate that the coronation is an important and historic occasion, the weight of your magazine this week causes me a problem. I enjoy reading a couple of articles from your magazine in bed last thing. At more than 2lb in old money or just under a kilo in weight the special issue is almost impossible to read in my chosen location. I would be very much obliged if future issues are less heavy, so us bed-time readers are able to dip into your magazine last thing at night without feeling we are exercising at the gym. Mike Johnson, Cheshire The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne When to…

IN January this year, Antonia Fraser woke up in hospital to find her six children surrounding the bed. ‘I thought, good heavens, anyone would think I was dying.’ It was, indeed, what they assumed; a priest had been summoned to give extreme unction. She had picked up an infection following surgery on a broken ankle. In the hospital? ‘Well, they don’t say—only the Almighty God would know and He was not in a very good mood. Anyway, my kidneys packed up and I just shut down. My poor family: they came from Mexico and France, my sister came to have a last view. I knew nothing of all this.’ Home now, but not yet walking, she sits in the corner of a plump sofa, elegantly wrapped in a fall of…

ALTHOUGH I do try to fish every month of the year, I am a great believer in the traditional closed seasons—once termed ‘fence months’—because gleeful anticipation lies at the heart of angling and you tend to appreciate something more if there is a certain difficulty in obtaining it. By the time spring comes to the glen up here, I am usually suffering from a severe case of cabin fever—or ‘the shack nasties’, as they say in Maine. I can tell it’s spring, because when I take our cocker spaniel Pompey for his early-morning constitutional, I no longer cast a moon-shadow onto the frosted lawn. This year, my first vow was to ‘commit more fishing’. I admit this is a perennial resolution, but I was emboldened by a report from Prof…

HORTICULTURAL know-how has never been so widely and easily available to the curious reader. Historians, plantsmen and garden-lovers are well served by books about gardens and gardening. Ever since cheap colour printing arrived in the 1970s, the publishing industry has poured forth a flood of glossy, well-illustrated books about every aspect of plants and gardens. Designers, plants-men, historians and media personalities have all done very well from the demand for knowledge —I know, I am among them. Yet there is one field of garden history that is under-represented, largely because the subject is ephemeral or unresearched. Or both. I mean the study of old nurserymen’s catalogues—those beautiful, colourful and instructive volumes that serve us for a season and are then discarded. Some of the older ones are highly collectible. Others…

A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4779, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, May 16. UK entrants only ACROSS1 Epic drama about ambulance worker (9)5 Girl goes back in to credit (5)8 Basic nature of perfume (7)10 Frank paid in advance (2,5)11 Those who deprive our classmate again (12)14 Beat alien admission (6)15 Angry feeling causes strabismus (5-3)16 Arab rent reviews are unusual (8)18 Right to dip in water as sensuous (6)19 In brief, value turns out to be fabulous (12)23 Captivate when set out nettle rash remedy (7)24 Light that makes things darker (7)25 Unusual card game (5)26 Looter rushed to depose former monarch (9) DOWN1 Modern birthday custom…

WHAT a delicious irony that The Guardian should be brought to book over a cartoon. This is a newspaper that doesn’t do humour, so it’s not surprising that the disgraceful portrayal of the newly departed chair of the BBC, Richard Sharp, wasn’t funny, but was a pictorial version of its jaundiced writing. There is no place here for real humour because that demands a sense of proportion and an understanding of the ridiculous—things The Guardian can’t manage. There, the antics of the Right are too dangerous for laughter and those of the Left too serious to be guyed. Apart from Marina Hyde, it’s a joke-free zone. There’s no Matt to challenge the newspaper’s editorial stance; no intellectual, North London-based version of Maudie Littlehampton to put the woke in its place;…

THE death earlier this year of the remarkable figure of Rory Young, at the age of 68, has brought to an end his admirable transformation of a small and unassuming townhouse in Cirencester. Ultimately, it was a combination of three houses, but one in particular served as the base for his notable and action-filled life as an artist, artisan, educator, thinker and networker, so that the person and the building became so intertwined that one could scarcely be understood without the other. Young’s parents both had roots in the area going back several generations and he grew up on the farm that Prince Albert had planned as a demonstration facility for his Royal Agricultural College. His father, Peter, liked the old ways of doing things, among which was maintaining dry-stone…

THE date was set for Thursday, April 26, 1973. The invitations arrived in the form of a first-class Great Western Railway ticket. The ticket was clipped on boarding the train, known back in the day as a ‘football special’—a Pullman hired specifically to take supporters to matches. It set off from Paddington station at 6.40pm, with a stated return of 11.35pm. ‘Drinks, goodies, food and music,’ were promised for the journey and the destination was revealed as ‘Moreton On Marsh’. Recollections as to the food, music and goodies served on the 1½-hour journey are sketchy, however—mostly because the drinks provided on the train turned out to be a surfeit of Champagne. The party had been arranged to celebrate the launch of Rocket Records, a new, independent label founded by Elton…

