‘When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, we admired the island and wandered all over it’ From the ‘Odyssey’, Homer, 750BC–650BC
HOMER, of course. The Odyssey. Few, if any, stand before me in my admiration of the Ancient Greek poet, not only for the epic verse, but the devotion to small-scale agriculture. It’s there in the Iliad and the Odyssey, if you read them closely. Homeric heroes reckoned their riches in cattle and pigs rather than glittering gold. Better still, they farmed the family plot themselves. Odysseus was as skilled with ploughshare as with sword.
Yet, personifying the sunrise as dawn, soothing the day into being? Perhaps in the Ithaca of old. I vouchsafe that I, a yeoman farmer, have seen more break of days in Britain than most and sun emergent on the horizon, pinkly benevolent, is, frankly, a minor act. Our native dawn comes in so many more forms. It comes seeping over the horizon like spilt milk or bloodshed. There are days when the sun ascends by mere right, insouciant, majestic, so Charles II. The times it powers up over the eastern horizon, nuclear, more portent of Armageddon than promise of Creation. Dawn it was, after all, that killed Romeo and Juliet. And, God, those days when you realise dawn is an illusion. Dawn does not rise, the Earth tilts down.
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2024-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.
