How best to record the passage of time is a problem which has exercised the mind of man from the beginnings of history. The mechanical clock dates probably from the end of the 13th century, and since that date clock-making has evoked the finest and most precise — and often the most complicated — mechanism of which each succeeding age was capable. Not content with that, the clockmaker called in every appropriate form of applied art to decorate his efforts — the goldsmith, silversmith, enameller, lapidary and others.

The study of horology is, therefore, one which covers a great many forms of mechanical and artistic effort.

No one even remotely connected with horology would ever think of referring to 'the Ilbert Collection of Clocks and Watches.' All over the world the Ilbert Collection, without qualification, is known as the most complete collection of clocks and watches there ever has been, or is ever likely to exist.

The making of it called for the leisure, means, mechanical knowledge and artistic taste that are rarely found in one man. Courtenay Ilbert had them all, and he devoted 50 years to his tremendous achievement. Primarily, the emphasis of the collection is mechanical and scientific, but nearly every form of decorative art is also represented, and there is hardly any — certainly no important — aspect of horology from about 1500 to 1850 which is not worthily represented.

Ilbert died in February, 1956. The British Museum quickly realised the importance of acquiring his collection for the nation, and for two years his executors continued to hold it while the Museum has investigated the possibilities of raising the relatively modest sum of £85,000 for which it was offered to them. Unfortunately, at this time, their budget up to the end of this year had been fully bespoken, and although various substantial offers have been made towards raising the sum, the Treasury has so far refused a special grant for the balance.

Accordingly, despite their desire for the collection to remain intact and in this country, the executors and beneficiaries under Ilbert's will can no longer delay, and short of a miracle or a change of heart by the Treasury, the clocks will be auctioned at Christie's in November. This unique and never-to-be-repeated work of a lifetime will thus be broken up, and probably many treasures of national importance will go out of this country.

The oldest surviving clocks date from the late 14th century; they are monumental mechanisms such as the Salisbury Cathedral clock of 1386. Exceedingly few domestic clocks exist from before 1500 and the Ilbert Collection starts at about the beginning of the 16th century with the typical late Gothic house clocks, with iron movements, and up to three trains, for the main timekeeper and for striking hours and quarters. These are surmounted by one or two bells carried in a framework with crocketed decorations. The trains are weight-driven, and the escapement is the verge and foliot which was universal for clocks until the application of the pendulum in 1657, and for watches until the practicable development of the balance spring in 1675.

Until these two dates, accuracy of timekeeping made little progress and, perhaps as a compensation, this is the great age of decoration in clocks and watches. Watches, or at any rate portable, spring-driven time-keepers, date from the end of the 15th century. The oldest spring-driven clock is dated 1525 and belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The earliest surviving watches, which could be carried about the person, date from 1550, and the Ilbert Collection has a small, drum-shaped instrument from the mid-century, almost completely without ornamentation, which was certainly intended to be carried. Towards the end of the century watches became less uncommon and the collection is well represented with French fusee and German stackfreed specimens in typical pierced and engraved, metal-gilt cases of flattened drum shape. Clocks became more adventurous, such as the lovely little drum clock with rock-crystal sides and a superimposed, dome-shaped alarum.

An alternative to the fusee or stackfreed, as a means of equalising the variable torque of the mainspring, is found in a mechanism by Hans Kiening. The almost drab, box-shaped case contains a movement of superlative finish in which the depth of engagement of the verge with the crown-wheel is reduced as the pull of the mainspring diminishes. Part of the pierced and engraved blued-steel fretwork which decorates the movement plates was missing, and a replacement was made by Ilbert himself. It is indistinguishable from the finest contemporary work.

Of unparalleled importance is the great clock of 1598 by Nicholas Vallin; it is the earliest dated clock of British make, and probably the oldest surviving musical clock. At each quarter a long performance is made of 13 bells, and the outer case is of architectural form, in metal gilt.

The first half of the 17th century saw increasing richness of decoration, and the collection has a superb variety of watches cased in painted enamel, cut rock crystal, engraved silver and silver-gilt, form watches, pin-work, and so forth; and examples of the early Baroque table clocks with complicated astronomical movements and gilt cases in 'tabernacle' shape.

The collection may have had rivals, but it is with the invention of the pendulum for clocks and the balance-spring for watches that it really comes into its own. Reasonably accurate time-keeping became possible after some 350 years of little or no progress; and British masters leapt at the new opportunities, so that within two decades they had established themselves as pre-eminent, and an export trade had been established.

The Dutchman Huygens first brought the pendulum to a stage when it could be produced commercially, and he confided his method to Samuel Coster, who made the first examples. The Dutch family of Fromanteel had previously settled in London, and they sent John Fromanteel to Holland to learn the new system from Coster.

By 1658, they were advertising pendulum clocks in England, and cased them in what was to become the standard British long-case or grandfather clock. Ilbert's specimen, from details of the pediment-topped case, can be identified as probably the oldest surviving British long-case clock. From it stems a selected range of long-case clocks. Next is an early example of the long pendulum and anchor escapement (Britain's first great contribution to horology) in the form of a superbly proportioned, very simple clock by Joseph Knibb. Then come three Tompions; a year clock by Quare; and then one of the first regulator clocks by Graham. George Graham, by his invention of the deadbeat escapement and mercury-compensated pendulum, brought timekeeping from limits of a minute or two a week at best, to a few seconds a month by soon after 1725. Ilbert's Graham regulator is a superb example, giving sidereal and mean time. It is matched by the slightly later sidereal and mean time regulator of Thomas Mudge, with a gridiron pendulum. This perfectly-proportioned piece was about Ilbert's last important addition to the collection.

Then came John Harrison's first practicable marine timekeeper and Mudge's invention of the lever-escapement. Of Harrison's two successful marine timekeepers one is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and one, belonging to the clockmakers' Company, is in the Guildhall Museum. No example is in private ownership; but of the next steps in the development of the marine chronometer the Ilbert Collection is unsurpassed. Mudge's constant force escapement was too complicated for quantity production, but its performance was unsurpassed for a century. Of the three earlier timekeepers made by Mudge, Ilbert has one. Mudge is also not known to have made more than three instruments with the lever escapement, of which the only watch belongs to Her Majesty the Queen. Of the two clocks, Ilbert's is certainly the first. By 1780 John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw were producing relatively cheap marine chronometers on lines which have not been seriously departed from or improved upon. It is questionable if any very early Earnshaw survives, but the Ilbert Collection has every important type of Arnold's work, and typical specimens of Earnshaw's.

Correspondingly came improvements in the accuracy of pocket watches, with the development of Mudge's lever escapement by Emery, Leroux, Grant and Breguet, and the detent escapement by Arnold and Earnshaw. All of these are represented in fascinating profusion, with cases of appropriately simple perfection. The last great step in the perfection of the pocket watch, by the virtual elimination of position errors, was Breguet's tourbillon. His first perfected specimen he gave in a simple, silver drum-case, with an inscription dedicating it to John Arnold. This unique piece and many other Breguet examples are in the collection.

Also of this final period of the artist-craftsman, before Swiss mass-production methods took the field, are some superb late decorative watches such as transparent enamel over engine-turning, complicated astronomical movements and a variety of unusual French clocks, including a bracket year clock by Berthoud.

As a background to all these mechanically and decoratively perfect clocks and watches is a huge chest of some 2,000 watch movements representing every imaginable facet of mechanism from earliest to latest.

There are many fine collections in the world of clocks and watches, but none covers the whole field so comprehensively as Ilbert's vast collection. With the fierce competition among collectors to-day such a thing could never be got together again. For the three and a half centuries covered by the collection, horology has commanded man's greatest mechanical and decorative skill. That the nation, on the responsibility of the Treasury, should throw away the chance of securing the finest horological collection there will ever be, for the want of part only of the agreed valuation of £85,000, seems almost unthinkable.

