For city miles, the unfeeling metal architecture of railways: parallel lines and skeleton gantries. Beside the track, spavined, dieseldosed bushes of buddleia. Creeping bramble, as bad as barbed wire. Not much to see.
Slough. Poor Slough. Doomed forever by Betjeman for its urban (lack of) planning and its industrialisation. ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now/ There isn’t grass to graze a cow…’
Heading to Reading, towards the dawn. Two white swans on a flooded gravel pit. Morning light on thin water. A sort of relief. Cold optimism.
January is the contrary month, named for the Romans’ two-faced god Janus. A transitional month. The bulk of winter done, spring on the horizon. Often the coldest month of the year (England’s lowest ever temperature, -26.1ËšC, was in January 1982 and recorded in Shropshire), but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Beyond the rain-streaked window of carriage B: new-build houses, red-brick homes for humans, where Nature once lived. They are building over England.
Esta historia es de la edición January 26, 2022 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.
