Innholdsfortegnelse for 25-Oct-2023 i Country Life

THE phone lights up and a text message comes in bearing a cryptic barrage of letters: ‘Igy, dw’. Stumped, the recipient runs swiftly across the gamut of possible interpretations for those pesky consonant sequences, until the eyes cross and the brain hurts—but nothing. The meaning remains as impenetrable as the British coast to the Spanish Armada (in case you’re wondering, it translates as: ‘I get you, don’t worry’.) Now ubiquitous, acronyms—or, precisely, initialisms; they only graduate to acronyms when they are pronounceable as words, such as NATO—make communication a minefield. Sometimes, it makes sense to abbreviate commonly used words (think of MP and how repetitive it would be to write out Member of Parliament every time). This magazine is as guilty as anyone of using initialisms for countryside groups (RSPB,…

Letter of the week Bibliophilia in Israel EARLIER this year, I entered premises at 36, King George Street, Tel Aviv, Israel, and found myself in book heaven (‘Doing it by the book’, October 11). Run by two German ladies, with impeccable English, it is an antiquarian and rare-books establishment (since 1899). I immediately noticed a first-edition (1911) volume of A Little Pilgrimage in Italy by Olave M. Potter with colour illustrations by Yoshio Markino, published by Constable and Company of London. I promised the ladies I would be back the next day—never go into a bookshop without your wallet—and they promised to keep it for me. I returned and it is now part of a large collection of travel books. I have other, much larger collections on a…

THERE was a story in which a mole, a beever, a badger & a water rat was characters & I got them terribly mixed up as I went along,’ wrote Kenneth Grahame to his wife, Elspeth, in 1903, in the Cockneyfied baby talk in which this unhappily mismatched couple communicated. He was describing a walk in London’s Kensington Gardens with the Grahames’ only child, three-year-old Alistair, known as ‘Mouse’. Five years later, and much altered, the story invented for Mouse on wintry afternoon sorties from the Grahames’ house in Durham Villas, Campden Hill, was published to overwhelmingly negative reviews as The Wind in the Willows. It would be Grahame’s only full-length novel. To the novel’s illustrator, Grahame confessed: “I love these little people” ‘Children should read of the joy of…

The eyes have it The eyes are the window to the soul, so it’s vital to frame them properly. Optician E. B. Meyrowitz opened in London in 1875 and still crafts the finest opticals in the country. ‘We are so proud that everything we make is by hand,’ says owner (and avid COUNTRY LIFE reader) Sheel Davison-Lungley, who elegantly glides around her shop on The Royal Arcade, W1 (right). Everyone’s face is wonky (even Stanley Tucci’s, a customer) and a pair of bespoke specs from E. B. Meyrowitz will address this by balancing out a face, straightening ears and noses, chiselling cheekbones and perfectly tuning all features. More than 23 measurements are taken and a person’s colouring is considered, too— ‘frames should blend in with you,’ the eye maestro…

THE other man’s grass is always greener’, so the saying goes. That’s probably because he uses far too much nitrogenous fertiliser, whereas my lawn gets two doses of blood, bone and fishmeal each year—in April and again in June—and the plantains and dandelions are prised out by hand with a daisy grubber. There are drawbacks to being an organic gardener. But I digress... The thing is, no two gardens are the same, not only because of differing cultivation techniques, but because not all gardeners cultivate the same soil. Take my daughters: they live a mere eight miles from my Hampshire garden, just over the border in Surrey, where rhododendrons grow like weeds and great billowing clouds of them draw sighs of admiration when they erupt across the landscape in spring.…

BRITAIN’S electricity grid needs urgent transformation if we don’t want the lights to go out. It will be a real challenge to the countryside, because the improvements that are essential mean the construction of a new web of connection to provide the energy to heat homes, fuel cars and run all the machines that power our modern lives. We’ve done it before—our national grid is the most advanced in the world and the pylons that stride across the countryside made it so. However, that grid was the reverse of the one we now need—20th-century electricity was generated in huge coal-fired power plants and fed out around the country. As a result, everybody, even in the most rural of places, expects to get electricity. The electricity of the 21st century may…

Jamie Hambro is the chairman of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association Landseer’s animal paintings are among my favourites, this one in particular. My childhood was full of incorrigible Jack Russells, one of which conducted several romances in the nearby village that resulted in some interesting offspring, which looked similar to Low Life. He could be an old sea dog telling tales of foreign adventures or how he lost an eye in a street fight. He looks a great character whose wandering days are over and who now occupies the chair nearest the fire most of the time Charlotte Mullins comments on Low Life A MEATY Jack Russell type stands guard outside his master’s cramped workplace. His eyes are alert, but he appears slumped against the wall, as…

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WRITTEN by playwright Anthony Shaffer and helmed by first-time director Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man is a tale of a priggish, puritanical policeman named Neil Howie, who is lured to a remote Hebridean island, having been anonymously tipped off that a young girl called Rowan Morrison has gone missing. When he arrives by seaplane, he discovers the locals, although appearing to have perfectly normal daily lives, are actually members of a practising druid cult that worships pagan pre-Christian gods. During his investigations, he comes across a schoolroom of children being taught the phallic roots of the maypole and couples engaged in what he considers blasphemous fertility rites. In one memorable scene, a girl’s sore throat is treated by having a frog placed in her mouth, all of which adds to…