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As I cycled home from work yesterday, I came across something odd. It was a teenage girl, only she was well groomed, impeccably dressed and wore her hair in a bob. Are teenagers not meant to look spotty and out of place, I wondered? As London Fashion Week returns to the city this week, has sartorial fever finally gripped our adolescents?

Not quite. Today’s young ’uns are empirically more elegant than we were — a result, some say, of TikTok, where the algorithm subsumes sartorially unfriendly cultures to the benefit of a safer, dominant aesthetic. It holds up, but I would like to propose another theory. Trends tend to work in 30-year cycles. Thirty years ago was 1996. Whereas I was stuck with mod haircuts and skinny jeans at the age of 15, 30 years on from 1983, today’s teenagers are donning camisoles, suede jackets and slacks à la Kate Moss and Johnny Depp. QED.

2026 has inspired comparisons to 1976 (hot summer, bleak economy) and 1999 (stock-market exuberance fuelled by only a handful of tech companies). These were also years remembered for the majesty of their fashion: think Cher in suedes and feathered bodysuits by the dearly departed Bob Mackie, or Gwyneth Paltrow in that Donna Karen ensemble. Fashion is only free to go off the rails when the economy is soaring, because people will buy it anyway. The 1980s, fittingly, is still known as the decade that style forgot. Where The City saw a Big Bang, most wardrobes faced a Big Bust.

In a more uncertain climate, customers are forced to become more discerning. Designers, for their part, are expected to take fewer risks. A cynic might call this boring — the death of creativity — but history suggests otherwise. Designers are often at their best when finding freedom within constraint.

Reining in excess allows the details to take centre-stage (see Tom Ford’s tenure at Gucci, 1994–2004), a commercially savvy idea in an era where the snapshots of an outfit — think Chanel’s recent barefoot sandals — go viral more easily than the overall ensemble. Reuse and timelessness also become more important, as they ought to. In perhaps the only upshot of economic downturn, this weekend’s collections are expected to be a triumph.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If Burberry has come to signify a quintessentially British style, it also represents the quicksilver nature of national identity, for, even in our class-conscious society, the brand has been adopted as a uniform across the social divide, spanning grouse moors and football terraces, worn by everyone from the late Duke of Edinburgh to Liam Gallagher.

Indeed, the company’s signature check became front-page news in 2002 after the EastEnders soap star Danniella Westbrook was snapped with her baby daughter in co-ordinating head-to-toe outfits, complete with a matching pram. ‘CHAVTASTIC!’ declared The Sun at the time, with gleeful delight.

Yet, despite solemn nay-sayers predicting the death of the brand, it continued to flourish, doubtless helped by the fact that it remained admirably practical for country sporting pursuits, with a durability evident in Elizabeth II’s hardworking Burberry raincoats.

‘Icon’ is a hackneyed term in fashion and, indeed, the wider culture, but it does seem to me appropriate for the title of the exhibition opening on September 21 at the V&A Museum. ‘The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon’ celebrates the brand’s 170th anniversary, tracing its history from 19th-century artisanship to the contemporary runways of London Fashion Week.

Founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry — an enterprising 21-year-old draper who established his eponymous outfitters in Basingstoke in Hampshire — the business expanded thanks to his patented 1879 invention of weatherproof gabardine (a sturdy material that is still woven today in Yorkshire).

In 1891, Burberry opened its first flagship store on London’s Haymarket, followed by Paris in 1909 and Buenos Aires in 1912. The polar explorer Ernest Shackleton took it even further afield, wearing Burberry gabardine on his Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century.

During the First World War, the brand’s gabardine coats acquired their famous military associations, advertised as ‘trenches’ that would be repaired free of charge for serving officers. Burberry was successful, too, in appealing to adventurous women, designing female mountaineering outfits as early as 1908 and for the pioneering aviator Betty Kirby-Green in the 1930s. This, perhaps, was the beginning of a subtle shift towards transatlantic chic, when Hollywood film stars such as Greta Garbo began wearing trench coats, suggesting an androgynous, yet glamorous mystique.

By the 1960s, the pendulum of fashion had swung back again to London, and Burberry’s signature check, originally introduced in the 1920s as a coat-lining, began appearing on accessories and umbrellas, exported around the world as jaunty emblems of a semi-imaginary English landscape.

Patrick Lichfield’s advertising campaigns added a charmingly graceful touch, depicting Burberry-clad models in the picturesque gardens of country houses (including the maze at Hever Castle, Kent) or alongside the Household Cavalry.

Several generations of the Royal Family remained loyal to Burberry — from George VI and the Queen Mother to the young Prince Charles and Princess Diana — and Catherine, the current Princess of Wales, has followed their example.

Yet the appropriation of the brand as subversive streetwear, embraced by mods, punks and the Britpop stars of the 1990s, has revealed its chameleon-like capacity to shape-shift through successive decades.

In an era in which some commentators are prone to dwell on the divisions in our society, I find it reassuring that Thomas Burberry’s egalitarian vision of robust textiles and tailoring still endures. Remarkably, his legacy has not fossilised into a fusty form of nostalgia; instead, it has proved to have the resilience and flexibility to run like a thread through our shared sartorial heritage, as well as forming new patterns, and standing boldly at the cutting edge of taste.

In this sense, it has a delightful quality in common with Country Life —and so I urge readers of all ages to search dusty attics or muddy boot rooms for forgotten trench coats and sally forth, as gallant Britannic ambassadors, with heads held high.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

My enviable job as Lifestyle Editor means that I receive an unenviable volume of press releases every day. Most of them barely get a look-in. A few hit the mark and earn replies. Some stand out for more quizzical reasons, as did one announcing the launch of a pub in Battersea Power Station. ‘Really?’ I thought. A pub in a shopping mall? Those don’t really go together, unless it’s the Wetherspoons at Heathrow Terminal 5, in which case they absolutely do.

The pub in question is called The Hero’s Return — not to be confused with The Hero, a pub in Maida Vale. The two hostelries share similar DNA: both belong to a new school of pub where the focus has shifted from the bar to the dining room. Overseeing the food at The Hero’s Return is Jonathan Woolway, an alumnus of London’s best restaurant: St John.

One cannot help but wonder if these pubs are really pubs. Our licensing laws do not prevent restaurants from calling themselves pubs, so long as they have a bar and can serve drinks on their own without a meal. Should this really be enough to qualify them, however? Above anything else, the pub is a watering hole: a space for friends and neighbours to gather, drink, play cards and perhaps join a trivia night. I find it odd when people go to the pub to read — or to have a meeting. (They do.)

Why, given the opportunity, would a restaurant choose to call itself a pub? Decades ago, the idea would have been unfathomable. Pubs wanted to call themselves restaurants, boasting of their brand-new dining rooms as the nation’s culinary nous and expectations rose for the first time. They attempted to shed their image as outmoded dives, good only for darts and men who go by Keith.

These days, the opposite is true. With good food to be found on every street corner, the playing field has changed. A restaurant can distinguish itself if it offers a convincing semblance of the pubs of yore — no matter how contrived. The search for conviviality (what young people call ‘vibes’) has replaced the pursuit of the edible in a city that frequently tops global dining rankings.

Perhaps the pub is the most unlikely victor of our glossy and artificial times. Why not have one in the same Battersea building that houses Apple’s UK headquarters?

But at the same time, why not preserve the essence of what makes a pub great? With that in mind, below is a short list of some of our favourite pubs in London; bastions in a strong tide, refusing to move with the times.

The Shakespeares Head, Islington

One of London's finest flat-roof pubs, there's almost too much to love about the welcoming Shakespeares Head. I adore the giant charity cheques and faded actors' headshots on the walls, the jukebox (which was free the last time we visited), the old school sandwich counter and the giddy afternoon rush of friendly posties from nearby Mount Pleasant HQ. Also, there's no apostrophe on the sign, so maybe the head doesn't actually belong to Shakespeare?

