Innholdsfortegnelse for January 7, 2026 i Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk PESSIMISM is the very petrol of defeat, so let us not be downhearted about the unhappy state of British biodiversity. This point in the calendar should be a time of optimism and hope. We may not be able to wave a magic wand, but here are our surely reasonable New Year wishes and resolutions for the countryside in 2026. A polite memo to the weather gods: if Britain’s location on the globe, caressed by the Gulf Stream, is Goldilocks-fortuitous, being neither too hot nor too cold, the weather in these isles can be, shall we say, eccentric and is becoming increasingly so. A year that commences with a sunny spring for the chicks, followed by a…

How to survive January BRIDGET JONES once declared, with typical chutzpah, that New Year resolutions should begin on January 2. To which I raise her today, January 7. There’s a lot to be said, I think, for taking it easy in the first week of the year and trialling your resolutions to see which are more likely to stick and which you ought to retire. It’s also helpful for those of us in denial about it being January at all—or who celebrate Twelfth Night on January 5 (or 6th…). Forget those who tell you that February is the bleakest month: the days are longer and sunnier and awards season usually kicks off with a bang. That’s without even mentioning skiing. No: January takes the biscuit. How to make it bearable,…

THE crowd gathered outside Nuremberg’s Frauenkirche in 1452 is clustered around a fire. Its focus is divided: some stare at the flames at their feet, growing minute by minute in intensity, whereas others turn towards the Franciscan preacher, who, from a makeshift pulpit, exhorts them to abandon worldly vanities. In a contemporary woodblock depicting the scene, made by a German printmaker known simply as ‘Monogrammist HS’, the fire is not consuming heretics, but gambling accessories. According to one account, sexa-genarian Cardinal Johannes Capistranus had persuaded Nuremberg’s citizens to burn ‘3,612 backgammon boards and more than 20,000 dice, and playing cards without number’. ‘Martin Luther would claim that, in his youth, priests refused card-makers the sacraments’ By the middle of the 15th century, the city was among the playing-card-making centres of…

Water, water, everywhere LONDON’S story is written in water,’ muses Colin Tough, in his newly published The Walking Guide To London’s Waterways. The city ‘has continually reinvented itself’ beside it, be that ‘the great sweep of the river Thames’ or ‘the calmer ribbon of Regent’s Canal’. It was water that first drew the Romans to Londinium—a name that, linguists claim, was adapted from an earlier Celtic word meaning ‘the place that floods’—and it has been present wherever London has shone. Shakespeare performed by its banks, Wordsworth composed his most famous poem upon West-minster Bridge and MI6 intelligence units now foil terrorist plots from their head-quarters in Vauxhall. It ebbs and flows. Although the city hasn’t experienced a tidal flood in 97 years, we maintain an almost perversely close relationship to…

WHETHER in daylight or in darkness, beyond the glass of my expansive bedroom window lies a cornucopia of marvels. Late into the night, long after my hot-water bottle has lost its punch and the fire in the wood-burning stove has dwindled to ash, I can lie in my bed and watch the progress of a waning moon through the sky. I can see the blackened outline of trees and wooded ridges and, beyond, a horizon of high mountains, their snow-capped peaks washed purple in moon shadow. I can see the stars, almost as clearly as if I were outside lying beneath them. When dawn breaks, the pink rays of sunrise hit the highest summits first—a slow reveal of Himalayan magnificence unfolding with the light, accompanied by an enthusiastic sound-bath of…

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Heaven sent THE Christ Child in Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity is ‘reaching towards the Virgin’ (‘And so this is Christmas’, December 10/17, 2025), but He is also looking beyond her, to the dark cross on the shoulders of the donkey bent reverently above. The joy of birth is shaded by foreknowledge of the Crucifixion. Prof Norman Hammond, Cambridge Animal attraction OUR bald Jack Russell, Pixie, was bred by a gamekeeper as a working terrier. In spite of her threadbare appearance, a rare side effect of one treatment for her skin condition gave her a permanent je ne sais quoi pheromone scent; a canine Chanel No. 5. When she left my brother’s farm to live with us in London, she had a trail of besotted chaps in tow. The photograph is of…