A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4803, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, October 31. UK entrants only ACROSS 4 Girl assistant quickly established metrical foot (8) 8 A subtler way to support railing (8) 9 Compassionate call by accountant (6) 10 Chart temperature in river still (10) 11 Delighted when journalist’s boss hides that deadline has been missed (6) 12 Runners who crawl? (8) 15 Few present are attractive (8) 16 Journalist about to take ale (8) 21 Dim piece about plague (8) 22 Rock below earth surface is point for god of the underworld (6) 23 I raided art gallery that is dazzling (10) 26 Vegetables are on…

Quiz of the week 1) The sculpture of Hodge the Cat in London’s Gough Square commemorates the feline companion of which 18th-century writer and lexicographer? 2) Fell, Eriskay and New Forest are all breeds of which animal? 3) Who composed The Lark Ascending? 4) A mycologist works with and specialises in the study of what? 5) Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery won which key battle in the autumn of 1942, which later became part of his title? Word of the week Dactyliomancy (noun) Divination using a finger ring 100 years ago in COUNTRY LIFE October 27, 1923 THAT Trafalgar Day commemorates a hero even more than a great event is a truth curiously emphasised by a remarkable letter of which the original belongs to Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, who quoted…

IN May 1940, the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) was forced to move from its long-standing home in Chatham, Kent, to the relative safety of Ripon, North Yorkshire. The city had been the site of several massive training camps in the First World War, most of which had been cleared after hostilities had ceased, so the move meant it was revived as an important military base. From its new headquarters, the Royal Engineers undertook a series of projects that would prove enormously important, both in the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War. It was here, for example, that a new family of Bailey Bridges—modular and portable structures designed by the Experimental Bridging Establishment led by civil engineer Donald Bailey —were tested and introduced to Canadian and American…

LIMEWASHED the colour of ripened barley, Ballone Castle stands dramatically on a clifftop viewed across the fields of Tarbat, the wing-shaped peninsula that juts into the Moray Firth. When Lachie and Annie Stewart came here in January 1989, they found a roofless shell inhabited by cows. An architect and a textile designer, who had met at Edinburgh College of Art and established their design company ANTA in 1984, the couple had been looking for a castle in the Highlands to restore as a home and they were immediately drawn to the setting and unaltered form of this 16th-century tower house (Fig 2). They called on the owner, who, on hearing that Mr Stewart came from Lochalsh, invited them in. The farmer liked them because they wanted to make a home,…

I DISMOUNTED from my penny-farthing in the heart of Makariv, a provincial Ukrainian town 35 miles west of the capital, Kyiv, and walked into a restaurant called Vasabi. It was deserted except for a group of 10 young women, who were sitting around a rectangular table crammed full of local dishes and bottles of Ukrainian vodka. There was a palpable silence as my unexpected presence on a Sunday was digested. I doffed my black top hat, leant my 54in-diameter-wheeled bicycle against the wall and blurted out: ‘Excuse me for interrupting, but I’m British. Nice to meet you.’ I had stumbled into Lena’s private birthday celebrations. Shortly afterwards, having been joined by my expedition colleagues Paula Reid and Mark Cropley, we exchanged greetings and I explained that we were midway through…

ONE afternoon, after I got back from work in London, Peter, our builder, asked if I wanted a cellar. My heart jumped—of course, but how much would it cost? ‘Not much, the digger’s already here.’ In the end, the electric door in the utility floor was double the price of the cellar itself. My new cellar has only three bottles of wine in it. But what a start they are. Each of them is from Château Troplong Mondot, a Premier Grand Cru Classé from Saint-Émilion, France. It is one of Bordeaux’s greatest wines, which, this year, has celebrated 20 years of insecticide and herbicide-free cultivation. The land is ploughed by a team of 12 horses, as Indian runner ducks control the slugs. Best of all, I went to stay there…

ARTISTIC fashions, like so much else in life, are subject to sometimes violent inter-generational swings. The lions of today will be scorned tomorrow or, perhaps worse, forgotten, but if there was quality to begin with, the reputational big dipper will likely soar again. An extreme case was the way in which Victorian masterworks could be had for a pound or two by 1950, only to sell for millions again a few decades later. The rises and falls of the English watercolour market have been partly due to fashion, but other factors also had their effect. Many of the best examples were gathered into the Mellon collection, now the Yale Center for British Art, making them a less enticing field for new collectors. Fading affected many others and the disastrous…

I LOVED my week in Strasbourg competing in the 10th European Transnational Championships in the summer. I didn’t love all my decisions at the table, but I’ll be telling that story over the next weeks. Teammates Peter Crouch (not the footballer) from Oxted and Simon Cope from Radlett were one-all on today’s major-suit games from the qualifying Swiss. First, a good defence by our pair, recovering from an unfortunate, if normal, opening lead. West led a normal ten of Clubs (at the other table, East had opened One Diamond and West led a Diamond, rendering Four Spades nigh-on impossible to make). The Dutch declarer played low from dummy, East winning the King and switching to the ten of Diamonds (best—setting up a second-round winner and attacking dummy’s entry). Declarer won…

LAST week, I was on the Isle of Lewis, crouched behind an old barbed-wire fence at dawn. The tide drew in around my boots, cold light broke through in the eastern sky and, out on the mud, a curlew cried. The previous evening, we’d stayed up late, having gloomy conversations with the outgoing party about how few fish they’d caught. They knew the River Grimersta like an old friend, but, despite fishing it hard, with experienced gillies, they’d only managed four salmon. The strange thing is that the conditions had been perfect, but the fish seemingly had no interest. Grimersta is certainly not the most expensive fishery on the windswept and almost treeless landmass of Lewis and Harris. Garynahine, further to the north, charges a fair bit more for a…