— Leonie Cooper, food & drink editor 'Time Out' and Co-host of Messy Lunch

The Victoria, Bermondsey

Like Tortuga in Pirates of the Caribbean, you'll never find The Victoria unless you know where it is. Not only is it hidden down a small residential street in SE1, it's also hidden in 1974. Fixtures and fittings are straight out of central casting (and are recognisable from many television shows filmed there, such as The Gold), while the pièce de résistance is a central horseshoe bar.

— James Fisher, Digital Commissioning Editor

The Nag's Head

The Nag’s Head on Kinnerton Street would feel familiar to the grooms and carriage drivers who drank here in the early 19th -century when this tranquil corner of Belgravia provided transport to residents of Wilton Crescent and Belgrave Square. Too many characterful quirks to mention. If you know, you know.

— Giles Kime, Interiors Editor

The Southampton Arms, Kentish Town

Only serves sausage rolls and often has a man in the corner playing an instrument he has whittled himself.

— Emma Hughes, acting Assistant Features Editor

Fox & Hounds, Belgravia

The man who created Coronation Street lived on this block off the Pimlico Road, so there is a theory the Fox inspired the Rovers' Return. It's a proper locals pub where you'll meet people from all walks of life, including, but not limited to, Chelsea pensioners, Pimlico road antiques dealers and interior design mavens, Conservative MPs, and BAFTA-winning actors who are doing plays around the corner at the Royal Court (back in the day, O'Toole and Harris, more recently Ben Whishaw).

All answer to the landlady Dee Dean and her enormous German shepherds. A punter once mentioned out loud that she bares a likeness to Eva Braun. He was never seen again.

— Adam Hay-Nicholls, journalist and author

The Coach and Horses, Soho

That carpet has seen it all, including I believe much urine.

— Will Hosie, Lifestyle Editor

There's something uniquely British about dressed crab, a dish that is at once smart and splendidly laid back, as happy in the hushed booths of Wiltons as it is in some shabby seaside shack. For this is a thoroughly modern crustacean that, having climbed out of tracksuit and trainers, lowers himself into a hot bath, before slipping into top hat and tails. Don’t, however, be fooled by his elegant attire. For beneath that suave façade lies a hint of full fathom five, of darkness and the debased.

This is, of course, part of its eternal appeal, the essential mix of bosky brown and virginal white, bass versus treble, where thud and grumble meet the choir celestial. This is a dish that not so much requires the dark meat as demands it. It’s also a dish that insists upon the very freshest crab, preferably killed, boiled and picked yourself. Pasteurised meat has no place here.

Ok, so I appreciate that live crabs are not always the most practical of ingredients. I once bought a pair of particularly boisterous browns from a fishmonger in London’s Chinatown. Travelling back home on the Tube, they made a sudden bid for freedom, ripping through their plastic prison and scuttling down the carriage. My fellow travellers were less than amused. If you can’t buy them live, ask your fishmonger for his most freshly boiled beasts. This year, they may be a little more expensive, thanks to a rampaging invasion of octopuses (never octopi).

As coastal waters continue to warm, in they swarm, finding easy feasts in the crab and lobster pots scattered across the seabed. For the cephalopods, it’s one endless ‘all you can eat’ buffet. For the fisherman, however, it’s less than ideal, as they haul in pot after pot filled with depressingly empty shells. I had stopped eating octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher. The eight-armed hero of that documentary seemed so sweet, so human, that it seemed awful to even contemplate throwing him on the plancha. But then pigs are every bit as sentient and intelligent and I still devour them with conscience clear. No one likes a hypocrite. So, in solidarity with our fine fisherman, it’s time to embrace octopus once more.

Back to the crabs and, for maximum gratification, you want to pick them yourself, twisting off the limbs and claws, cracking the carapace in half, digging and gouging into each tiny joint and crevice to extract every last morsel of sweet white meat. A specialised crab pick is ideal, but the handle of a teaspoon will do the job just fine. Use a rolling pin to crack the claws lightly. Brown meat is the easiest to remove, lurking at the top of the shell, simply peeled or spooned away. Once you get into a rhythm, the cares of the world slip away.

I find the whole process not only deeply satisfying, but rather therapeutic, too. Like artichokes and whole prawns, much of the joy lies in the undressing, but do beware the errant shard. Nothing ruins a dressed crab like the jarring, incongruous crunch of cartilage or shell. Sift through the white meat with your fingers, then sift again.

When it comes to the dressing, I err towards the simple. No surprises there. There’s little need for breadcrumbs, nor elaborate, baroque garnishes involving anchovy fillets, capers and olives. Sure, the recipe below incorporates a boiled egg, but that merely gives the brown a little more body. A half lemon and homemade mayonnaise is all you need at the side, together with soft brown bread, lustily buttered, a non-negotiable part of the deal — and, perhaps, a few drops of Tabasco.

For those who can’t face this most civilised of picking processes, you’ll find dressed-crab perfection at Wiltons, J Sheekey and Bentley’s in London, as well as The Company Shed in Colchester, Essex, and The Lobster Shack in North Berwick, East Lothian. Serve with a glass of something dry, white and cold.

River Cottage dressed crab

This comes from The River Cottage Fish Book, written by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the late Nick Fisher, and still one of the great works on all things piscine. ‘This is our favourite way to eat a really fresh crab’, they write, ‘usually one that we’ve caught, cooked and picked ourselves. It can be served up in the main shell of the crab or on a plate.’

Ingredients

• Brown and white meat from 1 medium-large brown crab
• The crab’s main shell, scrubbed under a hot tap and left to dry (optional)
• 1 large hard-boiled egg, peeled and coarsely chopped
• 2tspn mayonnaise
• ½–1 tspn English mustard
• Freshly ground black pepper

To accompany

• Buttered brown bread
• 1 small red onion, very finely chopped
• A few lemon wedges

Method

• Lightly flake the white crabmeat, doing a final check for any slivers of shell, then pile it up in the middle of the carapace shell or on a medium- size serving plate
• Put the soft brown meat in a bowl and combine with the chopped hard-boiled egg, the mayonnaise, some English mustard to taste and a twist or two of black pepper. Make two mounds of the brown-meat mixture on either side of the white meat
• Serve the crab with the brown bread, red onion and lemon wedges
• The idea is to put some white meat on your buttered bread, top with a little of the brown-meat mixture — use it almost like a sauce — then sprinkle the whole with a little chopped onion and a squeeze of lemon juice

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

What was the single most important jewellery event of the past 100 years? For me, there can only be one answer: Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel’s exhibition of about 50 (no one knows the exact number) spectacular diamond jewels, which took place in Paris from November 7–19, 1932.

The event was staged in the richly decorated étage noble of her 18th-century mansion at 29, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

The word ‘staged’ is an appropriate one. Each piece was presented on a fully clothed wax mannequin complete with real hair and eyelashes (or, in some instances, part of a wax mannequin — a be-sleeved wax arm, for example) and placed in glass vitrines. The overall effect bordered on the surreal, especially as the mannequins had realistic facial expressions. Visitors paid 20 francs for entry, and the proceeds were donated to charity.

Chanel’s ‘Exposition de Bijoux de Diamants’ was attended by the great and the good — princes and politicians, artists and actors — photographed by the filmmaker Robert Bresson, featured in the newsreels and covered, often on the front page, by the world’s press. Why the fuss? By the 1930s, Chanel was an international celebrity. What began in 1910 as a millinery establishment had become one of the largest couture houses in Paris.