TO tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so.’ These are the words of Dr Sheppard, inscrutable narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published 100 years ago this spring and is the book that propelled its author Agatha Christie to literary stardom. The third to feature the finicky Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, it was voted the best crime novel of all time in 2013 by the British Crime Writers’ Association for its unexpected denouement. The New York Times opined that few detective stories ‘provide greater analytical stimulation’; The Observer said it made ‘breathless reading’ and was distinguished ‘by its coherence, its…

ALONG one wall of the boot room in this grand Regency house is a bank of solid-oak haberdasher-style drawers inspired by the fittings of early-20th-century gentlemen’s outfitters. Here, it has been designed by furniture-makers Artichoke for modern country life with drawers that vary in scale to store scarves, gloves, dog whistles, leads and other paraphernalia. Some drawers are connected internally to create larger compartments, yet maintain the appearance of smaller fronts. Each is fitted with hand-written labels—one is marked ‘Clutter’—which add a further characterful detail. Above is a row of deep alcoves designed to accommodate hat boxes, picnic hampers and blankets. These are accessed by using a steel ladder set on a rail. On the other side of the doorway is an oversized Belgian-blue limestone sink that was carved from…

I KNOW it’s still cold and the ground may be hard as a hammer, but the days are getting longer and, when the clouds part, there’s just a sense that spring might not be many weeks away. Even as I still cling to the log burner and mulled cider appears in the evening once in a while, my notebook is starting to fill with scribbles of what I’ll be adding to the garden for the season to come. Although I won’t yet share what I’m growing for the first time this year—they might turn out to be disappointing—I’d like to recommend three of my favourite unusual edibles of which I’ll be adding more. First up, Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis), which also goes by the less appealing name of warty cabbage.…

WE had time to kill the other day on the long drive north from London to Edinburgh, so we detoured via Durham to revisit the cathedral there. I am neither a great churchgoer, nor a great architectural historian, but, as I suspect many do, I experience a humbling sense of awe in the religious bastions of our blessed isle. Once, on a day-long walk in the company of Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust, I found myself marvelling at the exquisite medieval stained-glass windows in Great Malvern Priory, prostrating my body in submission against the north wall of the pretty country church in Powick and holding back the tears as Dr Hayward sang an ancient Anglo-Saxon chant to St Wulfstan in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral. It was strange…

The Land in Winter Andrew Miller (Sceptre, £10.99) IN the interminably cruel winter of 1962–63, ice patches formed on beaches, farm animals starved, villages were incommunicado for days, policemen had to help deliver milk and the army cleared railway lines. Andrew Miller has set his superbly atmospheric novel, which won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction—unsurprising, as his period detail of this still depressed post-war time is meticulous—and was shortlisted for the Booker, during these bleak months, in Somerset (somewhere between Bridgwater and Bristol), the county in which he lives. The story is of the complex inner lives of two couples, who live a field apart; both wives are pregnant, neither husband is socially comfortable in their milieu or with their family pasts. Bill, a farmer who dreams…

I RECENTLY got chatting to a Suffolk gamekeeper who spent his working years on some of the last great wild-partridge manors. Shooting has evolved greatly in only a few decades. There are gamekeepers, now in their sixties, who remember being given a bicycle when they started. They would pedal around their beat checking for grey-partridge nests before cycling on to check their trap lines for stoats and weasels. Some of those keepers now have night-vision scopes for shooting foxes and drones for counting deer. This man was reflecting on the way that a good keeper would know every glade and every ditch. Their patches were smaller then—a 5,000-acre estate might have a team of five gamekeepers and life was slower. Creating the right conditions for wild birds to thrive was…

Quiz of the week 1) Published posthumously in 1991, what was Roald Dahl’s final children’s book? 2) What type of cheese is traditionally used in making tiramisu? 3) The Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival was the original name for which famous festival? 4) Which species of crab commonly found in British waters can be identified by a distinctive ‘pie-crust’ edge to its shell? 5) Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff are houses in which fictional school? 1) ‘The Minpins’ (later ‘Billy and the Minpins’) 2) Mascarpone 3) Glastonbury 4) Brown or edible crab (‘Cancer pagurus’) 5) Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Riddle me this: Janus Riddle me this I am the Roman god with two faces, one looking to the past, the other to new places. Who am I?…

