Innholdsfortegnelse for January 1, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk WORLD peace, cancer cured, nutritious food for all, coastal erosion halted—January 1 must be a day for optimism, but most of us know we have to be more modest in ambition for a new year. We can dream of political stability and short NHS waiting lists or of an end to strikes, junk calls, spam emails and spurious conspiracy theories advanced without research. Too much to ask? Probably yes, sadly. What about strict targets for roadwork completions, music lessons for all pupils, accurate geographic labelling of food, earlier gritting of snowy roads, cleaner rivers and more nuanced, less aggressive discourse on subjects such as house building, meat eating, energy and conservation? Perhaps we might dare to…

Print education YOUR fascinating article about Stationers’ Hall, which I must have passed many times unaware on Ludgate Hill in London, reminded me that my father attended gabled, redbrick Stationers’ School in Hornsey in the 1920s (‘Putting in a Good Word’, December 4, 2024). It had become a flourishing grammar school after its foundation in the 1850s in Bolt Court, off Fleet Street, providing education for the sons of those in the printing, publishing and allied trades. In the 1960s, it became a comprehensive and lost its links with the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. It closed in 1983 and the building was demolished. Lucy Scott, Gloucestershire Sugar bricks FURTHER to your various mentions of the Buildings At Risk register, which highlights the magnificent, but decaying structures across…

NO New Year celebration the world over is complete without a raucous, swaying rendering, arms linked, of Auld Lang Syne, a sentimental paean to old friendships, the ancient phrase meaning, literally, ‘old long since’. Despite its ubiquity, few people probably know all the verses—the yearning third one begins: ‘We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans [picked the daisies] fine.’ The talismanic Scottish poet and hero Robert Burns wrote the lyrics in 1788, although they did not appear in print until after his death. He freely admitted that they had been ‘collected’ and adapted ‘from an old man’—or perhaps from a 1711 ballad by James Watson that begins: ‘Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,/and never thought upon; The flames of Love extinguished,/and fully past and gone.’ The Scottish…

I STEP into the woods, my dog by my side, leaving the streetlights behind me. Even in winter, the canopy gives a sense of enclosure—of entering a separate space, darker and wilder. My fingers trace the shape of my phone in my coat pocket as if for reassurance—its torch would be light enough if I wanted it. I resist the temptation to turn it on. I’ve come here this evening to experience darkness. I’ve been craving it, the richness and peace of it, the way you crave silence when you’ve had too much noise. I walk slowly, my feet reaching out and feeling the way. I breathe in the evening and the first hint of night. I know my eyes will adjust given time. The first thing I notice is…

PEOPLE love land and, although some other estates found the sale of large houses problematic this year, at the end of the day, anything that comes wrapped in a good piece of land will eventually find a buyer.’ So said David Hebditch, head of land sales at Carter Jonas, in announcing the successful sale of the glorious Bridehead estate at Littlebredy, Dorset, which was launched in June 2024 with a guide price of £30 million and found a buyer in October. This was also the year that marked the end of an era for four great English country estates. It is rare for an entire Dorset landed estate to find its way onto the open market and Bridehead was not only one of the loveliest, but one of the most…

IT’S easy to be dazzled by summer’s colourful supply of scrambling courgettes, runner beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. You’d be far wiser, however, to develop a winter pantry of vegetables that you can use for months on end: winter crops stand still and can be picked and dug a little at a time all the way from October until late March. They’re handsome beasts, too, and rows of Tuscan kale, leeks and cabbages, steaming slightly on a bright winter’s morning, will please the eye just as much as the stomach. ‘Tuscan kale is hardy, despite the Italianate connection’ It’s a much longer and slower process altogether and you need to start planning now if you’re to get the seeds of your choice. Order from a vegetable specialist (see box), because they’ll…

IS there a doctor on the plane?’ I can’t say I’ve heard this announcement often in my travelling life, but there have certainly been a couple of times when the call has gone out. The most recent of these took place on a return flight from New York following a rather bumpy bit of mid-Atlantic turbulence. Inevitably, on hearing the announcement, most passengers, me included, twisted in their seats to see what was going on (rubber-necking, alas, is a sorry fact of human life) as an air hostess tried to calm a panic-stricken, heavily pregnant woman. Mercifully, there was some sort of medical professional on board, who quickly made themselves known and, mercifully, it was a false alarm. No baby was delivered and we all returned to our books, our…

