SOME three years ago, I sat in an office, anxiously, being stared down by the Editor of this very magazine. ‘What’s your favourite part of COUNTRY LIFE?’, he asked. ‘I adore the features,’ I replied, reading from the script I had mentally prepared. ‘They’re of an extremely high quality, varied, eccentric and always interesting and engaging.’ I got the job and the rest is history.
I lied of course. Not about the features (they are all of those things, and much more), but they were only my second favourite part. What I loved, and still love—and I’m sure I’m not alone—are the houses.
I love the Gothic masterpieces, the Palladian mansions and the Arts-and- Crafts style so perfected by Lutyens. However, nothing can beat the picturepostcard English cottage. That gentle wisp of smoke rising through the thatch on a crisp winter’s evening; the borders of the garden bursting with colour in the spring—it is, as Rupert Sweeting, head of national country sales at Knight Frank, says, ‘the quintessential English idyll’.
‘When I picture a traditional English cottage, I envisage a quaint thatched home on the outskirts of a Cotswolds village, with a pub and local shop only a short walk away,’ he adds.
Esta historia es de la edición March 18, 2020 de Country Life UK.
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Esta historia es de la edición March 18, 2020 de Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
