THERE really is no such thing as bad weather, only different types of good weather,’ John Ruskin once wrote. Which goes to show, if any further proof were necessary, that you can’t trust 19th-century watercolorists as far as you can throw them. Because, of course, plenty of bad weather visits our little island and it can really take its toll. Not only on our cars, our gardens, and our dress sense but also on our psyches. Come the 18th consecutive day of mackerel-colored clouds and somber-voiced weather forecasts, we begin to feel that we’d be prepared to overcome most things, even navigating Luton airport, in order to get some Vitamin D.
Luckily, there’s a fantastic choice of short-, mid- and long-haul destinations for seasonal sufferers, where sunshine is assured, beaches are golden, skies are cerulean and no one— as far as our research suggests—ever wants to talk about Ruskin.
Short haul
Madeira
It’s a sultry afternoon at the Belmond Reid’s Palace, on the vertiginous island of Madeira. Among the mirrored coffee tables and the canary and navy slipper armchairs of the fourth-floor lounge, I feel sure I’ve just missed Patrick Standish from Take a Girl Like You stealing a kiss from a blushing Jenny Bunn. And on the front terrace, amid the rattan chairs, isn’t that an aging Sir Winston Churchill, staggering in with an easel under his arms, fresh from a few hours painting?
Debonair and defiantly British and wearing its age lightly, Reid’s Palace doesn’t merely look like the kind of place that Churchill would have stayed in. He, and numerous other luminaries, actually did.
この記事は Country Life UK の December 25, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の December 25, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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.