AGROMENES’S New Year’s resolution is to help this country relearn the language of priorities. It was the Government that set him off. The announcement that, in the midst of economic collapse, wars and rumours of war, Labour would prioritise legislation on boiling lobsters and banning trail-hunting showed that it had finally lost the plot. We start with priorities for the countryside. We have to recover the confidence of farmers, which is vital if Britain is to have enough food. War, disruption and climate change mean that we can no longer rely with certainty on the ability to import what we need: food security has become a national priority. This demands the immediate cancellation of the family-farm tax; it means making all national agencies, from schools and hospitals to the Armed…

Fighting cats THE Earl of Leicester stands beside the fireplace of the Long Library at Holkham, a 1730s interior designed as part of the family wing of this great house by William Kent. Set in the overmantle is an image of a lion triumphing over a leopard (below). It is presented as a painting in a gilt frame—and replaces a seascape by the 17th-century artist Claude Lorrain—but is, in fact, a micro mosaic. The term refers to the minute pieces of glass or tesserae used in its composition. The mosaic was purchased in Rome by Thomas William Coke—the great nephew of the builder of the house—on his Grand Tour in 1771–74 from the collection of the Palazzo Mignanelli. It originally came from the theatre at Gubbio, from where it was…

LAST year’s apple crop pipped all the records: boughs groaned under the weight of ripe fruit and growers declared it the best season for decades. The abundance was credited to a frost-free spring and a warm summer, but perhaps there was another reason for the bumper harvest: the rise of the curious tradition of wassailing. Often associated with a form of carol singing, midwinter wassailing is in fact a deeply rooted tradition that involves anointing an apple tree with cider and making a good deal of noise. At its core, it is a ritual to encourage a good apple harvest later in the year. It’s both reverent and uproarious and, in bringing people together outdoors, is just the thing to raise the spirits on a dark January night. ‘At every…

IF there were kitchens that defined the shiny optimism of the 1980s, they were those made by Bulthaup, the brand of choice for those who made their homes in former industrial buildings, from London’s Docklands to downtown Manhattan in the US. Unlike other kitchen brands inspired by modernism, it was—and continues to be—much more than a triumph of style over substance. The decade was a highly inventive period in the history of Bulthaup, founded in the late 1940s in Bavaria. A design that created significant waves was the kitchen workbench, launched in 1988, which combined a stainless-steel cooking area with a sink heavily influenced by professional kitchens. Perhaps the most liberating factor was that the workbench could be plumbed and wired wherever you like and taken with you when you…

LAST May, Tate Modern celebrated its 25th birthday with a gala in the Turbine Hall: a raucous affair attended by artists Sir Grayson Perry, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin. Food was prepared by the River Café’s Ruthie Rogers and guests enjoyed a performance by the Pet Shop Boys. As Hollywood stars Daniel Craig and Reese Witherspoon mingled over Champagne, Maria Balshaw, the director of the gallery, was fielding questions about Tate Modern’s future. Accounts for 2023–24 revealed yet another deficit budget approved by the trustees, ‘due to self-generating income not increasing at the same pace as the cost base post-pandemic’. Last March, Tate Galleries cut 7% of its workforce. When asked whether free entry to Tate Modern’s permanent collection could one day be revoked, Ms Balshaw said ‘I…

LEIGH LAWSON has a history of defying the odds. As a young man, he made it into one of the hardest professions you can break into: acting. Now, he has published a book of his poems, Now and Then, despite the almost impossible hurdles faced by new poets—especially if they are past their 80th birthday. Ask him why he trod the arduous path not once, but twice, and he candidly admits that, in both cases, he felt a pressing need he couldn’t resist. He tries to explain with a story from his theatre days: ‘When I was doing The Merchant of Venice with the Peter Hall Company and Dustin Hoffman was playing Shylock, Dustin and I became great friends—and we decided, in the end, that you don’t choose the theatre,…