Chanel had created a style so unique, so timeless, so desirable that it is still in vogue today. She had been paid $1 million dollars to design costumes for only three Hollywood films and her perfume sales alone made her one of the richest women in Europe. A 10-year affair with the 2nd Duke of Westminster, the wealthiest man in England, added to the Chanel magic.

Timing played a part, too. To unveil jewellery with an estimated value of £55 million (in today’s money) during a period of widespread economic hardship — it was the depths of the Depression — was, to say the least, audacious; which brings us to the story behind the exhibition.

The collection was commissioned by the Diamond Corporation of London with the express purpose of reviving demand after the 1929 stock market crash. It loaned the diamonds and paid for all the pieces — many of which involved complex settings as thin as wire — to be made. De Beers stock, by the way, rose 20 points after the exhibition opened. At least two pieces from the show were purchased on the first day. Yet such was the power of the Parisian jewellery guilds that they were able to stop sales on the grounds of unfair competition. What of the jewellery itself?

The majority of pieces followed a celestial theme. Janet Flanner in The New Yorker wrote: ‘Mlle Chanel’s mountings for the jewels are in design dominantly and delicately astronomical. Magnificent lopsided stars for earrings; as a necklace, a superb comet whose nape-encircling tail is all that attaches it to a lady’s throat; bracelets that are flexible rays; crescents for hats and hair; and, as a unique set piece mounted in yellow gold, a splendid sun of yellow diamonds.’

There were also trompel’oeil textile motifs — ribbons, fringes and feathers — and a few with simple geometric patterns. It is widely believed that Chanel’s inspiration came from the orphanage where she spent much of her childhood. This was attached to the medieval Cistercian abbey at Aubazine in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the coat of arms of which incorporates the sun, moon and stars and where stained-glass windows and mosaic floors contain other symbols found in the collection.

The show was surrounded by mystery. Chanel never said why she agreed to hold the show; she was famous for her costume jewellery and for combining real gems with fake ones, for wearing pearls with tweed instead of ballgowns, so the move into high jewellery was out of character, to say the least.

What happened to the pieces when the show closed? Long after Chanel had died, the company spent a small fortune trying to find out and we must assume that the collection was dismantled. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to describe this as a tragedy. Yet, although the originals are denied to us, all is far from lost.

In 1993, Karl Lagerfeld relaunched Chanel Fine Jewellery, and eight pieces from the original Bijoux de Diamants selection were reissued. In the years that followed, further designs were reissued and new pieces, inspired by the originals, were released.

I’ve not had the opportunity to visit the CHANEL jewellery mansion in Paris, but I will confess to being a customer of its London sister. After making an extremely modest purchase — considering the fabulous jewels on display — one of the assistants patiently waited as I breathed all over their display cabinets and then showed me one beautifully decorated salon after another. The interior, based on Chanel’s own private apartment, is almost as breathtaking as the jewellery.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Of all the parties I expected to attend in 2026, I hadn’t anticipated that the most fun would be had from vegetables. ‘Rovi has always been about great produce,’ says chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi of his restaurant in London's Fitzrovia, which hosted the capital’s foremost harvest party last Thursday. ‘It is about vegetables from root to tip, with a menu shaped by our growers and our kitchen garden near Tottenham.’ The shindig, harking back to Athenian tradition, was also an excuse for a hoedown. Moonlighting as disc jockeys for the night were Aimee Phillips, former manager of The Scissor Sisters, and Femi Koleoso, the live-tour drummer for Gorillaz.

As the country gets back to work and diners return to their old watering holes, restaurateurs are finding renewed success in celebrating the ancient food network. ‘We wanted an evening that had growers, cooks and consumers in the same room,’ Ottolenghi says of his party. Despite 2026 proving fatal for many crops — our winter saw record-breaking rain before the summer baked in record-breaking heat — the UK’s best kitchens are refusing to put on the brakes. Joshua Overington, co-founder of the award-winning Mýse near Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, is hosting the restaurant’s inaugural churn supper on October 4. ‘We had no idea, when we decided to do this, how challenging this summer was going to be for farmers,’ he notes.

The churn supper is an old, northerly tradition that was first named as such in the 19th century, perhaps after the jug of cream that would have been passed around the table or for the first churn of butter that would have taken place at the time. ‘Our supper will be for 26 people,’ Overington explains, ‘and to mark the occasion, we have invited chefs from far and wide to shine a light on a different aspect of British farming: meat, dairy, horticulture…’ Each chef will serve a different course.

‘Far too often,’ he continues, ‘kitchens are self-celebratory and overlook the fact that the hardest work is done by its suppliers. Yet without our farmers or growers, restaurants like mine wouldn’t exist.’ These events, then, are an opportunity for customers to engage in a more direct dialogue with the people who harvest the ingredients on their plate. ‘There’s a real desire to feel closer to our food again,’ says Ottolenghi. ‘To know who grew it, where it came from, and understand why it tastes better at certain times of year.

‘A harvest party,’ he concludes, both ‘makes that connection and celebrates it.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

All boys like cars, right? We assume and expect a little boy to like cars from a tiny age. Perhaps it’s a gender thing — blue for a boy, pink for a girl and never the twain shall meet etc. It goes without saying this is an outdated idea, but I’m a man with a little boy and he does, unsurprisingly to some, love cars. I put it down to a simple evolution of interest; he loved playing with a little ball as a baby, balls are round, balls roll, what else rolls? Wheels. What has lots of wheels? Cars. The question I find myself asking is whether that love of cars will graduate from Hot Wheels and Matchbox up to the real thing — will my son become a ‘petrolhead’?

As the current generation’s first cars are invariably brand-new hatchbacks with Apple CarPlay, power steering, electric everything and a 100-year warranty, the days of tinkering with a ‘bit of a banger’ seem to be a thing of the past. I’m not sure the last time I saw a 1990’s Fiesta on the road. Now I’m no wrench monkey myself — I can check the oil, change a tire and refill a radiator — but to a 20-year-old in 2026, I might as well be Gordon Murray. My first car was a second-hand Peugeot 106 with a cheeky little 1.2-litre engine, just the four gears and a driver’s door only I had the knack to open. Oh, and it would spontaneously cut out for a reason that was never fully explained. It was great.

Thankfully there’s still a world out there of grey-haired men in sheds restoring and maintaining old MGs, Series 1 Defenders or their father’s Austin. But what happens when they are no longer with us? Can the CarPlay generation learn to play with cars?

To answer this question, I decided to take three generations of my family to a place that I believe had the best chance of enticing the youngest into the automotive world: The Goodwood Members' Meeting. The generational bridge would hopefully connect the dots in a family of car lovers — my brother and I spent our childhoods ogling supercars with our father at the Motor Show and my son and his cousins have had the benefit of my journalism career introducing them to many a Ferrari, Lamborghini or McLaren.

The Members' Meeting is, as it sounds, reserved for Goodwood Members, it’s an event that started small in 1949 and relaunched as the modern iteration in 2014. What’s important about this event, and why I think it may be useful to experience, is that it favours classic cars. You won’t see the latest Ferrari 296 GTS or a Lamborghini Huracan. I’m not sure you’ll see much past the 1980s and the vast majority tearing themselves around the course are 1930s/40s/50s racers.

And the racers go racing. This isn’t Salon Privé, where the cars are polished so much you can study your retina in a wheel arch — this is an open paddock culture where anyone can walk up and touch a 100-year-old award winner, talk to the owner and watch it head out for a few laps. It's noisy, it's hectic and it's palpably exciting. What that means is that cars, their drivers and their capabilities aren’t put on a pedestal or made to feel otherworldly. That’s important, as it’s too easy for them to feel out of reach and only for the rich and famous. Hopefully the rustic, informal presentation of them and their owners will make the world feel more accessible to newcomers.

