Innholdsfortegnelse for December 31, 2025 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk January Encouraged by Cornwall, Norfolk makes a bid for independence. Furriners (visitors and second-home owners) unable to engage in mardle (idle chit-chat) in Norfolk dialect will have to pay kewter (cash) to stay. February There’s romance in the birdwatching world with a new dating app, MateForLife, that alerts birders to a potential love interest observing a pair of courting grebes nearby. Loud booing overwhelms the opening Six Nations rugby match; the waddling robots that have replaced human referees are hopelessly behind the action, letting through all manner of fouls. March The Oscars ceremony descends into chaos after some joker swaps the contents of the envelopes, with the result that the winning make-up artist takes Best Director.…

Leaps and bounders ON Christmas Day, prompted by the dramatisation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, talk turned around our table to the difference between a bounder and a cad. An ex-army guest stated firmly that a cad is a junior officer who seduces his commanding officer’s daughter and a bounder is a middle-ranking officer who seduces the commanding officer’s wife. I thought I would share his answer with COUNTRY LIFE in case the question arises during other readers’ celebrations. Letty Fraser, Gloucestershire Blessed are the peacemakers READING about the growing interest in going to church (Stuff & nonsense, December 24), I was cast straight back to Beirut in Lebanon, where my sister’s family and I attended Mass on December 2. It was Pope Leo XIV’s first foreign tour and, although…

The Fall of Anarchy (?) by J. M. W. Turner ‘I love all of Turner’s paintings–his work is synonymous with movement and drama. He gave landscapes so much more meaning and emotion than a mere snapshot ever could. For some reason, I’m particularly drawn to this unfinished piece. There’s something especially mysterious about it, as if it is still evolving, taking you on a journey with no clear beginning or end. All his unfinished works also offer a glimpse into his techniques: his experimentation with colour and light and his exploration of different subjects. It’s incredible to think how revolutionary–even controversial–his work once was and how it continues to inspire and intrigue us two centuries later’ Charlotte Mullins comments on The Fall of Anarchy (?) THIS unfinished painting by J.…

JUST as two sunrises are never the same, no two hangovers are ever alike. There are the common basics to address—get yourself hydrated, move gently and consider a breakfast that will provide the best response from your body as well as your mind. However, from here, things quickly diverge. Sometimes your route to recovery will be fruit, perhaps a bacon roll, and I’ve even heard tell of the powers of an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. There will be those who firmly believe in a strong cup of coffee, yoga or a dip in the sea. Be warned, however: any hangover roused too rapidly can send a surging torrent of bodily rage coiling from your core and must, therefore, be respectfully dealt with. As if it were a king cobra basking in…

Lacquer It’s easy to forget that light was once a prized commodity (beeswax for the well heeled, tallow for the rest). Shiny surfaces, whether silk, silver or crystal—or gilded, mirrored and polished—were intended to maximise their effect. Today, shininess is back in similarly high demand and lacquer, in particular, is bouncing light around discreetly lit interiors. Moorish The Moorish renaissance is thanks to the celebration of eclecticism that has precipitated a revival of everything from brown furniture and tribal art to folky textiles and lustreware. Expect to see it creeping into cabinetry very soon. Egyptian The new Grand Museum in Cairo (home to 100,000 artefacts, including the complete collection of King Tutankhamun’s treasures) is sure to fan the flames of Egyptomania that have been smouldering since the Parisian fabric house…

CHAENOMELES are beautiful and rewarding garden shrubs—hardy everywhere and not fussy about soil or position. They have only two drawbacks: one is their thorns and the other is their name. We used to call them Japonicas or Japanese quinces—and some of us still do, because no one knows how to pronounce chaenomeles. You realise that a genus such as chaenomeles is looking up when new, improved selections start appearing in garden centres. So many have hit the market in recent years that the RHS started a four-year trial of them in 2022 and the results should be available next year on the society’s website. The trial is important because it represents the largest collection of Chaenomeles ever assembled in Britain. The RHS judges have been evaluating every cultivar for the…

THE rule of law lies at the heart of what it means to be English. We are rightly proud that ours is the Mother of Parliaments, but our nation’s stability and security relies as much on our system of justice as it does on our democratic institutions. Even before the Norman Conquest—and long before the Magna Carta—Saxon England had established the right to be tried by one’s peers. Certainly it was a restricted right, and often ignored by the powerful, but it was accepted as the way things were to be done properly. We, as citizens, were to uphold the rules by which our society was governed. It is that principle that still runs through our whole approach to law and to order. It is lay magistrates who try the…

