Country Life

If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure why I started reading Country Life magazine.  Probably, it was in the hugely mistaken belief, which is the driver behind any story about celebrity, that through reading about a subject, one could become part of that world.  This is not a new phenomenon and is why so much Young Adult fiction has a dash of the fantasy, many teenagers spend a lot of time wishing that they were somewhere or someone else, the irony is of course that eventually they get their wish, they turn into an adult, someone else entirely, although one would hope they never lose their taste for Haribo.

Country Life magazine is, at first glance, the publication most associated with waiting rooms, the exception being the waiting room at Dignatas, in which the sole reading material available is the ‘Daily Main’, after reading which some visitors have been heard to exclaim ‘Fucking Hurry Up’ at the door marked ‘Exit’.

Anyone taking a cursory glance at the cover, advertising, contents and overall glossiness of the publication might think that this is the magazine for Torfs.

It is.  But it’s so much more.

With the exception of the ‘Evening Star’ (the sister paper to the ‘Morning Star’ and yet not remotely associated with the inexplicably more popular ‘Daily Star’, the ‘Evening Star’ being the sort of newspaper that would be published by the hard left if they had knocked off after publishing the morning edition, celebrated as traditional journalists do, then brought out an edition where they really wrote what they thought and where every editorial began ‘Right…’) Country Life is the most militant publication not actually produced in the front room of a self styled ‘activist’ who wears a combination of corduroy and cheesecloth and churns out their publication on one of those hand cranked printers the sole purpose of which was to give millions of schoolchildren an introduction to purple ink and solvent abuse.

Think I’m joking?

Here’s how militant Country Life is.  It abhors littering.  And bad behaviour.  And ill manners.  And unnecessary noise.  It hates pollution.  It is an advocate of the preservation of environment.  It is the champion of the agricultural sector that we rely upon to, you know, eat.

Moreover, it champions the preservation of our heritage.  This takes many forms.  The most obvious is that it tends towards Stately Home Porn but, and this is the saving grace, it knows where to draw the line.  Published every week apart from at Christmas where one imagines the entire staff are off first killing and then cooking their Christmas dinner or at least causing a scene at Waitrose, the magazine often spreads a feature over two issues, occasionally this will be a feature on a Stately Home with words about architecture and history, and images (‘figs’, never photos) of the grand hall, the long drive, the privy, and so on.  Occasionally, if it is not term time and the younger daughter of the house is back from a Scottish university where she doesn’t have to pay fees (how do you think these people hold on to their wealth) there will be a picture of a young woman in a ballgown, cuddling spaniels.  Otherwise, images of the owners remain mysteriously absent.  That’s because usually they might be confused with the gargoyles festooning the East Wing.

I started buying Country Life magazine when I noticed that it featured articles of interest to me, such as farming, food production and the future of our environment.  The property pages I skipped past and the section on antiques and the art market were not really for me, I couldn’t afford a £12,000,000 estate in Scotland or an oil painting of the same place at the same price.

I started subscribing to Country Life because it had something important to report every week, or something interesting to say about gargoyles, or because it featured an estate for sale that looks like an oil painting, and there’s always the lottery.

It’s also something of a counterpoint to the rest of the media (apart from ‘the Field’ magazine).

And, of course, there’s always the young lady gracing the frontispiece, like a posh Page Three.

English eccentricity

If there’s a standard scale for sanity, and there probably is but who wants a search history that can be used against them in court as a result of their looking up ‘am I normal?’ on Google so I’m not going to attempt to find out, then, like metric and imperial, there will be one scale for the rich and another for the rest of them…I mean us.

Let’s call the scale of sanity for the ordinary man in the street, or indeed Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus, the Metric scale.  A reading of zero means that you can pass for ordinary, you don’t twitch or drool and you don’t feel the need to perform a cleansing ritual after meeting a gypsy.  At the top end of the scale, 100, are people who are so insane they occupy positions of power, or kill people, or indeed both.  It’s around the 60 to 70 range that things get interesting, that’s where your, let’s face it, more amusing mental health issues are pitched, like believing what you read in the Daily Mail.  Tracking back towards zero we pass through the superstitious range, which encompasses everything from paying actual money for a palm reading ‘you are very gullible’, to wearing your lucky shirt on match day.  Oh, and by the way, one day you will realise that because you always clean and iron your lucky pulling shirt, those actions make it your lucky pulling shirt.