When we arrived, we barely made it out of the car park; the culture is that if you have an interesting car, you drive it to the event. And if it's pre-1960, you get to park closer to the entrance. The cars get progressively more interesting as you head towards the entrance — a walk broken up with shouts of ‘oh a Ferrari! Oh, another one! Dad is that a Lotus? What’s this blue one? Papa, isn’t that an Alfa Romeo?’. I had to remind the youngsters that we hadn’t actually entered the event yet — it’s a great aperitif for what’s to come.

And what’s to come is an atmosphere of enthusiasm and openness, a place that doesn’t have a VIP section or corporate hospitality — whether you are The Duke of Richmond or Dave from Richmond, you can wander around looking at cars, talking to like-minded people without judgement or questions about your status. Plenty of the classic-car enthusiasts dress up in their finest tweed and chinos, which gives the event a classy country feel, but it's not a fashion show.

As the very loud and very tangible Goodwood Racetrack is full bloodedly placed at the centre of the event you are never far from the action or the soundtrack. In fact, that noise underscores the whole place, whether you are getting coffees from an old army truck or burgers from The Forge.

There is also a playfulness to the organisation; when you get your ticket, you are assigned a ‘house’ (or team essentially), which harks back to school. Each car racing through the weekend wears the badge of various houses and you can track the progress of your house on various scoreboards and online. It’s such a wonderfully silly idea that (thankfully for my narrative question) speaks to a youthfulness within the event — a scholastic rivalry manifesting in V8s, V12s and the odd V16.

To complete this prep school make-believe there is a huge dining hall with team emblems and flags, long canteen tables and hearty food that evokes Hogwarts as much as Eton. This of course is wonderfully playful for us grownups, but saliently recognisable for the kids — it was this room that made the kids think that all this noise and machinery could also be for them.

After we filled up on burgers from The Forge and beers for the dads, we got stuck into the noise. And what a thing. The £20 I spent on Amazon buying cute little ear defenders for my son is probably the most important money I’ve ever spent, this side of buying our house. There’s no way he would have stood avidly watching DB5s and E-Types ragging it past the pit lane without them. He was mesmerised by the spectacle. And as he is so small he could thread his way through any crowd and still get a great view — luckily the event is well judged in terms of capacity, so it never feels like you’re restricted at all.

Naturally with children there comes a time when you can tell they’ve had enough — classically ours came directly after they had all got themselves an ice cream. With faces plastered with a 99, we started to find our way back to the car.

Although exhausted by the day, they still had time to swing into a very well stocked toy shop and given the location it was of course only selling cars. Hotwheels, Matchbox and everything in between. My son went for a large, rather tatty NASCAR racer which may have been driven by his love of Lightning McQueen. His cousins favoured a more conventional pair of Ferrari 296s. (My brother and I may or may not have picked ourselves Porsche and Range Rover Dakar specials respectively …parents can have fun too). After the financial blood-letting had ended, we exited the event to ease our way back through a sea of great cars as we all digested the day.

I think if I was to distil the wide-eyed, joy-filled look on the face of a 4-year-old, 7-year-old and 9-year-old (not to mention the 41, 43, 76 year olds) it would be liquid passion. The tangible thrill was there, as was the vastness of it all — cars are large, noisy, smelly and colourful, an assault on the senses. But I think the more that kids are engaged on all sensory levels the better — it’s too easy for it all to be through a screen, no offence to Mr McQueen. Sometimes it’s best to get out there and see it for real. Feel it for real.

I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure these kids will be back. And as for the big kids? Well, we’ll keep opening their eyes to the exciting things out there in the world. Some of which have 4 wheels and a V8.

With thanks to: Goodwood. The next Members' Meeting will take place on April 10-11.

'Alsatians and caviare have this in common: one either likes them or does not,' Country Life stated in 1928. Before anything Teutonic had become widely unpalatable, the breed had been known as a German shepherd dog, but 'on examination of the case in the critical spirit aroused by the war, British and French alike agreed that the true home of the dog was Alsace' and some went so far as to trace the breed’s roots to Scotland. Consequently, the breed would for a time be renamed the Alsatian wolf dog.

However, the breed had been developed by German cavalry officer Max von Stephanitz as a herding dog in the 1880s. The first German shepherd dogs came to England about 1911, but, as with so many other imported breeds that have ultimately become popular, they aroused very little public interest.

After soldiers returning from the First World War made the breed popular, impressed by the intelligence and sagacity of the dogs used by the Germans as messengers, guard dogs, and carriers of medical supplies (the Germans had been responsible for producing the first 'mercy dogs', trained to seek out the wounded and comfort the dying).

Rin Tin Tin, an Alsatian who had been rescued from the trenches, became the star of 27 Hollywood films, firing the imagination of millions of people by giving visual evidence of what a dog could be trained to do. Displaying 'intelligence and beauty, trainability and intense devotion,' the dogs were suddenly in great demand.

In 1921, Major C. E. W. Beddoes (who was stationed in Munich at the time) wrote two articles for Country Life championing the 'Alsatian wolf-dog, or, as he is called in Germany, the Schäferhund.' As well as detailing the breed’s 'remarkable'powers of scent, Beddoes would also recall an incident in which his wife was 'spoken to in a very unpleasant manner' and one of his dogs came vigorously to the rescue, “tearing the man’s coat” so his wife could tell him 'exactly what she thought of him in her very best German.'

Back on British soil, Country Life would reflect later that the breed’s sudden rise in popularity was probably 'England’s first experience of a boom in any breed, the dangers of which were not perceived until it was too late.' Poor breeding practices exacerbated undesirable temperament traits and by the end of the 1920s, the breed’s popularity was in sharp decline.

The magazine would reflect in 1928 that 'perhaps the Germans have taught us one thing, or they have talked more about it than we have — that is, the importance of temperament and the desirability of cultivating the intelligence by means of training.'

During the 1940s the breed managed to claw itself back into public esteem, despite being used in Nazi propaganda (Hitler’s own bitch, Blondi, was touted as proof that he was an 'animal lover'). The main factors that salvaged and restored the public image of the German shepherd were twofold: its use as a guide dog for the blind (the world’s and the UK’s first formally trained guide dogs were German shepherds), and secondly, the work the dogs did during the Second World War for the army, the RAF, and the police.

No longer considered 'a descendant of wolves, a dog ready and willing to attack man or beast with or without command, the Alsatian has steadily climbed back by virtue of his beauty, brains, intelligence and integrity,' and in 1977, campaigners succeeded in having their dogs registered under the original breed name as German shepherds once again.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

It felt, until recently, as if things might be over for London Fashion Week. Since Brexit, the consensus among industry titans has been to skip the city and fly straight to Milan in Italy, where audience figures have been growing year on year.

However, a changing of the guard at the British Fashion Council and a breath of Cool Britannia 2.0 means the wafer-thin programme is bulking out once more.

Scottish designer Christopher Kane has arrived at Mulberry to stage the brand’s first runway show in nine years and Alexander McQueen, which has shown in Paris since 2001, is coming home the way football never could.

Perhaps the most significant addition to the line-up is Marks & Spencer, which saw what Calvin Klein was doing in the USA — resuming runway shows after a six-year hiatus — and decided it was time to put affordability on the catwalk. It’s no small feat: fashion shows are expensive, some reaching £10 million in production costs.

As audiences return to analogue (interest in film cameras and physical books is on the up), labels are finding it necessary to swap modernity for old-school tactics.

The 1990s, as so often, provide the blueprint: slip dresses and oversized blazers are among the top trends of the year. Appropriately, one of the cult films of the decade — the 1995 fashion documentary Unzipped, which takes viewers on a behind-the-scenes journey through designer Isaac Mizrahi’s Autumn/Winter 1994 collection — will return to American cinemas this month, sating growing demand among young fashionistas for whom the traditional runway format feels like more of a novelty.

