Countryside

When I was four, the progressive teachers at my primary school thought it would be wise to teach us how to type on a keyboard. When it was my turn to key out the phrase ‘Biff and Chip’ on the computer, they discovered, to their horror, that I was already capable of effortless touch typing. I have been using computers, and by extension the internet, since before my earliest memories were formed. Not only did I grow up online, I did so during the early 2000s when there were virtually no safeguards or restrictions on what children could access. I pirated my first film, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, at the age of seven and bought my first (sadly wasted) bitcoin at 13.

Royal removals The King has had more success in stripping Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal titles than George IV had in removing the title of his Queen, Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. George, then Prince of Wales, and Caroline married in 1795 having got engaged before they actually met. On their wedding night, both found each other physically disgusting – although they did manage to conceive a daughter. Caroline went on to have a string of affairs, prompting delicate royal investigations, even though George was hardly a picture of fidelity himself. She later left England and set up with an Italian manservant, Bartolomeo Pergami, but returned to England when George ascended to the throne in 1820. His efforts to dethrone her via a Pains and Penalties Bill failed.

Crossing the floor Danny Kruger defected from the Tories to Reform, the first sitting MP to do so. Which parties have gained, and lost, the most MPs from defections since 1979?

I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in Kent. On hot days the goats would hide in the dense, cool woodland and it could take a long time to find them. Occasionally they broke out of the reserve because our gates were of poor quality, so I was delighted to see one morning that new gates had been installed, shiny metal ones. When I got up close, though, there was a surprise in store. All of the new gates were adorned with a picture of a woman in a burka and an injunction to abide by the Countryside Code. This struck me as peculiar, not to say borderline Islamophobic. We had never experienced trouble with Muslim women ignoring the Countryside Code.

‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s the thing. We live in deepest north Norfolk, not the achingly suburban Surrey town of Camberley that so provoked punk angst. When we bolted from south London after the lockdowns, our checklist included no streetlights, motorways (the nearest is 98 miles away), new-builds or nearby neighbours. To secure the rambling farmhouse we wanted, we had to compromise on the last of these. But we were moving to the English equivalent of la France profonde.

The recession relationship There are fears that the US and UK may both be heading for a recession. Has the US ever suffered a recession which did not spread to Britain? Since the Great Depression of the early 1930s there have been 16 identifiable periods in which the US met the usual definition of a recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth), the most recent being in 2022. Britain has seen only ten such periods – even though its economy has grown by less overall. Periods when the US saw a recession but Britain did not include 1937-38, when the US economy shrank by 18 per cent over a year, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1969-70, 2001 and 2022. The UK suffered recessions not shared by the US in 1956 and 2023.

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since, with visits to hospital for treatment. His Parisian lawyer, François Zimeray, has still not been given a visa, so the charges are unclear.

My beavers have been kidnapped. A few months ago there were five of them living on my family’s farm on Bodmin Moor. Now there are none. I know where they are and I have received proof of life from their kidnapper, but he will not release them back to me or allow me to collect them and bring them home. I miss them and often walk along their stretch of river and past their dams with a tear in my eye. I miss them and often walk along their stretch of river and past their dams with a tear in my eye I was quite early to the beaver game.

In a recent interview, Hilary McGrady, the director-general of the National Trust, complains that ‘The culture wars we’re trying to grapple with are never something I supported’. I do believe her: she is not a political warrior. But what she does not acknowledge – or possibly does not understand – is that it was the wokeists within the National Trust’s staff, and the outsiders they commissioned to help them, who started the fight. There would have been no unhappiness among members if, to improve historical understanding of Trust properties, more attention had been given to the origins – good, bad or something in between – of the money which built them.

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends. When he returned, it was with a wind-beaten face, wearing the traditional beagler’s white breeks and green socks, with a leather hunting whip slung over his shoulder. I knew nothing of this world, until one late autumnal Saturday he invited me to join him. As I watched the beagle pack race across the landscape, I realised I had stepped into a magical event, a hunting scene from a medieval tapestry brought to life. I was hooked. To this day, many sporting Christians throughout Europe honour St Hubert with songs and prayers after a hunt Beagling was my entry into field sports, but soon the door might be closed to others.

Ophiostoma novo-ulmi is not an expression that sits easily at the head of a Christmas Spectator column, so I’ll return later to the unpleasant fungus and disobliging beetle that over my lifetime have been devastating the English elm, and turn instead to one of our most beloved poets offering his own personal homage to his most beloved tree: Old Elm that murmured in our chimney topThe sweetest anthem autumn ever made. John Clare wrote ‘To a Fallen Elm’ in the 1830s: a poem that was partly a lament inspired by his boyhood memories of the English agricultural enclosures. Thoust heard the knave abusing those in powerBawl freedom loud and then oppress the freeThoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hourThat when in power would never shelter thee.

The last straw Farmers are threatening to strike over the government’s changes to inheritance tax in what is being described as a first in Britain. Besides France, where farmers regularly protest, India witnessed a farmers’ strike in 2020, which was eventually settled after the government dropped proposed new laws. But one of the earliest farmers’ strikes was conducted by the Farmers’ Holiday Association in Iowa in 1932, by farmers protesting at consistently low prices for their products. The idea was that farmers would go on ‘holiday’, refusing to sell any of their produce. Few, however, joined, leading to pickets blocking rural roads with telegraph poles. One policeman was killed, but in an accidental discharge of his gun. The action died down after a few months.

There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not have felt he needed to chuck a piece of legislation at his backbenchers, like a juicy bone to a pack of hungry hounds. The hunting ban never was about animal welfare, but class hatred, Dennis Skinner declaring that the bill was ‘for the miners’. The ban, Blair later admitted, was ‘one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret’.

The new hunting year formally began last week. Should I resubscribe? Politically, the outlook is bleak. In February, Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, announced that Labour would implement a ‘full ban on trail and drag hunting’, on the grounds that there were ‘loopholes’ in Labour’s hunting ban. This even though, when advocating the original ban, Labour said it favoured drag hunting (trail hunting had not then been invented) and was worried only about live quarry. Mr Reed included his ban promise in a speech in which he announced that his party would treat rural voters with ‘greater respect’. His two aims conflict.