For the rich, the Imperial scale covers three main ranges.  Firstly, there is fucked up, which is what happens to an eighteen year old when they come into a trust fund.  They spend the fund initially on drugs and booze, and thereafter on trying to quit drugs and booze, possible solutions including therapy, The Priory, or a cult.  Secondly, there is inbred.  If you can inherit the family chin, stands to reason you can also inherit the family kinks in the cognitive reasoning, including the firm belief that it is still acceptable to use the term ‘darkie’ if you lower your voice while doing so.

Then at the top of the scale we have eccentricity.

Madness plus money equals eccentricity.  If you wanted to marry a goat you would be, depending on the community you lived in, laughed out of town or stoned to death.  Regrettably, there are also some corners of geography inhabited by people that would probably apportion some of the blame to the goat.  These are the same sort of people who, in conversations about women’s rights, make the sort of comments that give you the distinct sensation that your arse is clenching into your hat.  If you have a title, an estate and, and this is the important bit, some say over who gets to be vicar in the parish you own, the one with a charming Norman church, a rather lovely rectory and no knife crime at all, then it’s pretty likely that the bans will shortly be posted for the forthcoming nuptials of the Earl of Kinkey and Miss Willamina Goat.

Let’s be clear, being eccentric is fabulous, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in, for instance, your scientific experiments largely involving melons, you’re beloved.

Ever had a day, a whole day, when you have not got out of your pyjamas?  You have moved from bed to sofa to fridge to sofa to bed in one glorious relaxed manner, and you’re not even ill?  Fabulous, isn’t it.  Now imagine not getting out of bed for a week because you can’t be arsed.  That’s eccentric.

Working class and in Tesco in your jim jams?  Out, you fucking scum!  Titled and in Fortnum and Mason in a dressing gown?  Of course you are, you don’t need a wallet, you’ve got an account at the place.

The English tolerate eccentricity because, by and large, it’s more entertaining than harmful.  An aristocrat with a thing for trains may indulge his obsession by building his own railway, miniature or, my preference, full sized, on his estate.

Eccentricity is not madness, it is more refined.  It is the state of mind that causes one to be entertaining and harmless, and leads to one being fondly admired.

Gentleman's (and Poacher's) Relish

Gentleman’s Relish!  It sounds more like the title of an erotic serial publication (‘porn mag’ to you) from the seventies than a spread.

 

Just as Poachers Relish sounds more like a nocturnal knee-trembler with a milkmaid up against a stout oak that a tasty toast topping.

Both sound more like foodstuffs likely to be encountered in literature published in the 1920’s than encountered, never mind consumed, in real life.  However, they are available in real life, via Fortnum & Masons food hall.

And both are pleasingly tasty, but then I’ve always been the sort of chap that favours the savoury – a pickle, a pork pie and a smile, that’s me – over the sweet (although obviously the glove compartment of the car is stuffed with confectionary).  The Poacher’s Relish, essentially ground game, was something of a pokey surprise, like essence of mince.  Gentleman’s Relish is the piscine alternative, a spiced anchovy paste and an excellent way of bolting fish like a pelican, or accessing anchovies if you are tired of pizza.

Both come with cultural baggage.  Consuming either, spread thinly on toast, gives one a not unpleasant sense that you are setting yourself up for a day that is going to involve a pregnant maid, a butler out of control in the pantry, trouble at the hunt and, probably, the baffling murder of at least one houseguest, precipitating the arrival of an eccentric detective. 

You don’t get that with marmite.

It’s good to overcome class prejudices and try new things, even if a trip to the penguin enclosure is inadvisable following consumption of anchovy paste.  There are certain foods associated with certain groups and we shouldn’t be afraid of trying pies just because they are consumed by footie fans, or fried chicken just because it’s – based on my observations of the clientele orbiting the various chicken franchises at the rough end of town, not to mention an entire routine by teevee funnyman Mickey Flannigan – favoured by delinquents.  And I’ve been known to involve a kebab.  They are very tasty, you don’t actually need to drink for seven hours beforehand to appreciate a good kebab.  Obviously you do if you want to enjoy a bad kebab, but those are the rules.

Some foods just have a class association, there’s no getting away from it.  Anything served by a footman, killed (intentionally) on your own estate or pulled from your own river, or indeed all three, and it’s probably upper class nosh.  Anything served in a wrapper, probably not so much.  Of course there are foods that defy classification, anything grown in the garden or allotment is surely fit for a King, every Englishman’s home being his castle, so every Englishman’s garden is his estate and every Englishman’s allotment is…well actually it’s a place to get away from the wife and to stash porn in the shed while cultivating carrots, but for the purposes of this metaphor let’s describe it as his small place in Tuscany.