Where a decade ago CHANEL might have launched a rocket during its show at Paris’s Grand Palais, today’s runway efforts are notably more pared back, placing the human at the heart of it all. ‘It transports me,’ singer-songwriter Charli XCX told Bella Freud on the designer’s Fashion Neurosis podcast, ‘to watch Naomi [Campbell] or Shalom [Harlow] stomping along to an epic song.’ The artist paid tribute to the catwalk in the video for SS26, a song from her new album Music, Fashion, Film, in which she struts down a runway before a fashion-week who’s who.

For all the industry’s flirtations with the cutting-edge, we seem more than ever in thrall to the traditions that first made it big.

Imagine having so much faith in the postal system that you’d be willing to trust it with a centuries-old, 45-carat diamond. It’s impossible to fathom now — I’m still waiting for a thank you letter I sent in February to arrive at its intended destination — but that’s exactly what Harry Winston did with the Hope Diamond in 1958.

The dark greyish-blue gemstone — which inspired the fictional Heart of the Ocean necklace in the 1997 film Titanic — was sent wrapped in plain brown paper from Winston’s New York office to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, where it remains to this day. It is estimated to be worth between $200-350 million.

The jeweller acquired the probably now priceless sparkler in 1949 from the estate of the mining heiress and socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean (1886-1947), but it was far from his most legendary purchase. The Jonker Diamond (726 carats), the Vargas Diamond (also 726 carats; Winston chased the stone across three continents in order to get his mitts on it), the Star of Independence (75.52 carats) and the Taylor-Burton Diamond (a meagre 69.42 carats, but purchased in 1969 by actor Richard Burton for his wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor) all passed through his hands. So prodigious was Winston’s collecting that it is estimated he handled one-third of the world’s most famous gemstones during his career, earning him the moniker ‘King of Diamonds’. In a 1952 LIFE feature, it was claimed that Winston’s collection of historic jewels was second in size only to the Royal Family’s.

Winston (né Weinstein) was born in 1896 in New York to Ukrainian-Jewish parents who ran a modest jewellery shop on the city’s Upper West Side. He was a natural gemmologist with terrific taste. When he was not yet a teenager, he spotted a two-carat emerald in a pawnshop, bought it for 20¢ and sold it, two days later, for $800 — about $30,000 in today’s money.

The world leader in the diamond trade died of a heart attack in 1978, but his eponymous brand remains synonymous with the acquisition of exceptional stones. ‘There was a stone that came to auction, five years ago, called the Pink Legacy,’ says Sam Stirrat, a bespoke jewellery designer specialising in engagement rings and fine jewellery, and the founder of Blackacre, who went to admire it while it was briefly on display. ‘It was an 18-carat, Fancy Vivid pink diamond and it sold for a world-record price [$50 million or $2.6m per carat].’

The stone was sold by Christie’s, which remarked at the time that Fancy Vivid pink diamonds of more than 10 carats are virtually unheard of, and that in 250 years of their auction history, only four such stones have ever appeared for sale. ‘I spoke to the people at the auction house [Christie’s],’ continued Stirrat, ‘and they didn’t expect it to be bought by a jewellery house.’ But bought by a jewellery house it was — in a minor bidding war that lasted for only five, fast-paced minutes — and there will be no prizes for guessing which one.

Unsurprisingly, demand for pieces produced during Winston’s lifetime remains high and when they come up for sale they tend to disappear fast. This then is your public service announcement to sharpen your elbows because Hancocks London is selling a pair of Harry Winston diamond ‘day-to-night’ chandelier earrings that date to the 1950s. Set with approximately 28 carats of the lustrous stones, the studs feature a scrolling loop of baguette-cut diamonds next to a cluster of marquise-cut ones at the top, off of which drops an articulated cascade of more baguette-cut diamonds. This cascade can be detached.

The earrings belonged to Hazel Brooks, the second wife of Cedric Gibbons, the man who designed the Academy Award statuette. An 11-time winner of the very award he created, for art direction, Gibbons’ name appears in the credits of nearly 1,500 films. He had ‘an eye trained on design at the highest level,’ says Amy Burton, creative director of Hancocks. ‘He would have known exactly what he was looking at in a pair of Winston earrings this exceptional.’

The vintage diamond and platinum chandelier earrings are POA. Call 020-7493 8904 or visit the Hancocks London website for more information.

Do supercars sparkle in the rain? The answer, somewhat sadly, is no not really. But they still stand out, especially when presented on the lawns of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. For the aspiring aesthete, you would struggle to find a trinity quite as holy as the Vanbrugh designed palace, the Capability Brown gardens and some of the finest cars ever made. We are, of course, at Salon Privé.

Regardless of the rain or the shine (and on Wednesday, it was very much rain), this was still the place to be last week, and the lineup of four-wheel wonders was as sublime as ever. Here are five takeaways from the show.

Form is temporary, class is permanent

So the old saying goes, and the McLaren F1 certainly has the latter. Some 34 years after it first rolled out the doors of the factory in Surrey, the F1 still turns heads wherever it goes, and Terry Bramall’s example from 1995 was a worthy first winner of the new joint top prize, the Concours d’Excellence.

Restored by Lanzante to its original factory specifications, Bramall’s silver F1 held pride of place in front of Blenheim and was never without a crowd of fans desperate to have a look inside the record-setting three-seater hypercar.

One thing that ever gets old about the F1 is how modern it looks. Even today, it looks profoundly more aerodynamic and futuristic than its modern counterparts. As Salon Privé chair Andrew Bagley said: ‘In an exceptional field, this particular F1 stood out as a superb example of a car that fundamentally changed our understanding of what a road-going supercar could be.’

The other top-prize winner was Amir Ravan and his Lamborghini Miura P400 S, which took home the esteemed Best of Show Concours d’Elégance. The first true supercar, this was a glorious example in gun-metal grey.

‘For me, the Miura represents a genuine turning point in automotive history,’ Ravan said. ‘The engineering, the proportions and Gandini’s extraordinary design came together to create something that still feels remarkably special nearly 60 years later.’

Either the F1 or the Miura will carry the flame for Salon Privé at the Peninsula Classics Best of the Best in January 2027, against winners of other concours such as Villa d”Este, Cavallino Classic and The Quail.

Big does indeed mean beautiful

The first thing you notice about the 1935 Duesenberg SJ Gurney Nutting Speedster is its sensational black and orange colourwork, which pairs beautifully with its whitewall tires. The next thing you notice is the size. In true American fashion, she is larger than life.

Every Duesenberg is special, but this one is certainly more special than others. A one-off commission for Maharajah Holkar of Indore, it is the only chassis bodied by the celebrated coachbuilder Gurney Nutting. It was a winner of the Peninsula Classics Best of the Best in 2023, continuing a rich tradition of picking up top prizes, after it was awarded a 99.5-point score at the Eastern Grand Classic in 1963.

Highlights among the whitewall tires, the covered wheel arches and sensational bodywork are the red and blue lights mounted on the front wings to indicate whether it was the Maharajah or his wife travelling in the car. In a surprise to absolutely no-one, the car also won this year’s prize for Most Exceptional Coachwork.

Polestar position

I’ve long been a fan of Polestar and their delightful mix of speed and practicality. Salon Privé was the first time I laid eyes on the new 5, their extra-sporty Grand Tourer, and I was suitably impressed. It’s muscular in all the right places, sits on a gigantic pair of wheels and features a full four-door layout. It’s aggressive but chic, everything a proper GT should be. I’m looking forward to seeing a few on the road sooner rather than later.

Silent style for the Lady Mayor

One of the great joys of Salon Privé is that there’s always a surprise lurking around the corner. You expect the McLarens and the Lamborghinis and the Ferraris, but who could possibly expect to see an electric 1973 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI created for Alderwoman Dame Susan Langley DBE — the 697th Lady Mayor of the City of London.

