Why Ronald Blythe is so revered

Ronald Blythe, the celebrated author of Akenfield, is to turn 100 next month, and to mark his centenary a beguiling calendrical selection has been made of his ruminations for the Church Times, for which as a lay reader he penned a weekly ‘Word from Wormingford’. It is distilled from 25 years of musings that chase the months from first ghostly intimations of snow at New Year to the blaze of the fire at Wood Hall’s mid-winter supper, while outside ‘the trees crack and the moon is made of ice’. Coming full circle and anticipating the ever-repeating rhythms of the year, they glance between past and present, sacred and secular and serious and wry in such a way that, to quote Richard Mabey in his introduction, ‘a profundity by an Apostle can shade into anxieties over a fish pie’.

Shading, glancing – yes, Blythe’s writing here is agile, light in tone and brimming with playful possibilities and allusions, which is not to say that it is not deeply serious and learned, too.