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.

Postcard from Norfolk - Daffy and Dickie

  

An association is rather a good thing for a public house.  Fame and infamy can equally add character to a pub and, pubs being pubs and human nature being human nature, any pub of a decent age will be more likely to be infamous than famous.  Pubs, you see, even respectable ones with coffee machines and a breakfast menu, are less likely to be the place where a National Treasure hung her bonnet when writing the sort of fiction that is adapted for Sunday night viewing, and more likely to be the place where a laudanum soaked poet wrote his last before drinking himself into an early grave.  Alternatively, they were frequented by a bloke with the charming name of ‘Mad’, ‘Chopper’, or ‘The Lathe’, once to be avoided and now on a Gangland Walks trail.  Many pubs have Blue Plaques, more still have stained carpets.

Indeed, companies exist that can create character in a pub for you.  They scavenge skips (or to give them their full title rural action houses) and can transform a former car showroom into Ye Olde Something Or Other with the addition of only a few antique agricultural implements and a pine-effect condom dispenser.

However, it takes more than a few antique cigerette or Fry’s chocolate machines converted to dispense vape-sticks and pistachios to give a pub atmosphere, especially since the smoking ban came in.  What a pub really needs to do is a holistic historic makeover, setting up web-sites that will convince you that your local boozer has that most attractive of qualities, a pool table (just kidding, I mean A Past).

I used to drink in a pub that was featured on Crimewatch.  Everyone suspected that the landlord had done his wife in because a) she disappeared and b) the cellar acquired a new concrete floor.  The thing is, he kept a good pint.

Tricky moral decision, but when asked if one wanted a quick one ‘up the murderer’s?’, the answer was usually ‘yes’.  In his defence, I don’t think he served Stella, so he was obviously anti-violence to women.

Many pubs have, of course, been around since pilgrims needed somewhere to stop off for a quick drink before visiting Jerusalem.  Given the state of the Middle East today, that remains a good idea.  The older the pub the ‘richer’ the history, usually featuring, appropriately, claret.  But stabbings, gangland slayings and poetry is the least of it, given the amount of former entertainers, a trade that traditionally like a beer, now being locked up, it’s a wonder the police don’t just visit every pub called ‘The Yew Tree’ and throw a net over the regulars.

Of course, the best a Bristish boozer can boast is a resident highwayman.  Bierkellers are an efficient, mechanised, German pub and, if grainy black and white newsreel footage is to be believed (and why not) most of them were frequented by Hitler.  Not so much a Blue Plaque, more a brown shirt moment.

Britain’s pubs are richly decorated, and not just at chucking out time.  The walls of pubs in Britain are adorned not just with Sky Sport posters but with everything from hunting prints, to tabloid front pages, to wanted posters.  Look closer still and you will see why, in Britain at least, pubs remain haunts of gentlemen; photographs of regulars who may have stepped out, but who remain in spirit.

The Hoste Arms in Norfolk remains one of the best pubs in Burnham Market.  It remains so in rthe face of significant challenges, such as having a spa on site, and being frequented by very wealthy people.  It remains a good pub because the staff are quite, quite lovely and the place is at the same time the last word in excellence and not remotely pretentious.  I have had some great times there and sitting in the October sunshine with a glass of champagne and a springer smelling faintly of beach is one of life’s great joys.

The walls of the bar are adorned with original cartoons by Annie Tempest of her weekly strip (ooh er!) in Country Life magazine, ‘Tottering by Gently’, featuring Lord Tottering (‘Dicky’) and his wife, Daffy.  The strip concerns itself, as far as I can determine, with the upkeep of Tottering Towers, their stately home, red wine, dogs and, bizarrely, social media.  The strip is very ‘Country Life’, a magazine slightly up its own arse, more usually up a fox’s arse, but amusing.

All very lovely and slightly more original than a Space Invaders cabinet converted into a wifi booth or whatever.  A recent addition though are busts of Dicky and Daffy.

It’s always tricky to pull off a likeness of a cartoon character.  The last person to do it successfully was Michael Keaton.  However, one you get over the initial shock, they are actually quite fun.  Daffy is just as you would imagine her, although worryingly close to the red wine.

Dicky is fantastic.  That he does not resemble the cartoon character so well is fortunate, because the bust is an incredible likeness of the late, much missed, Professor Brigadier Richard Holmes.

Possibly the sculptor captures the likeness of the wrong Dicky.  Probably he captured the right one.

And if you were playing pub heritage top trumps, military history beats everything else.  From faded photographs of local lads in kaki, through oil paintings of Spitfires, through to bright photographs of local lads in desert gear, and never forgetting the gentleman in the red jacket, every pub should have a military connection.

Finally, the Hoste has it all.

Country Life - National Map Centre

http://www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs/spectator

I shared Carla Carlisle’s shock when I learned, during a visit there last week to purchase an essential rain-proof street map of Edinburgh, that the National Map Centre was to close (Spectator, ‘Map-reading by heart’ August 24).

Every journey may begin with a single step, but prior to that the wise traveller would make a quick trip to the National Map Centre. It is here that one finds not just guide-books and globes and maps and memoirs, but a sense of adventure.

A good book shop is not stocked, it is curated. It is a pleasure to spend time there browsing and one frequently leaves not just with one’s intended purchase, but other discoveries as well. Such a store is the National Map Centre.