And yet, that is exactly what Electrogenic turned up with. The Rolls is the official limousine of the City of London Corporation, and its electrification is part of the Corporation’s drive to achieve net-zero emissions from its own operations by 2027. It comes with, among other things, a 120kW electric motor, 310Nm of torque and a 62kWh battery pack, as well as a dedicated ‘ceremonial’ driving mode for ‘slow-and-stately progress’. Quite right too.

‘We were honoured to be asked to electrify this significant motor car, and to play a part in the City of London Corporation’s journey to net zero,’ said Electrogenic CEO Steve Drummond. ‘When it was launched in the late 1960s, the Rolls-Royce VI was the most refined and dignified limousine on the road. Now, thanks to electrification, its core character has been enhanced further: it is whisper quiet, effortless to drive with swift performance, and emits zero tailpipe emissions.’

Bristol is back

It’s not easy to make a lot of noise at a show like this, but the return of Bristol Cars made a racket in more ways than one. Metaphorically, the unveiling of a newly completed Fighter was quite something, and was more than a reasonable birthday present for the company’s 80th anniversary. Physically, the machine is powered by an 8.0-litre V10 engine from a Dodge Viper, produces up to 600bhp and a claimed top speed of 210mph. Noisy stuff indeed.

The Fighter was originally conceived in the early 2000s and was the firm’s final production model before manufacturing ended in 2011. The chassis on display at Salon Privé is one of five that were preserved and are now confirmed for a limited continuation programme. Each car will be hand built in the UK, available in either left or right-hand drive, and if you want to know how much it costs, you can’t.

‘Bringing Bristol Cars back is about far more than reviving a name; it is about bringing back the spirit of a marque that has always stood apart,’ Paul King, director of Bristol Cars, said. ‘Bristol has a remarkable story, from its roots in aviation and engineering to the extraordinary and exclusive cars it crafted. We want to honour that heritage while giving Bristol a future that is every bit as distinctive. To bring Bristol back to making cars in Britain, and with Richard Hackett returning to the company, we have brought together an exceptional combination of heritage, knowledge, engineering and craftsmanship. This is the beginning of Bristol’s return, and there is much more to come.’

We very much look forward to seeing it.

The English-American actor Cary Grant was a Hollywood star with a generous streak: not only did he give his own gold watch to the woman who cared for his mother in her old age, but he also covered her nursing home fees. The family of this woman, Maggie Leach, have now sold the storied timepiece.

The watch went under the hammer on September 10, at Clevedon Salerooms, as part of the auction house’s Autumn Specialist Sale of Antiques and Collectables. It was sold for £6,800, more than three times its upper estimate of £2,000, after competitive bidding between two telephone bidders and two online, including one from the United States.

Born in Bristol, Grant rose to fame in classics such as North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief.

‘It’s not often a piece comes to us with a story quite this personal,’ says Henry Michallat, an auctioneer at Clevedon Salerooms. ‘This watch is a lovely reminder that even one of Hollywood's biggest names never forgot where, and who, they came from.’

The watch in question is an 18-carat gold, Bueche Girod ladies bracelet-style treasure, likely made in the 1970s. It has Roman numerals on its face and a lapis lazuli crown.

Charity seems to be the flavour of the month. On September 28, four unique, gem-set Rolex Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona watches are heading to auction to raise money for the brand’s Perpetual Planet Initiative.

The watches come in four colourways, each one inspired by a different season, and the proceeds will go towards the Federer Foundations and Re:Wild.

The former was founded by Roger Federer and champions early learning for children in southern Africa and Switzerland; the latter, founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, protects and restores wild eco-systems. The tennis player and the actor are longtime Rolex testimonies.

If the ‘Fab Four’ aren't your speed, the first proper wristwatch of Zinedine Zidane, the French football manager and former player, is coming up for sale in November. His Cartier Pasha will be offered in Christie’s Rare Watches auction and proceeds will benefit ELA International — of which he has been a patron for more than 25 years.

The charity is a non-profit organisation that coordinates research and funding to fight leukodystrophies (rare genetic diseases of the central nervous system). Zidane’s watch features a stainless steel bracelet and sapphire cabochon-set pushers.

‘This Cartier Pasha was the first watch I bought for myself with my first salary when I was playing in Bordeaux,’ says Zidane. ‘I purchased it nearly 35 years ago and it has remained with me ever since… I hope it will also hold special meaning for the person who acquires it.’

In recent years, ‘Ottolenghi’ has become a byword, used almost exclusively by middle-class dinner party hosts, for ‘I am better than you’. It stands for quality, flavour and, above all, almost unpalatable levels of smugness. No longer do people in the UK prepare ‘Middle Eastern food’, they now prepare ‘Ottolenghi’ food.

‘Drama in the mouth’ is the cooking philosophy of the restaurateur and author. But who is the man behind the moniker? The one who is responsible, surely, for the largest uptick in supermarket sales of tahini and pomegranate molasses this country has ever seen.

He is a flamboyant dresser, for starters. When I meet Yotam (so famous is his last name, that I have momentarily forgotten he will even have a first name) the 57-year-old is beaming, wearing a white shirt patterned with pink turtles. We are here to talk about his new cookbook, Ottolenghi Simple Too, which he assures me that even I, a chronic fish-fingers-in-the-airfryer type of cook, will be able to make something from. The recipes look delicious.

‘This is a book that’s been percolating in the back of my mind since the first Simple, which was published in 2008,’ the Israeli-born British chef and restaurateur says. ‘I am always asking myself: how do I make the food super accessible for a busy world and people who are just looking to find a way into the kitchen that is not too demanding?’

Along with his colleague and co-author Verena Lochmuller, he has collected recipes ‘that are really easy and simple’. ‘It all came together into something that I’m so proud of, because I think it’s really tempting, but also very achievable,’ he says.

This emphasis on easy and simple recipes may be a product of Yotam becoming a father. He has two boys, aged 11 and 13, who he shares with his ex-husband (the pair divorced last Christmas). ‘I cook for my kids very often and for them I know I need to get dinner on the table quite quickly,’ he says. Has being the children of Ottolenghi gifted them a sophisticated palette at all? ‘Unfortunately the answer is no. They love their chicken nuggets,’ he says.

It’s hard to imagine Yotam doing any other job, particularly one without lashings of za’atar, but he has an extremely varied CV. First a stint in the Israel Defence Force, then a short period working for newspapers, before he eventually came to London to study French pastry cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. It’s certainly not the classic chef pipeline.

‘I was planning on becoming an academic, because that is my background,’ he recalls. Yotam’s father was a Chemistry professor and his mother a high school principal. ‘I was thinking that this was going to be my world,’ he says, but after a degree and a masters, he decided the world of academia was too insular for him. ‘I wanted to speak a language that everyone understands. Food is that — whether a person likes cooking or they don’t, they still eat.’

When he hosts, he does still feel the pressure. ‘To put a meal on the table for a group of people is not easy… I still get stressed because I want it to be the best it can, but I also know that the expectations are quite high.’ Without those expectations, however, he thinks ‘you kind of lose your touch.’ Yotam definitely hasn't lost his.

Your aesthetic hero

One of my closest friends, Ivo Bisignano, was a Sicilian designer. He passed away a few years ago, and we worked together on many projects. He really understood food, and I loved how he dressed. He was like a style guru for me, in the sense that anything he touched, he did so well. He was definitely my inspiration in many ways.

An exhibition that has really impressed me

I saw a Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Bilbao, Spain, more than a decade ago. She had her famous spiders. It just stayed with me as something so powerful and intense. How they occupy a space in the room is in a very science fiction way.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some pink birkenstocks for the summer.

A possession you would never sell

I have a tiny statue that I have from childhood, which is one of these office toys of a man balancing. You cannot, whatever you do, push him off centre. I inherited it from my dad.

