Brian Viner
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 30 November 2005
When you live in rural England you get to know certain stretches of road better than you know members of your own family, and thus it is with us and the Hereford-to-Ludlow stretch of the A49. If we could invite it for Christmas, we would.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 23 November 2005
With two children at school just south of Ludlow, and one at school in Hereford, Jane and I are wondering whether to apply for Mastermind, specialist subject a 20-mile stretch of the A49. And were we to make it through to the second round, then our next specialist subject could be the A44 between Bromyard and Leominster.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 16 November 2005
It was our friend John H's 70-somethingth birthday last week, so he and his partner, John C, took a bunch of us out to celebrate. I've written it before, but it bears repeating that shortly before we moved from London to Herefordshire, a friend who had emigrated from Chiswick to a hamlet near Stroud told me that in the country we should expect to become part of a much less homogenous social circle. Her friends in London had all been more or less like her, she said, whereas in rural Gloucestershire she had friends of all ages, from farmhands to knights of the realm, from fellow former city-dwellers to born-and-bred country folk for whom the ugly spectre of relentlessly frenetic urban living was exemplified by Cirencester.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 09 November 2005
The enthusiasms of a middle-aged man, number 347: a good municipal tip. I really can't find sufficiently high praise for the tip in Leominster, our nearest town. Indeed, the word "tip" itself scarcely does it justice.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 02 November 2005
At the risk of turning the saga of our dogs into a Bleak House-style serial, I am returning to the subject one more time, although more than anything else as an illustration of how life is never dull in the country. Cold, muddy, smelly, sometimes. Dull, never.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 26 October 2005
Last week I began the sorry tale of how our much-loved golden retriever, Milo, and Jack Russell terrier, Paddy, stayed out overnight and caused carnage in a field of sheep.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 19 October 2005
It has been a week of bloodshed and tears in Docklow, which is not something Garrison Keillor ever got to say about Lake Wobegon. It all started when our dogs, Paddy and Milo, went missing on Friday night.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 12 October 2005
As Max Bygraves used to say, I wanna tell you a story. Not that he would have told this one, about a man, let's call him Gerald, who is involved in a serious car crash and regains consciousness in hospital to be told that he is fine in almost every department, but that, unfortunately, his penis was severed in the impact and couldn't be found.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 21 September 2005
Perhaps because of our proximity to the Welsh border, this is a truly historic part of the country. Strictly speaking, every part of England is as old as every other part, but there are some places in which you feel the weight of history. That is true in spades for Herefordshire and Shropshire; indeed you have only to read the property section of the Hereford Times to realise it.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 14 September 2005
AN ADVERTISING sales person phoned us the other day, as advertising sales people do every day. We advertise our three holiday cottages in a small selection of magazines, and if these adverts yielded as much in the way of bookings as they do in the way of phone calls from advertising sales people from other magazines, then we would even now be planning a family Christmas in Hawaii.