Valet app

Why did Apple include a feature on their last iPhone that was supposed to be a robotic personal assistant?

The answer may be that they were trying to integrate the personal organiser functions on their telephone using an interface that saved you from having to flip from feature to feature to try and find out the simplest local information, or remember your dry cleaning, or your mother's birthday. In other words, they spent millions of dollars developing an application on their gadget to replace the Yellow Pages, or a diary, or a post it note, or a conscience. Or some basic sentient being skills like remembering.

This was presumably because the cognitive energy otherwise needed to remember that you are meeting Simon for cocktails at five on Tuesday can be instead channeled either to work on your next oh-so-droll tweet, or vigerously deny that binging on spirit-based drinks early on a Tuesday afternoon is evidence of alcoholism.

Selling a voice recognition package as some sort of personal assistant went well beyond the obvious reason why Apple may have done this; to make iPhone users' relationship with their iPhones even more unhealthy, reaching the point where the dependency is actually a recognised medical condition that The Metro can publish articles and Channel 5 can screen sensationalist documentaries about.

So perhaps the real reason was the economy and Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey cut right through any doubts whatsoever that Britain ever had a chance of becoming, in John Major's term, a classless society. Britain bloody loves being a class-structured society. We love it so much that we recently invented a whole new class - 'under' - to meet increasing demand to have somebody to look down on. It's like the Indian caste system but without decent railways. Downton Abbey's success, penetrating the nation's consciousness like a sex toy in a novel that sells well on Kindle, demonstrated that we know our place. It's in front of the TV at nine o'clock on a Sunday night.

Two things unite Downton Abbey viewers, they all think they are at least one social class higher than they actually are, and all of them think their life would be a whole lot easier if they lived in a stately home and had an army of servants to iron their pyjamas.

That's why Apple produced an interactive feature on their 'phone, because having something that reminds us that we are due at the pox clinic tomorrow, or that we have forgotten to pickup our dry cleaning, again, is the closest that most people are going to get to having staff. Even the gripes about the voice recognition was a deliberate feature, as it allowed people to complain about the staff (it also gave long term Apple gadget users a warm glow of satisfaction, they have been moaning about Apple's interfaces for years, like the handwriting recognition on the Newton. Long term users consider recent adopters nouveau riche).

But the economy being what it is, the middle classes can't afford to retain servants any more, though that doesn't mean that they don't want them, if only to fire.

What's needed is to confront this thing head on and model the interactive features on the iPhone 5 like a traditional country house. This means that instead of having one feature that does everything a bit crap and can't understand you if you have a speech impediment, like a lisp or working class accent, it has lots of apps with different specialist functions.

Surely it can't be that difficult to interface the iPhone's camera with a valet app that could archly criticise both your grooming and your lifestyle with pithy comments, all the while maintaining a faintly camp and slightly sinister tone? A simple click of the shutter, some diagnostics and the phrase 'sir is pleased to jest' will alert you to a potentially shaming sock/tie combination.

Certainly such an app is needed. While the erosion of the servant classes may have resulted in a removal, at least superficially, of some class barriers, it also means men's grooming has reached the point where an association football shirt is considered suitable attire, the away kit being deemed 'formal'.

Postcard from Oxford

Oxford has a reputation for being car-unfriendly. It’s not. It’s driver un-friendly. The city has adopted, in the city centre at least, a Dutch traffic model where they remove all of the street furniture and drop the kerbs so that the pavements and pedestrians are at the same level as the road and traffic, with no bars, railings or other rational safety features to protect people from cars, or cars from bloody tourists too intent on photographing and gawking to watch where they are bloody going.

The theory is that this makes the driver more cautious, slower and safer. In practice the result was a bloody terrifying experience, not just because after a day being buzzed by acrobatic aircraft and weaving round airshow entrance fee-dodgers lining the rural roads of Oxford I was a little wary of pedestrians, but because while there is no street furniture or kerbs in the centre of Oxford, what they do have is a plethora of the sort of road signs that you normally only see right in the back of the Highway Code, the ones you don’t even memorise for the test and you only ever expect to see again in a waggishly photoshopped picture with the caption ‘Evel Keneveal ahead’ attached to that one of a motorbike on top of a car.

These signs had circles, times, cars, busses, lorries and confusing arrows on them. I wasn’t worried about hitting a pedestrian, I was worried about driving into a sixty quid, three point street that I should not have entered between three thirty and the end of Michalmas term.


