Innholdsfortegnelse for April 16, 2025 i Country Life

FOR Sir John Betjeman, that great arbiter of nostalgia and national character, our country stood for ‘the Church of England, eccentric incumbents, oil-lit churches, Women’s Institutes, modest village inns’ and ‘arguments about cow parsley on the altar’, among other things. Much has changed since this wartime radio talk of 1943, not least the acceptance of frothy white sprays of Queen Anne’s lace as a suitably decorative flower for the pedestal by the altar. Yet, if Betjeman were around today to indulge in a bit of his beloved ‘church crawling’, he’d no doubt overhear the flower-rota ladies—‘and they are usually ladies,’ confirms Father Benji Tyler, parish priest of St Andrew’s in Chippenham, Wiltshire—discussing the arrangements for a forthcoming service or festival. Nowadays, however, any arguments are likely to be about whether…

IN ancient India, it was thought that diamonds were created when bolts of lightning struck rocks. There was a saying: ‘He who wears a diamond will see danger turn away.’ For the Egyptians, diamonds represented the sun—the symbol of power, courage and truth. The Greek philosopher Plato claimed that diamonds were living beings that embodied celestial spirits. According to the Romans, Cupid, the god of love, shot tiny, diamond-tipped arrows at people to make them fall for each other. I love all gemstones, but I love diamonds more. I love them because they are the oldest of the gems and have travelled the furthest. I love them because they are the hardest mineral in the world: the word diamond comes from the Greek adamas, which means invincible. I love them…

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk SOMEWHERE this Easter, a troubled visitor will enter a church to mumble rusty prayers. Easter is the season of renewal, of hope against the odds. In today’s churches, will our searching soul find such redemptions? A new widow may be struggling with bereavement. An unhappy spouse may be looking for calm. Sorrows come in battalions: an ill child, money woes, the farm tax. In my new novel, it happens to be a terminal diagnosis for a corduroy-trousered Englishman. Full of painkillers, he potters to a wine bar and drinks too much hock. On the way home, he is beckoned by the open doors of his county town’s cathedral, steps inside, selects a discreet pew and bends…

Lest we forget JOHN GOODALL was astonished to discover that Sherborne, Dorset, was bombed during the Second World War (Town Mouse, March 26). I was an evacuee at Templecombe, Somerset—then two stations down the line from Sherborne—and, on September 5, 1942, 14 villagers were killed when a German bomber dropped five bombs on the village. Luckily, I was away from the village at the time. However, I do remember the year before, playing in the school playground, when a German plane machine-gunned the station. It is often forgotten that during the war nowhere was safe and how fortunate we are compared with other war-torn countries to live in a time of comparative peace. David Barker, New South Wales, Australia Chimney posturing THE thatched cottage on your cover (April 2) reminded…

Auguries by Julie Mehretu ‘I am drawn to Julie Mehretu’s large-scale works for their inherent sense of musicality (which can often appear as graphic scores) and for her use of art to comment upon current affairs. For a recent orchestral work, Abstractions, I drew inspiration from her massive 12-panel work Auguries: the dynamic composition of long, arcing lines and compact, energetic marks suggests dense, shifting forms and an array of musical elements. The use of space in Ms Mehretu’s print also evokes a system on the verge of either collapse or formation. She recently shared that: “As a painter, I am trying to negotiate all that is happening in the world through my work”’ Charlotte Mullins comments on Auguries TUMBLING across 12 large sheets of paper is an avalanche of…

THE early career of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams coincided with that of a burgeoning folk movement, through which a group of like-minded musicians and academics transcribed thousands of regional folk songs sung by locals to save them from dying out. Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) amassed more than 800 songs and carols, mainly from East Anglia, Sussex, Herefordshire and Yorkshire. The profound emotional impact of the First World War—for which he volunteered—curtailed this, but folk music remained a leitmotif in his works. In 1906, he published The English Hymnal with the Revd Percy Dearmer, another collector of folk songs; it was first used at Dearmer’s church, St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, north London. (They also produced Songs of Praise and The Oxford Book of Carols.) ‘I know now that two years of close…

General knowledge 1. Which birds usually start the dawn chorus? 2. What do P. G. Wodehouse’s initials stand for? 3. The cowslip, kingcup (below) and oxlip are members of which flower family? 4. At which racecourse does the National Hunt season traditionally end? 5. Which Irish poet and bishop’s wife wrote the lyrics to both There is a Green Hill Far Away and All Things Bright and Beautiful? 6. What is The Queen’s new puppy called? 7. Which novelist is the current Booker Prize winner for Orbital? 8. Which actor plays Rupert Campbell-Black in Disney+’s recent television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals? 9. Which web-footed rodent has orange teeth, supposedly due to a high iron content? 10. What is a ‘Midland Bullock’? 11. What is the only variety of porpoise…

