Another Country Diary #1

With apologies and dead snakes.

Probably the last thing Substack needs is another country newsletter. There seems to be a crowd of them here, an abundance of foragers and gardeners, rural psycho-geographers and folklorists, ecologists and herbalists, all of them brilliant at what they do. However, I’ve always had a soft spot for the country diary, that sub-genre of nature writing grounded in observation and reflection.  It has been popularised by a certain newspaper making more than a century of space for it. It can be, at times, a bit like a commonplace book, revealing of the person who put it together and of the landscape they inhabit. The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial. Urban dwellers should look away or touch concrete for luck for the curs…