SAMUEL JOHNSON would despair, but some of us have tired of London. Within a week of lockdown, it was apparent that our main reasons for being in the capital—a short commute, an outstanding local primary school and flat whites on every corner—were redundant.
With three children and two dogs, the Victorian townhouse we had renovated as a newly married couple was no longer working for us. Our woolly ideas about moving to the country began to take shape. With my husband, who works in Fintech (financial technology), unlikely ever to go back to five days a week in the office, we felt liberated to look beyond the ‘golden hour’ of commuter-land.
We wanted to travel past the manicured lawns and verges into wilder countryside —as described by Nancy Mitford in The Pursuit of Love, where ‘the roosting pheasant and the waking owl filled every night with wild primeval noise’.
Suddenly, great swathes of the countryside have been opened up to us: Dorset and Somerset in the west and, heading north, the Norfolk coast and as far north as Rutland, even York. We wouldn’t be what one country friend calls, disparagingly, the ‘DFLs’—the Down From Londons—second-home owners using the village as a dormitory and contributing little. I’d walk our children down the lane to school, go to Pilates in the village hall, help with the flowers in church.
Denne historien er fra September 02, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 02, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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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.
