Country Mouse

I love staring – in a non-sexual way

giles wood

In the past, texts of a religious or improving nature hung on every cottage wall.

Victorian needlework-samplers might typically remind the occupants to ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. Thence to basements in the pot-smoking 1970s, where posters of the saccharine poem Desiderata (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste’) seemed to endorse the passivity of the ‘basementals’ gazing on.

As a teenager, I was very taken with the description of such texts in a fictional household within a world paralysed by genetic mutation.

In The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, the narrator describes his family home: ‘The nearest approach to decoration was a number of wooden panels with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them. KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD…

‘Frequent references to these texts had made me familiar with the words long before I was able to read… I knew them by heart.’

In a similar way, advertisers believe they have a captive audience, culturally primed to be ‘influenced’ by wall-hung admonitions – and that no more potently receptive is this audience than when on the Tube. There, passengers should be happy to alight on any distraction rather than have to catch the eye of a fellow traveller.

Except in the case of oldies, who may well be trying to catch the eye of a fellow Tube traveller as they search their memory for the identity of the sofamiliar-looking person sitting opposite.

Non-fake news – this has recently become a ‘crime’. Instead they must now rest their eyes on new notices which read, ‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.’

A modern domestic-propaganda machine comes in the form of the A Year in the Country 2022 calendar, produced by the prolific illustrator and writer Matthew Rice.

Although the Aga cohort would seem to be the natural demographic for such a calendar, one of these was given to me in a well-meant bid to gentrify our sansAga, galley-style kitchen.

Rice’s 1970s Good Life counterpart might have advised, ‘Gather handfuls of the first nettles. They make a superb spring tonic eaten as gruel, porridge or soup.’ Rice’s advice is more aspirational.

His February tip sidesteps any hair-shirt aspects of the Good Life, instead exhorting, ‘Quick! Can you fit in a short trip to VENICE? February is the MOMENT to go to VENICE, the weeks before Carnevale are ESPECIALLY good and there can be BRIGHT, SUNNY, SPRING weather.’

Having recently been unsettled by the horror film The Witch (2015), featuring a satanic goat called Phillip leading a 17th-century Puritan, Anya Taylor-Joy, astray, I ignore all Matthew Rice’s recommendations regarding goats: ‘An exciting addition to the yard is a small family of goats. They are EXCEPTIONALLY friendly if a little over-ATHLETIC.’

Nevertheless, from having nothing else to stare at while waiting for the kettle to boil in our so-called kitchen, I’ve learned a lot about the different varieties of goats which might appeal to the aspirational classes: ‘Golden Guernsey, Boer, Saanen, Anglo Nubian, Toggenburg…’ Today, if you’ve got an agenda, a calendar is surely the medium for spreading the message.

Moreover, I have always responded well to schoolmasterly diktats.

Consequently, in April, in response to the calendar’s command, ‘EAT whatever is fresh and green to blow away the cobwebs’, I set out from the back door, bearing a traditional garden trug. I sashay through the weaving paths into my wild larder, which one neighbour, who misunderstands my gardening style, has described as ‘nothing more than an infestation of rank weeds’.

Round here, landowners talk about ‘clean’ land, by which they mean ‘free of weeds’ – in which category they include gorse, brambles and any scrub that might have the temerity to raise its head.

My wild larder offers a goodly assemblage of saladings: including Jack-by-the-hedge, sorrel, the flower heads and leaves of ransoms and a smattering of young hawthorn leaves, which for some reason are traditionally known as ‘cheese’.

All this would be disgusting, of course, without a dollop of Mary Berry’s Classic Salad Dressing from Waitrose, a mere 15 minutes’ drive away. But how ‘tormenting’, to paraphrase Cobbett, ‘to have to attend to the provision of daily supplies from shops’. Now even more tormenting with the cost of diesel.

It took the calendar to remind me that I already have a well-stocked cottage library of books on the subject of the wild larder. The standard books on foraging are by Roger Phillips and Richard Mabey, who in their research must have stood on the shoulders of Jane Grigson and Claire Loewenfeld. Phillips and Mabey were well ahead of their time.

But now foraging and craft-based rural culture have become mainstream, and rural relocators look to Rice for their improving texts. We often laugh about one such who took a chicken to the vet, following a visit from Mr Fox.

If she had bought his calendar, Rice would have warned her about this. But what if she’d been in Venice at the time?