The National Map Centre sells not just OS maps, guides and travel writing, but huge wall-sized world maps, ideal for plotting foreign trips or world domination. These fascinate because many do not always place Great Britain in the centre of the map. The different projections of the world challenge traditional views and present a different way of looking at things. Yet this does not diminish our importance, a map is a way of finding your way home, and home is always the most important place in the world.

The National Map Centre is important also. The adventurers great and small that have started there must be countless. When it closes, the world will be a slightly darker, duller place, and that much harder to navigate.

Listmania

If you want somebody to do something, put it in a list. Lists have much more natural authority than long, rambling and slightly preachy paragraphs of prose. The ten commandments for instance, the original list, ten things you should not do. Can you imagine if it wasn’t in the form of a list? Moses would have come down from the mountain with, well, some stuff about coveting and something about a false idol, which would just leave everyone wondering if this was about some new Simon Cowell show.

Lists are interesting, it’s good to be at the top of certain lists (‘most popular’) and not so good to be at the top of other lists (‘most wanted’). What people look for in a list is themselves, whether it’s their neighbourhood being described as a desirable area, or a reflection of their skills or status. Being on a list in whole or in part validates us, especially if it’s printed. That’s why when you chance across an article listing ‘the five symptoms of Denge Fever’ or something, you come away convinced that you have contracted some vile malady and are left wondering if the local chemist sells powdered lizard feet or whatever the bloody cure is.

A couple of weeks ago ‘Country Life’ magazine published an edition containing a list of thirty nine skills that youths should have by the time they leave school, recognising that a formal education can be a narrow one and that while it might equip one well for spelling or adding up, as well as doodling in exercise books or looking out of a window daydreaming to the point of drooling, one needs skills beyond those picked up in the classroom.

I read the list and thought it was an entirely reasonable set of expectations, my only criticism being it omits some core skills, such as knowing what wine to serve with swan.

This from the May 4, 2011 edition of ‘Country Life’ magazine.

Every young man and woman should know how to:

1. Cook three different dinner party menus
2. Say 'Can you help me please' in Arabic, Cantonese, Urdu, Spanish and Russian
3. Play a musical instrument, even if it's just the tom-toms or a mouth organ
4. Ride a horse to jackaroo standard
5. Be a 'tech whisperer', able to fix and set up the latest technogadgets
6. Talk about five classics of English literature with authority and passion
7. Perform resuscitation on someone who has stopped breathing
8. Know how to grow carrots from seed, distinguish five native trees, identify 20 flowers and arrange a bunch
9. Handle a shotgun, skin a rabbit, gut a fish and pluck a pigeon
10. Repair a bicycle puncture and fix the chain
11. Dance the eightsome reel, waltz to Strauss and bop to Lady Gaga
12. Taste the difference between Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and know how to mix a mojito or margarita
13. Write a memorable thank you letter
14. Recognise music by Mozart, Elgar and Handel.
15. Put up a shelf and change a plug
16. Tie a bow tie, bowline and Bloody Butcher
17. Sail a boat across the Solent
18. Carve a joint of meat
19. Tell the difference between Gothic, Baroque and Palladian architecture
20. Make a speech, entertain an audience with a joke or an anecdote, and sing at least two songs by heart
21. Drive a tractor, reverse a trailer, renew engine oil and change a wheel
22. Find their way round five capital cities
23. Host a party and put others at their ease
24. Sustain a 10-shot rally at tennis
25. Build a bonfire and lay a fire
26. Perform three good card tricks
27. Identify five constellations and find the North Star
28. Score a cricket match
29. Talk knowledgeably about five British landmarks
30. Uncork and pour a bottle of Champagne
31. Iron a shirt, sew on a button and sew up a hem
32. Amuse small children for at least an hour with magic tricks and storytelling
33. Read a map, pitch a tent and pack a rucksack
34. Be authoritatively acquainted with at least one work by da Vinci, Constable, Degas, Turner and Canaletto
35. Manage a bank account
36. Slip away from a football riot
37. Address a member of the Royal Family
38. Complain effectively but politely in a restaurant
39. Deliver a lamb.

Lists are popular in magazines, you can compile one by gathering random suggestions from the office, they don’t cost anything to compile and, crucially, they don’t require any fact-checking or invite legal challenge unless they are of the ‘rare breed ducks that some famous footballer has shagged’ variety

It’s also gratifying to compare your own life skills and abilities to those listed. If the magazine has got its demographic right then the reader should feel pleasingly smug at having some, most or all of the skills listed. So much better than those ‘personality’ quizzes in the glossies that you take, score ‘mostly c’s’ on and discover that, apparently, you are a psychopath and not a kleptomaniac at all, something of a surprise given that you shoplifted the mag.

The other thing about lists is that they are endlessly adaptable, this one from the 2010 February/March edition (Number 49) of ‘The Chap’ magazine listed the qualities a husband should possess.

Chap husbandry
A prospective husband should possess at least five of the following qualities

A duelling scar obtained in Heidelberg
A picturesque war-wound, but not a libido-threatening one
The ability to hit a playing card at twenty paces with a Webley
The ability to late cut between first and second slip
A set in Albany
A hint of danger
A cruel set to the lips
A goodish DSO or a decent MC
A square jaw
A poetic forehead
A strong head for absinthe
A Himalayan peak named after him
Fluent French and passable Arabic
A mother who isn’t a very good cook
A talent to step into a play when the actor pulls out at the last minute and steal the show
Sang-froid, savoir-faire and noblesse oblige
Being able to drive and navigate at the same time
Two Olympic gold medals
A talent for the trombone
Millions of pounds