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LITTLE could the wives of Henry VIII have known that the King’s favoured rendezvous—hunting lodge Greenwich Castle, atop a hill beside the Thames—would one day become an observatory so renowned that its location would define the Earth’s two hemispheres and, therefore, time itself. The auspicious moment was 3.14pm on August 10, 1675—350 years ago—when the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed laid the foundation stone amid the castle’s demolished ruins—less than a year later, he moved into the Royal Observatory, which had cost £520.45 to build, and, over the course of the next 40 or so years, made more than 50,000 observations of the heavens. Cleanliness being next to godliness, 50 years later, in 1725, George I founded the Most Honourable Order of the Bath—the name derives from the ritual bathing,…

AGROMENES is a fan of the BBC’s Countryfile and the direct and cheerful reporting of Charlotte Smith. However, when interviewing the Defra Secretary of State, Steve Reed, last month, she didn’t pose the one question on the family farm tax that every farmer wants to ask. Why did she not ask directly and persistently: ‘Before the election, you promised farmers there would be no change in inheritance tax. How can any of them trust you now?’ It is so crucial a point and she is so good an interviewer that Agromenes suspects it was a condition of getting the interview that she wouldn’t ask. Yet we ought to know the truth, because around this question the whole unhappy story of betrayal begins to unravel. For years, the Treasury has tried…

WELCOME to the COUNTRY LIFE British Wildlife Awards 2024. Here, we celebrate our national and treasured animals… and, to be frank, some of our less beloved. As Oscar Wilde once noted: ‘Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.’ And Wilde’s creepy-crawlies don’t even take our ‘Most likely to be avoided at a picnic’ prize. Neither does that legendary picnic-botherer the common wasp, Vespula vulgaris. Truly, there are more off-putting critters out there when holding a Scotch egg and Pimm’s—which is a back-handed compliment to great British Nature. Whether we categorise animals as wise, funny, brainy, possessing a superpower—such as the salmon’s sense of smell—or rate them as a contender for ‘Even a mother must struggle to love them’, we are…

January On the stage Batten down the hatches for English National Opera’s splendidly silly production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at the London Coliseum, until February 21. Tickets from £10 (www.eno.org) Art and culture Somerset House celebrates its 25th anniversary with an array of exhibitions and events throughout the year, beginning with ‘SOIL: The World at Our Feet’—which aims to unearth the vital role soil plays in our planet’s future. January 23–April 13; tickets from £15 (www.somersethouse.org.uk) Music On January 31, the Nu Civilisation Orchestra will celebrate the life and music of Nina Simone in Mississippi Goddam at the Royal Festival Hall, led by conductor Peter Edwards. Special guests include Corinne Bailey Rae. Tickets from £25 (www.southbankcentre.co.uk) February Art and culture ‘Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the…

MANY years ago, leading the garden team at River Cottage in Devon, I had a trick I used on every course, event and garden visit: I’d pull a single 2in-tall coriander seedling from its compost, lift it to my mouth and start chewing, then ask the person at the other end of the 48ft polytunnel to tell me what I was eating. ‘Coriander’ was always the answer. So potent was the aroma, it always found its way to them. No matter how often I did it, I couldn’t quite believe it would work, yet it always did. Everyone in the group would pick a single one of these micro leaves and, although the walk back through the garden to lunch took 15 minutes, that single seedling would still be giving…

STEP back 2,500 years and the dominant civilisation on earth was Sparta on the Laconia plain beneath the great Taygetus mountain range. The military-based society never lost a land battle until its ultimate defeat by Thebes at Leuctra and remains famous for its austerity and spartan lifestyle. There is little to see of Ancient Greece in modern-day Sparta—the stonework was recycled into a later part of this area’s extraordinary story. The Spartan society didn’t feel the need to build walls around the city, but the way of life did give us the laconic phrase. When Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, had conquered much of southern Greece, his attention turned to attacking Sparta, sending the message: ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out’, to which the Spartans replied…