Brian Viner: England seal joyful victory after magical series
Published: 13 September 2005
"They're coming home, they're coming home; the Ashes are coming home." As an exercise in vocal triumphalism, it doesn't quite work on two counts. Firstly, it doesn't scan, and secondly the Ashes never actually left. To the occasional irritation of successive captains of Australia, the blazered panjandrums of Marylebone Cricket Club have never allowed the precious little urn to leave the museum at Lord's, at least not to take up residence Down Under.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 07 September 2005
Sometimes, townie sensibilities can serve you well in the country. A few weeks ago we met an elegant couple in, I would guess, their late sixties.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 24 August 2005
The call came from a chirpy production assistant called Sarah. To coincide with the Glorious Twelfth, the Radio 4 programme The Message wanted to discuss the media's coverage of countryside issues. Would I like to be a guest, along with the editor of Country Life, Clive Aslet, and the Countryside Alliance's publicity director Tim Bonner? I dithered, asking myself whether I had enough opinions on the subject. Moreover, Clive would be in the Canterbury studio, Tim in the London one, I'd be in Hereford, and the presenter Jenni Murray would be in Manchester. Round-table discussions are challenging enough without being at different tables. In the end, seduced by the promise of a fat BBC fee that I calculated would almost cover a ploughman's lunch, I said yes.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 17 August 2005
Every fisherman is said to have a story about a huge but elusive carp or salmon, but in truth The One That Got Away is not just a phenomenon of the sea or riverbank. I can think of plenty of other professions and pursuits in which The One That Got Away looms just as large.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 10 August 2005
This is our eighth consecutive summer staying in room 42 of the Treglos Hotel overlooking Constantine Bay in Cornwall. We have taken our children to Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Cyprus, France, America and the Caribbean over the years, yet the annual Cornish holiday is the one by which they judge all others. A holiday "nearly as good as the Treglos" is praise indeed, eight marks out of 10.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 03 August 2005
The Marshalls autumn vegetable seed catalogue arrived today, and to my embarrassment I realised that I was ripping open the envelope with an excitement that teetered on the unseemly, like a man expecting a cheque from the lottery.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 27 July 2005
It is three years since we settled in the sticks, and still people ask us whether we are enjoying the country life, as if it were some kind of experiment.
Brian Viner: When misquotes are better than the reality
Published: 22 July 2005
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 20 July 2005
Life in rural Herefordshire sometimes feels like an extended version of The Vicar of Dibley, never more so than the Saturday before last, when the Docklow church fete took place in our garden. According to Walter, who was born in our house 70-something years ago, when it belonged to his grandmother, it was the first time the fete had been held here since 1955. Which may have been the year someone said, "I think we need new trestle-tables", and then forgot to do anything about it for half a century. I've heard people asking, as they ponder the mysteries of the universe, why you never see baby pigeons. My own question is: why do you never see new trestle-tables?
Brian Viner: When golf shows its sentimental side
Published: 15 July 2005
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 13 July 2005
My wife Jane has been agitating for some time to add a Jack Russell terrier to our menagerie. I have resisted the idea with my usual thunderous authoritarianism, which is how I ended up, not 10 minutes ago, collecting the poo deposited on the hall floor by our new Jack Russell puppy, Paddy.
Brian Viner: A Country Life
Published: 22 June 2005
The further one lives from London, the more one becomes aware of, and affronted by, the shameless Londoncentricity of the national media. Their tendency to assume that England, to all intents and purposes, means London, I suppose affords us country bumpkins a small taste of what it must be like to be a Scot, sporran aflame with indignation when the word "England" is used rather than "Britain". I recently spent an hour interviewing Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, and a man who exudes worldly sophistication from every pore, yet even he referred to "your recent English general election". I had to suppress a smile, knowing how some Scots of my acquaintance would have given him a fearful earful.
Brian Viner: A Country Life
Published: 15 June 2005
Journalists are incorrigibly fond, when writing about historical events, of evoking the era by informing the reader who was Prime Minister at the time, which famous people were born or died in that year, what you would have paid for a semi in Esher ... you know the sort of thing. Well, when the shop in Ludlow that is now Bodenhams first started trading, Henry IV was on the throne, Owen Glendower seized Harlech Castle, Chaucer had been dead for only five years, the Battle of Agincourt was 10 years in the future, and a semi in Esher cost, at a rough guess, less than 100 groats.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 01 June 2005
Even now, nearly three years after settling in north Herefordshire, with nigh on 200 newspaper columns and a book behind me recording more pleasures than pitfalls in country living, with our children happily settled in excellent schools, with a new repertoire of skills, including the underrated ability to turn a sheep stranded on its back the right way up ... even now, I am frequently asked whether I ever regret moving out of London.
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 25 May 2005
Last week in this space, I bewailed the expanding gap in our house and garden between adults on the one hand (latest head count, two) and children and animals on the other (latest head count, 17).
