Countryside

The countryside is all very well so long as you know you can leave it. Funnily enough, exactly the same can be said for the town. I realise I have spent the entire year trying to decide whether to sell up and move from London to the wilds of Surrey. Or stay put in Balham. I’ve spent more evenings on Zoopla than can possibly be healthy. And now I think about it, I guess the reason I have struggled so hard to make a choice is that town and country are dependent on each other to produce their own special magic. I cannot enjoy the country unless I know I

The fabulous October weather is now just a memory but it made for a golden, old-fashioned apple day down in Somerset. The plan was to pick and convert a mound of sugar-rich Redstreaks — about 400 kilos — into a rather special vintage. We would pour the apple juice into an oak hogshead, freshly emptied of its whisky, to make a cider tinged with a 20-year-old malt. How good does that sound? The idea of the get-together was the idea of designer Bill Amberg and publisher Damian Jaques, who is a cider boffin. Various friends and their families convened by an old barn with a nearby orchard. We tipped piles of apples

I have fallen in love with an unsuitable male. My wife isn’t totally happy about this relationship because she recognises how dangerous it is. The problem with Eddie is that his vices are my vices. He’s reckless, an adrenaline junkie who likes always to be up front. Really, a most unsuitable companion for a skinny, breakable family man fast approaching 50. And did I mention how expensive he is? It’s as bad as having a high-class mistress or a serious cocaine habit, but I’m powerless to resist. I love hunting. I love my mount Eddie Stobart. When I’m riding to hounds, all my worldly cares vanish. It makes me feel

Yesterday, the RSPCA published the long-awaited review of its prosecutions policy. Interesting choice of timing – it finally released the critical report on the day of Cameron’s conference speech. Talk about burying bad news. The review recommends that the RSPCA no longer prosecutes hunts because it also campaigns on hunting, and calls into serious question the direction it has been taking. Personally, I think the charity needs a serious re-think after some shocking miscarriages of justice where it has pursued pet owners for very minor infringements, and been totally unaccountable and closed to any kind of public scrutiny. We now need a proper debate and I urge anyone interested in

With Candida, you learned to expect the unexpected. She said she might make the charity sale at my house on Thursday, but not to rely on her. I didn’t. But on Friday, a bright red pick-up truck turned into the yard and out got Candida with a bagful of contributions. But she also brought a birthday present of a beautiful Alice Temperley skirt for my younger daughter. The red pick-up was a present for Candida’s own birthday, thrilling her as much as any red bike for a six-year-old. ‘I’m an old hippy,’ she once said. Perhaps. She was certainly a child of the Sixties, when half the aristocracy’s offspring were

It’s 50 years since the death of Ian Fleming and The Spectator has always taken James Bond seriously. The writer of the Spectator’s Notebook in 1962 went along eagerly to see Bond’s first screen appearance. It hasn’t seemed to matter but it seemed odd that the director hadn’t explained some key parts of the plot. ‘Apart from the fact that Bond is played with an Irish-American accent—not particularly noticeable, of course, when he is throwing chaps around or conversing into his mistress’s left ear—what struck me most was the assumption on the part of the film-makers that everyone would know the plot of Dr. No. I imagine that much of

This has been a terrible year for horseflies. It’s bad enough if you’re human: often by the time you swat them off the damage has already been wrought by their revolting, cutting mandibles and it’s not till 24 hours later, I find, that the bite reaches peak unpleasantness, swelling into a huge itchy dome which somehow never quite generates the massive sympathy you feel you deserve. But obviously it’s worse if you’ve no hands to swat them with, as Girl and I were reminded when we went out for a summer ride. Every few yards our mounts shuddered and twitched and twisted their heads back under sustained and vicious assault

The funeral of Clarissa Dickson Wright: cook, television personality, countryside campaigner and, at the time, the youngest woman ever to be called to the Bar, was held in Edinburgh this afternoon. Best known for her eccentric and amusing Two Fat Ladies cookery programme with Jennifer Paterson, her life also encompassed law, alcoholism (and subsequent recovery), and appearances on a variety of television shows, including One Man and His Dog and Clarissa and the Countryman. She was famed for her outspoken and (apparently) ‘un-PC’ views on the countryside and hunting, and her admirable penchant for speaking her mind. But Clarissa is best explained in her own words. So in her memory,

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt

Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to nominate a favourite church or house or even town and they will casually suggest a few. Ask for a view and you delve deep. A view is personal, intimate. It is not a landscape but the experience of a landscape. Many suggested places where they had fallen in love or found consolation. A number said simply, ‘The view from the end of my garden.’ Rejecting such a choice for ‘England’s best views’ could be a personal slight. That may be why Hazlitt advised his readers always to walk the countryside

The grey long-eared bat is threatened by extinctions, according to various news reports this morning. Scientists at the University of Bristol, who made the discovery, have called for more protection of ‘foraging’ habitat in marshland and lowland meadow in southern England, where the climate is ideal for the grey long-eared bat. The scientists will probably get what they want, because the Bat Conservation Trust wants for nothing. Melissa Kite explains in this week’s issue of the Spectator: ‘Imagine: it’s Sunday morning, and the warden of a medieval village church arrives to get the place ready for communion only to find the altar covered in bat droppings.  As he gets scrubbing,

The section of the A83 that runs between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in western Scotland is known as the Rest and Be Thankful. It would be better described as the Get the Hell out of Here. For this, as far as I can tell, is the British trunk road most afflicted by landslips. The soil on the brae above the road is highly unstable. There have been six major slips since 2007, which have shut the road for a total of 34 days. The cost of these closures is estimated at about £290,000 a year. It’s a minor miracle that no one has yet been killed. The Scottish government

If Joni Mitchell were writing her song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ today, about the ruination of the natural world by the march of modernity, the lyrics might run something like this: ‘They paved paradise, put up a cycling route.’ Not content with demanding cycling lanes through our towns and cities, the cycling lobby — by which I don’t mean old maids bicycling to communion, I mean the Lycra brigade — are starting to turn the countryside into a surface on which they can pedal themselves into an endorphin-rich sweat as well, it seems. The tarmacking of a six-mile track through unspoilt Warwickshire countryside near my parents’ home is the latest evidence