Once I had safely parked and stopped shaking, sweating and sobbing, a quick shower, some jazz and a decent meal, and a nap, and I was ready for a walk round Oxford. It is, without doubt, a beautiful city. I suppose this is one of the benefits of the colleges owning a lot of the land here, they can actually make more money from the fees from their foreign students, and operating a meth lab in the chemical tutorials, than they can from flogging the estate and relocating to Milton Keynes. What you have as a result is a series of fantastic buildings that rise tall on either side of the street, allowing plenty of room for intimidating architectural features and looming.


It was a night-time walk around the city, possibly the best way to avoid all the tourists. Two things were apparent, that there is enough money in the surrounding area to support the short of shops that sell cashmere shorts and that Oxford likes to hide their pubs up narrow alleys, with twists and turns in them. While elitism, obvious wealth and looking down on anyone without their own large haydron collider might me acceptable, the consumption of pork scratching and a decent brew apparently is not.


I wandered around soaking up the rich cultureal heritage of the city; Morse and Lewis.

Oxford has an odd high streeet. It’s from 2008. They have Oddbins, they have a Waterstones with a Costa in it (why never a Costa with a bookshelf sized bookshop in it to return the favour). I was expecting to see a Woolworths.

Stayed at the Old Bank Hotel. Great staff, great rooms, free wi fi and jazz floating up from the courtyard.

Postcard from Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace is so posh that even the grass in the car park is posh. It’s been parked on, walked on and driven over and yet it still remains a comfortable and complete carpet of green, so unlike the municipal quagmires or off-roading challenges that normally typify parking at visitor attractions, leaving your car looking like you’ve just completed the Welsh mountain stage in a rally and your passengers stress-eating wine gums if you have them or chewing the magic tree air freshener if you don’t.


Blenheim is one of the self-proclaimed ‘Treasure Houses of England’. From what I can work out this is a collection of grand houses that are still owned by the families that built them a few centuries ago, a collection of posh people who have realised they can turn a profit by hanging on to the house and flogging ice cream and coffee to tourists, rather than those posh people who lurk in the private chambers of their houses now owned by the National Trust, silently seething with resentment as the tourists plod round their former pile. The Treasure House group have realise that if you brand something, people will regard it with the same kind of affection as they do English Heritage or the National Trust, and immediately start looking for the gift shop in search of lavender scented things.


The other way in which these places turn a profit is hosting events. This is why you see incongruities such as Hip Hop artists playing castles and stately homes. The event on the day we pitched up to check out the gift shop and attached stately home was a bike race. Or rather, bike races. There appeared to be several going on.

The first was a time trials for people in lycra with thighs about as thick as my torso. There were also amateur competitive races I think, because there were a lot of young couples in matching lycra wandering around, looking like they wanted to have a water fight with their Foska bottles and then collapse giggling into a hedge for some fit giggling nooky.

There was also a race sponsored by Brompton, the manufacturers of those bicycles that fold up quite small so as to fit on a train but not so small as to not be a bloody nuisance on a crowded commuter train. The people in this were racing on their Bromptions. It’s one thing to see some gent unfold his bike and whiz off down the platform to the office, quite another to see it being used like a proper bicycle. It was like watching something out of its element, like a bird elegant in flight waddling on land, or a middle class person in Asda. A Brompton is designed to weave in and out of traffic and be sworn at by cabbies, not whoosh down wide open avenues.

With all the races happening, I was rather hoping that they didn’t all meet at the crossroads and, if they did, there would be some sort of motorcycle display team riding going on as they pass one another at right angles, missing by inches, until the inevitable catastrophe, resulting in an almighty crash, the sort of bell ringing normally associated with a royal wedding, some groans and a single Brompton wheel rolling into the distance.


Blenhiem Palace itself is spectacular, no doubt about it. If you think the car park is well looked after then wait until you see the formal gardens. The house itself is stately home standard, lots of portraits look down from the walls wearing silk knickerbockers and enormous wigs. There is a portrait of the current lady of the house to keep things current, it certainly looks current – is it possible to botox a portrait?

There’s the usual heavy, dark furniture, the usual vast library of books in good condition (aristocrats prefer hunting, shooting, fishing and fleecing to reading) and surprisingly ugly pottery. In fairness there is also some rather beautiful pieces, Persian and Asian, that have been trusted to the public gaze. Best of all, for any boy or bloke, Blenhiem’s military connections means that there are more than your average amount of toy soldiers. Not just the lead soldiers that were played with for generations of the family, but cases where the British Modeller’s Association display some rather excellent dioramas. Made me nostalgic for the days when happiness was an Airfix kit, some glue, some paint, some thinners, an inadequately ventilated room and an out of body experience.