A COVEN of bald, misshapen heads gathers around a blazing fire, eyes sunken, mouths twisted, bodies swallowed by darkness. The Witches Cauldron could easily be the artistic love child of Francisco Goya and Edvard Munch, but it’s a drawing by British artist John Macfarlane for the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s staging of Verdi’s Macbeth. Mr Macfarlane is one of the world’s greatest set and costume designers for ballet and opera and his works have a black, almost Gothic quality, as ‘John Macfarlane & The Art of Theatrical Design’, an ongoing exhibition at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, shows. Even The Nutcracker—usually veering between the grandiose and the whimsical—becomes a little disturbing when seen through his eyes and his version of that otherwise merry romp that is Cinderella has a dystopian…

Moor Park, Hertfordshire, part I The property of the Moor Park Golf Club DID ever golf club have a 19th hole so sumptuous as this?’ asked John Betjeman of Moor Park, now the clubhouse of Moor Park Golf Club in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, in Metroland, his 1973 television essay on London’s commuter belt. As he hinted, there is something incongruous about Moor Park as we find it today. With its own eponymous stop on the Metropolitan Line, which opened in 1910, it is now in classic Metroland territory. Yet the majesty of the house itself speaks to a time when Hertfordshire was a place of retreat for some of Britain’s most powerful families. Built 1,000 yards away from the location of the vanished Manor of the More, which historian A. F.…

JANUARY is the month that has us looking in two directions as we review the past year—its sweet moments as well as its sadness—and crane our necks forward in anticipation of what the year ahead holds. The Romans found a way to cope with this transitional moment by focusing their energies on pleasing a god that could straddle both time dimensions and ease them into the new year with all its unknowns. ‘You give birth to the swiftly rolling years, and recall with your presence centuries long past,’ writes the Roman poet Martial of Janus, the eponym of January: a twin-faced god who looks both forward and back, occupying this liminal space in the minds of ordinary Romans. Known as the god of gods (divom deus), Janus was the first…

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AS a bottle of pudding wine is uncorked, chef Oliver Gladwin hands me his phone to show a picture of a palm-sized beefsteak mushroom. ‘You can’t get these for love nor money at the moment.’ Ever the forager, he’d spotted it beneath a tree on the way to his Soho restaurant, Sussex, W1, that morning and used slivers of it as a last minute accompaniment to the pillow-soft salt beef we’d devoured an hour or so before. It was the pièce-de-résistance of a sold-out, six-course dinner in collaboration with fellow River Cottage alumnus Gill Meller, but you suspect he’d have displayed the same amount of giddy enthusiasm if he’d stuck it on a bit of toast for his staff pre-service. ‘They’ve been able to fill their menus with ingredients they…

Red-cabbage and sausage tray bake with puy lentils and balsamic glaze Ingredients Serves 4 1 small red cabbage, cut into thick wedges (leave the core intact to hold the wedges together)1 large red onion, cut into wedges12 sausages (pork, chicken or plant-based)2 apples, cored and sliced into wedges—I used Braeburn4 fresh thyme sprigsA good splash of olive oil1tspn smoked paprika½tspn chilli flakes (for modest heat) For the glaze 4tbspn balsamic vinegar3tbspn honey or maple syrup2tspn Dijon mustard250g cooked green or Puy lentils (I used a sachet of the two combined)A handful of toasted walnuts (optional)A handful of fresh parsley Method 1 Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6. 2 Arrange the red cabbage and onion wedges, sausages, apple slices and thyme on a large baking tray. Drizzle over the…

I SPENT most of a recent weekend lying on the bathroom floor in a hotel room in Lisbon. It wasn’t what I had planned and my only advice for visiting the city—having seen almost none of it—is don’t buy oysters from the half-drunk man with a big moustache at his stall down by Martim Moniz Square. It was a pity, because Constance almost never manages to persuade me to go abroad and I can’t say I’m desperate to go again. It’s not only the risk of shellfish poisoning, I’ve never been good at doing nothing. Before I got sick, I saw a sign in a butcher’s shop advertising for an assistant; the obvious language barrier aside, I was tempted to apply. It could have been the start of something great.…