British

Wednesday

Flora Watkins

The National Garden Scheme is the perfect antidote to Chelsea’s vanity

Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in north Norfolk, my youngest child – in the throes of a screaming meltdown – eyeballs me as she rips the heads off a row of giant ‘Mount Everest’ alliums. By the time Fiona Black arrives, I’m spiralling into an existential crisis myself. Why did I bother asking if we’d be suitable, I wonder, contemplating the futility of gardening alongside children and dogs. Sliding tackles have taken out most of the alliums that survived the dogs’ digging. I retrieve a football from a bed of irises and chuck a bottle of Roundup weedkiller out of sight (soon-to-be illegal in the UK, but so effective, it’s the chemical compound I just can’t kick).

Tuesday

Rodric Braithwaite

The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory

Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress. In it he spelled out as no writer had done before the way people died in shattered trenches, their bodies shredded by shell fire and left to rot in the mud; or in filthy, overcrowded hospitals, where overwhelmed doctors hacked off limbs without anaesthetic. He wrote not about the generals but about the ordinary soldiers, the men and women caught up in the fighting, the Russian people themselves.