WE didn’t start well. Me and coriander, that is, a nefarious herb I didn’t so much dislike as detest. The feeling was entirely mutual. It would go out of its way to irk and anger me, sullying stir fries, curries and tacos alike with its aggressively strange, deliberately repellent tang. I mean, how could one such innocuous-looking leaf —the very picture of fresh-faced, verdant beauty—punish the taste buds with such violent disdain. For a good few years, I spent hours methodically picking out each and every green scrap, cursing furiously under my breath. Damn you, coriander, fridge-store antichrist, the Mephistopheles of the kitchen. Then, a strange thing happened. I’m not sure quite when or exactly where. It could have been at David Thompson’s Nahm and that mighty dish with the…

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church Peter Ross (Headline, £22) ONE of my favourite sections of this book—and it’s a competitive field—is when the director of the valiant charity Friends of Friendless Churches, Rachel Morley, observes that these buildings ‘transcend time. They are the spiritual investment and the artistic legacy of generations, and a community’s greatest expression of itself’. At this point, we are in Monmouthshire, at St James’s Llangua, which is situated down a farm track beside the River Monnow. Like more than 2,000 churches over the past half century in the UK, it is falling into disuse. ‘That people have come to pray, that they have brought their hope and anguish, their boredom during long services, their young to be baptised and their dead to bury—all…

IHADN’T been able to attend the annual Lords-Commons bridge match for more than 10 years, so I was delighted to attend the 2022 fixture, generously sponsored by Lord Kalms. My afternoon at the House of Lords was a most enjoyable affair—also a nail-biting one, with the Commons leaping to a sizeable lead and the Lords chasing, then catching them up to win by a minuscule two imps. Baroness Blackstone/James Cooper of the Lords bid and made three thin slams over the 24 boards. This was Board Five, declared by Mr Cooper, barrister for the Lords (the other seven players of the team were Members of the Upper House; the Commons’ team, however, contained only two current MPs). West led the six of Clubs to the nine, ten and Ace. Declarer…

Quiz of the week 1) In which region is there a stone cross that’s supposed to mark the centre of England? 2) Hyacinthoides non-scripta is the Latin name of which much beloved, nodding woodland flower? 3) The Olivier award-winning Leopoldstadt is the latest play by which famous British playwright? 4) In which month of 1066 was the Battle of Hastings fought? 5) Generally, the taste receptors of a butterfly are on which part of its body? Word of the week Nasicornous (adjective) Having a horn on the head Cabinet of curiosities by David Profumo THIS licence to shoot small game (specifically not pig or deer) was issued on November 23, 1949, the year that Germany was formally divided into two states, by the Military Government’s Bezirk (‘Borough’) Resident Officer,…

ATHENA looked at London Liverpool Street Station with particular interest when she passed through last week, because it’s presently the focus of a highly controversial planning proposal. The station was designed by Edward Wilson, engineer of the Eastern Counties Railway, and opened in 1874. It then stood next to another terminus, for the North London Railway at Broad Street. That juxtaposition prompted a scheme in 1975 to demolish both buildings and create one new station under offices. Fierce opposition via the Liverpool Street Station Campaign (LISSCA) saved the site. Broad Street Station was demolished in 1986 (and the site redeveloped), but Liverpool Street was completely re-cast in the idiom of the original design, an unusual approach for the period. The Victorian train shed, an elegant iron and glass structure, was…

IN the early 1820s, a 10-year-old boy was put to work in a cotton mill on the banks of the River Clyde. He was tasked with tying together threads of broken yarn on a factory floor that thundered with the din of spinning machines. It was the sort of tough, monotonous environment that gets young minds dreaming of escape, which might help to explain why the boy would go on to become one of Britain’s best-known overseas explorers. It’s now 150 years since David Livingstone died—on May 1, 1873—near the headwaters of the Congo. His earlier disappearance and his meeting with reporter Henry Morton Stanley (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’) have been documented untold times. He is remembered these days as a single-minded missionary, but equally as someone with the gumption…

YOU can say what you like about Napoleon Bonaparte, but he wasn’t one for dishing out idle praise. When he reportedly described perry as ‘the English Champagne’, it was a sparkling endorsement of the doughty orchardists of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The palaces of imperial France were a long way from the fields of the Wye Valley—nonetheless, a bottle of fine, bittersweet bubbles was seemingly enough to bridge the divide. Perry has history, provenance and prestige. It is, in very basic terms, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented pear juice: perry is to pears what wine is to grapes and cider is to apples. However, although wine and cider have legions of international devotees, perry occupies a much more specialised place in public (un)consciousness. It had a seat at the…

SOME weeks ago at a party, I was chatting to a communist about her days at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She has a reputation for being suspicious of people politically, but I’ve always thought it a bit unfair. At her wedding, she tactfully placed me on a table with an uncle who likes fishing and she didn’t seem to mind that I knew very few words of The Internationale, which admittedly was a welcome change after singing Jerusalem and Dear Lord and Father of Mankind at the 15 other weddings I went to that summer. She told me that at school she used to look out of her boardinghouse window at people in the building opposite and would wonder about how incredibly free life must be as an adult. We both…