It’s also the birthplace of Churchill and had a museum with artefacts connected to him, principle among these being the letters that young Winston wrote home from boarding school and some paintings, as well as a rather curious collection of Hallmark cards that used his paintings.

Having been to Chartwell and now to Blenhiem, it’s clear that every place related to The Great Man jealously guards whatever treasures it might possess. I rather hope that out there somewhere there is a village with a preserved telephone box where he stopped off to make a call, converted into a very small museum containing a little tin of dropped cigar ash (viewing by appointment, post cards available in the gift shop).


As stately homes go, it was stately. It had manicured grounds that obviously took a couple of centuries to knock in to shape, less decking and more ‘let’s plant here and come back in fifty years’. It had a little train to transport delighted visitors from one part of the estate to another. Nothing delights quite like a little train. Finally, it had statues. Many many statues. Some sat on ledges, some hid in alcoves, some held things up and some perched atop pillars. They fulfilled the function of classical statues everywhere – bringing a touch of the splendour that was Rome to a corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, and sporting little willies so as not to make the big knobs feel inadequate.

A class act

Ah, class. It used to be that everyone knew where they stood in the class system, you were either Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker or John Cleese. What class you were was determined, back when the world was black and white, by height, apparently.

It used to be much simpler, back when the world was colourful, but two dimensional. You were either a monarch, somebody who owned a castle, or a peasant. Class in those days was largely a matter of how filthy you were and how largely root vegetables featured in your diet. If you ended the day covered in pig-shit and looking forward to a hearty meal of a parsnip, you were a serf. If however you owned your own castle, had a selection of falcons and dined off hunks of things that only featured parsnip as something to help soak up the gravy, then congratulations, you can look forward to dying of the pox or in a crusade but until then, enjoy yourself!

Things became complicated with the introduction of the printing press, the artisan class and merchants, leading to people without castles having more money than people with castles, a situation that continues today, largely because of the cost of maintaining a castle (and also of course to that particular condition that afflicts the landed gentry: their bitter resentment of any member of the National Trust). Moats, as anyone who has scrutinised MPs expenses will know, are expensive to clean out. Must be all the pike-men and bits of siege equipment that presumably get stuck in the filters.

Britain is to class what Catholicism is to religion, taking a very simple concept and wildly complicating it. Other countries react differently to class. The French decapitated all of their aristocracy and hence now have no class at all, while in the rest of Europe the upper classes seem slightly embarrassed about having wealth and power and so reside in large residences far from commoners. The American system is slightly different and can best be described, as I read somewhere, by the following: if your name is on a building, you’re doing very well, if your name is on a desk, you’re doing OK and if your name is on a badge pinned to a shirt that features a corporate logo, you’re fucked.

Now we have not just your basic classes of; aristocracy, gentry, upper class, middle class, working class, lower class and underclass, but many sub-categories of class. And while the British are very good at identifying what class other people are (‘posh idiot’, ‘chav scum’ or ‘foreign’ for instance), they are less well able to categorise themselves, and terrified of asking in case somebody actually tells them.

The problem with Brits is that they consider that there is social mobility inside the class structure. Worse still is that those folk most acutely aware of the class structure are often the most uncomfortable when speaking to people from outside their own class. For instance, when speaking to tradesman, a middle class person will, if they have prepared properly for the occasion, have a variety of conversational gambits, usually sport related. This is partly because middle class people like to believe they can ‘get on’ with anyone, but mostly because they are trying to avoid the 30% middle-class surcharge that they secretly believe tradesmen apply to anyone who drives an audi.

They’re wrong of course, it’s actually 33%.

Gentry of course just treat everyone exactly the same. Unfortunately they do this by being universally ghastly.

This does not stop middle class people wanting to access the world of the upper classes and recently great steps have been taken to achieve this. Prior to the broadcast of ‘Downton Abby’ however, the sole guide to how to behave at a country house party was the writing of P G Wodehouse or Agatha Christie. Hence, if one were to be invited to spend the weekend at a country house, one would reasonably expect to spend one’s time either attempting to steal cow creamers and involving oneself in hi-jinks in the shrubbery, or beating the host to death with a candlestick in the library.

Hold on, isn’t that Cluedo? Boardgames, how very middle-class.