Treading the boards ROBERT TUCKER and Jonathan Wilmot stand on the hall dais of Restoration House to admire the elm boards of the floor. The massive proportions of the boards—11in across and nearly 2in thick—suggest that they were cut and laid in the 1630s when this room was created. In the 19th century, the floor was covered over. As a result, the boards have never been stained, varnished or painted, but have only been maintained by washing and scrubbing with sand. The treatment has brought out the natural texture and colour of the timber. ‘When we washed the re-exposed floor for the first time,’ explains Mr Tucker, ‘the light in the room dramatically changed and we began to understand how the limewashed walls and ceiling were reflected by the silver…

IN the 2nd century AD, Roman polymath Ptolemy gathered together hundreds of coordinates corresponding to the cities and towns of the British Isles in his Geography. These were used to create a map that ‘terminates at all points with the ocean’. Far from defining the region as remote, however, this sea was the source of our relationship with Europe and with the countries that traded materials along the Asian Silk Roads and African ivory routes. It was also crucial for our creativity: artists in medieval Britain used garnets from India, walrus ivory from Greenland and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan—and Cornish gold has been found on prehistoric art in Germany. This connectivity wasn’t restricted to materials: ideas flowed along sea routes and across kingdoms, bringing new perspectives and creating a fertile…

MY aesthetic North Star is currently The Englishman’s Room by Derry Moore and Alvilde Lees-Milne, a collection of interviews with a rarefied group of aesthetes, aristocrats, thesps, writers and scholars published in 1986. Collectively, they look as box fresh today as they did back then, notably the sitting room at Poggio al Pozzo, the farmhouse in Tuscany, Italy, that the artist Teddy Millington-Drake brought back to life with the help of John Stefanidis. Other highlights include the study of the architectural historian Gavin Stamp and the drawing room of Prof Bernard Nevill at his magnificent London home, designed by the Arts-and-Crafts architect Philip Webb, that was immortalised as Uncle Monty’s drawing room in Withnail and I. Even those that are grand fall short of pomposity. For me, they also demonstrate…

SAY Henry Scott Tuke and male nudes spring to mind. Ever since staying in Pietrasanta, Italy, in the early 1880s, he painted naked boys and young men, fishing, bathing or soaking up the sun. Yet, there was another subject for which he had a great passion—ships. By 1861, his family had moved from York to Falmouth, where the harbour was ‘peopled with sailing ships and clumsy-looking steamers with paddles,’ as Maria Tuke Sainsbury wrote in her brother’s biography, Henry Scott Tuke: A memoir. They caught young Henry’s eye and he made many ‘childish drawings’ of all sorts of vessels. That early love blossomed when Tuke (1858–1929) returned to Cornwall in 1883, first settling in Newlyn, then, from 1885, back in Falmouth, where he lived in a cliff-edge cottage overlooking the…

Quiz of the week 1) Which English county is known for having the most vineyards? 2) On which Hebridean island did George Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four? 3) What breed was Able Seaman Just Nuisance, the only dog to have been enlisted by the Royal Navy? 4) Name the 17th-century judge who sentenced Charles I to death in 1649 5) Which chocolate did Mars announce it was removing from Celebrations as a trial in 2022? 1) Kent 2) Jura 3) Great Dane 4) John Bradshaw 5) Bounty. Riddle me this At the stroke of 12, my melody rings, a song of remembrance we like to sing. What am I? Riddle me this: Auld Lang Syne Time to buy On this day… December 31, 1999 The world awaited the impact of the…

Salts Mill, Saltaire, West Yorkshire The property of the Silver family SALTS MILL near Bradford is the grandest of the ‘stupendous manufacturing piles’ of the Pennines, once the heartland of the world’s woollen industry. Local historian John James described it in 1866 as ‘rivalling in size and splendour the famed palaces of Venice’. In so doing, he failed to realise that it was, in fact, very much larger than anything in Venice, but Salts Mill does at least rise above a canal. Even today, its scale takes the breath away. It comprises two huge Italianate piles—the Mill and the New Mill, situated on the valley floor of the fast-flowing River Aire and separated by the Leeds-Liverpool canal, built in 1774 (Fig 5). Both buildings use local Millstone grit, a good…

The North Pole: The History of an Obsession Erling Kagge (Penguin Viking, £22) ONE place you definitely don’t want your map to fail is the North Pole. Erling Kagge claimed the first unsupported ski expedition there in 1990 alongside fellow Norwegian Børge Ousland (the latter going on to create his island ‘high north’ resort, Manshausen, known for its sleek sea cabins). Here, Mr Kagge leads us through the history of this otherworldly snowscape, rendering it uncannily familiar. ‘There are no foreign lands,’ said Robert Louis Stevenson back in 1883. ‘It is the traveller only who is foreign.’ A Training School for Elephants Sophy Roberts (Doubleday, £22) SOPHY ROBERTS’S Heart of Darkness-style voyage that winds through latter-day Tanzania re-traces a megalomaniacal 19th-century Belgian king’s quest to extract treasure from Africa using…

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