The garden of Derreen, Co Kerry, Ireland DERREEN is an outstanding woodland garden in Co Kerry, where the rocky Beara Peninsula projects deep into the Atlantic Ocean. It has all the characteristics of Ireland’s best gardens—a beautiful natural position, a long history of intelligent cultivation, trees of record size and a huge range of tender plants. Yet Derreen’s unique feature is the thousands and thousands of tree ferns that have naturalised all through the garden over the past 150 years. There is nothing to match it anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Derreen has belonged to the Fitzmaurice family since at least 1300. For most of that time, the windswept peninsula supported a subsistence economy supplemented by fishing. Its inhospitable landscape was covered by sparse native woodland of the Irish (or…

IT started with a cat—fat, orange and indolent—by the name of Garfield. The star of an eponymous American cartoon strip in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember little of him, save a limitless appetite for something called lasagne. I had no idea what the dish was or even how it was actually pronounced. The drawings didn’t offer much to go on, simply a baking tray filled with something brown, divided into lots of squares, but if Garfield liked it, then so would I. As I hounded my mother for a taste of this mysterious dish, las-ag-nn became an obsession. When I finally got to try it, at my aunt and uncle’s house in Dorset, I was both delighted and underwhelmed. For far from being some fragrantly exotic melange, it was…

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THERE are moments when even Agromenes questions ministerial sanity. He has already outed the Conservatives for ignoring the obesity crisis. Now Labour, too, is committed to doing nothing. This was clearly demonstrated by the Government response to the recent cross-party report from the House of Lords Committee on Food, Diet and Obesity. The report was well researched and properly balanced and its conclusions demanded immediate action. It showed that obesity-related diseases cost the NHS £18 billion every year and that this bill is rising inexorably, indeed, is set to overwhelm our health system. The report revealed that the cost of obesity is not only its toll on the NHS. It means that more of the older population are no longer employed, it reduces the capacity of many others and it…

MY happiest childhood memories are of trespassing and poaching. At school, I kept a fishing rod in my locker and, whenever the opportunity arose, I would disappear off to cast a worm for a salmon. During the holidays, I’d be out with my terrier trying to catch rabbits. I have long been aware that being able to explore the countryside is essential for our wellbeing. In some ways, it’s part of British identity. This was my inspiration for writing Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our relationship with the countryside. From fox-hunting to fell running, this is our green and pleasant land—but what impact does footfall have on the countryside and, therefore, on farming and conservation? As a species, humans are flourishing, whereas birds such as the curlew are fast crying their way…

IN his poem Stonechat on Cul Beg, the great Scots writer Norman MacCaig has captured something central to almost all our encounters with this wonderful bird family. Against his beloved Highland landscape, with its ‘square miles of bracken/And bogs and boulders’, MacCaig suddenly finds himself riveted by the exquisite detail in one tiny inhabitant. His stonechat is as ‘bright as an illumination on a monkish parchment’ and the poet feels compelled ‘to thumb the air’ and parse the bird’s aesthetic elements as if he were ‘a group of solemn connoisseurs’. In the chats, you realise, the colours are not merely captivating. They have the precision placement of jewellery, as if they had been designed for maximum effect: lozenges of apricot or citrus-orange framed within black borders or edged further in…

MR C. A. MORRIS had plans for his vegetable garden. Although it provided a genial backdrop to the beer garden at the Old New Inn, he hoped that an innovation would raise his pub’s profile. As he started considering the stone bridges crossing the river that ran through his typically somnolent Cotswolds village, his ambition grew. In the end, it took six men five years to execute the final vision: a 1:9-scale reproduction of all the surrounding buildings (about 100 models), each one carefully constructed from carved Cotswold stone. First conceived in about 1936, Morris’s model of Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, has been open to the public as a ‘miniature village’ since 1940. The idea was grandiose, but not original. In 1928, Mrs Callingham, wife of a suburban accountant, had tired of…

The Dream Factory Daniel Swift (Yale, £25) WE associate ‘The Dream Factory’ with modern Hollywood. However, in this bold and brilliant book, Daniel Swift applies it to London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouse, simply called the Theatre. It survived from 1576 to 1598, when its timbers were transported across the Thames from Shoreditch to Bankside to create the more famous Globe. For the author, however, the Theatre is an equally significant building: a visionary dream, a symbol of the new capitalism, a source of endless litigation and, above all, a place where the young Shakespeare served his apprenticeship before achieving true mastery. The Theatre was conceived by James Burbage, a former joiner and part-time actor, who took a lease on a muddy patch of ground in Shoreditch that once belonged to…