Your favourite painting

Recently, because the death of David Hockney reminded me, I'd say I really love his works from California. The collages of bits of torn paper he made of the roads and deserts, I found those very impactful. I was exposed to them at a young age and they really shape, somehow, this distorted view of reality which is familiar and unfamiliar. I found them very powerful and I just love them. They really take you somewhere but they also challenge you.

A book you found inspiring

I just read Whistler, by Ann Patchett. I found it very inspiring and very readable, and I love her in general.

The music that you work to

Yesterday I was listening to a lot of music while I was cooking. Do you know Christine and the Queens? I always listen to their music. I don't understand French, but I find it beautiful to listen to.

The last podcast you listened to

I listen to The Rest is History quite religiously.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Jeff Goldblum.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A good knife, olive oil and a bowl of lemons.

The thing that gets you up on the morning

I get really excited about starting my day. I can’t wait to come to work, because I love my job so much. I'm not just saying it, I really do feel very excited to come to work.

The items you collect

If I do collect anything then it would be ceramic bowls. They’ve taken over my kitchen.

A hotel to could go back and back to

We opened a restaurant in Geneva a few years ago in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. I go there and I don’t pay and get great food. I love that hotel, although I realise it might not be affordable to everyone.

The best present you’ve ever received

Recently someone came back from Paris and bought me some chocolates from my favourite chocolate shop. It’s called Plaq. It’s a very bougie little chocolate shop. They do very exotic flavours and they taste so good. I highly recommend.

The most memorable meal you've ever eaten

I went to Mallorca a few years ago and went to a restaurant called Sa Foradada. It does paella and the view is incredible. It sits on a cliff overlooking a cove. You can only get there by boat or if you walk down a hill for an hour. It's just the most incredible location.

'Ottolenghi Simple Too' by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller (Ebury Press, £30) is out now. All photography by Jonathan Lovekin.

My father was never too interested in cars, but he has always liked things. Contraptions fascinate him, whether they are aircraft from the Second World War, or lawn mowers, or CD players. If it spins, or vibrates, or moves, or takes an input and produces an output, he will stare at it with a watchful gaze, processing the motions of its mechanics, not always particularly interested in how it works, but seemingly overwhelmed with gratitude that it does.

My father is 79 years old. He is retired and lives in the countryside, while I am not retired and live in London. Time spent with him is rare and will get rarer, because that is what happens when people get older. What it also means is that he has seen a great many things; the Moon Landings, the assassination of JFK, the Falklands War, the trial of O. J. Simpson, and so on. What he has not seen, and was almost certainly not even aware of, is a Bugatti Veyron.

As we prowled the tiered parterre garden behind Heveningham Hall in Suffolk, weaving in and out of various Ferraris, Porsches, Bentleys and Astons Martin, I had the pleasure of being his tour guide. We stopped by the new Ferrari F80, which was described as ‘looking a bit like something from Miami Vice’. I explained how the Cosworth V12 in the Gordon Murray T.50 is one of the fastest and highest revving road-car engines ever made. I tried, and likely failed, to explain the difference between AC and Shelby Cobras.

We compared the elegance of both the original Mercedes 300 SL ‘Gullwing’ and its more modern interpretation, the SLS. I droned on about how a Ferrari F40 was the last car that Enzo Ferrari had ever signed off on, or how a Porsche 911 with lots of modifications and a big wing at the back wasn’t actually a Porsche at all, but something called a Singer DLS Turbo and how it cost many millions of pounds. I pointed at a Peugeot Type 15 Double Phaeton from 1898 and asked my father if that was the car he grew up in, because we like to have a laugh every now and then.

All of these things were interesting to me, but what was fascinating to him was the Veyron. I explained that it was the first production road car to produce 1,000bhp, and it was powered by two V8 engines welded together to create something called a W16. I told him that the indicator stalks were made of magnesium. He nodded and his eyes were wide. ‘And how fast can it go?’, he asked. ‘About 250mph,’ I replied. ‘Wow’. And then we moved on to the next thing.

Heveningham Hall is one of Suffolk’s finest buildings, and as much as it is the work of Sir Robert Taylor and James Wyatt, it is mostly the work of Jon Hunt. He purchased the Grade I-listed house in 1994 and has since spent millions on restoring and renovating the building. He also returned the gardens and grounds of some 500 acres to original plans laid out by Capability Brown. As ‘large country piles’ go, it is difficult to think of one in better condition than Heveningham, and it is also why it is such an apt landscape for this particular concours. The themes of restoration, renovation and elegance are consistent, from the front bonnet of Nick Mason’s Ferrari 250GTO to the Grade I-listed orangery. It is worth having nice things and there is value beyond money in looking after them.

A ‘Concours d’Élégance’ is a zoo, and the exhibits are made out of metal and meat. I have been to plenty and they roughly follow a similar pattern, which is that various millionaires and billionaires show off their prizes of great value and provenance and then have a lovely party at the end to congratulate themselves. At most, there is an invisible barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but that is also part of the allure. Like a zoo, or museum, these are things that we do not expect to see, but take pleasure on the rare occasions that we do. The other difference is that when you go to look at a nice painting in the National Gallery, you wouldn’t expect to find its owner standing next to it, enjoying a nice glass of Champagne. Like Halloween, a concours is when that invisible line between us and them is at its most transient, and at Heveningham it is very transient indeed.

Much of the great and the good of Suffolk are here this weekend, as the show runs concurrently with the Heveningham Hall Country Fair. While the restrained magnificence of the car collecting world hides behind the main house, out front, JCBs dance and steam engines roar and whistle, while young children with faces painted like tigers bury their faces in spun sugar.

Conservation and restoration is more than just looking after old fancy buildings and old fancy cars. In this period of nationwide malaise, where it feels that so much isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, it’s also about preserving, restoring and conserving a sense of community. Not only does the Heveningham Concours and Country Fair give the locals something to do, but it also raises money for various local charities.

Further afield, the nearby Wilderness Reserve is also under the auspices of Hunt, who aims to conserve and re-wild the 4,500-acre Sibton Park estate, underwriting the efforts by providing high-end luxury guesthouses where sheep will wander in through open doors and the windows vibrate with birdsong. It sits in stark contrast to the formal lawns and pastures of Hunt’s home; an ecological yin to the man-made yang of Heveningham.

The concours event is not large and it is not long before my father is tired and in need of a glass of Pimm’s. We find a space to sit overlooking Horsepower Hill, where various drivers compete to reach the highest top speed along one of the private roads that webs across the Capability Brown parkland. The winner this year is a Porsche Taycan Turbo GT Weissach, which rips up to 127mph. A disgruntled spectator complains that an electric car is ‘cheating’ and I am sure plenty in attendance are inclined to agree with him.

Electric Porsches aside, the grounds resonate with the sound of petrol and pistons, as everything from an Aston Martin Valkyrie to modified Ford Fiestas fresh from a McDonald’s carpark races up the hill in a cloud of tire smoke. Overhead, a P-51 Mustang, the ‘Cadillac of the Sky’, swirls, dipping its wings at the assembled spectators below.

I ask my father what his favourite car of the day has been. Was it the Best-in-Show winner Bentley Blower No. 1, from 1929? Nick Mason’s Ferrari 250GTO, one of the world’s most iconic cars? A Jaguar XK120 Roadster perhaps. But his mind returned to the Bugatti Veyron. He wasn’t particularly interested in the price, the provenance, or how it worked. It just looked quite cool. It was a contraption, a machine with a purpose, that spins and vibrates and drives very quickly, but could also play his Bob Marley CD. It didn’t win a prize, and it wasn’t the most exotic car there, but that wasn’t the point. It was something he’d never seen before, which at his age, is a gift that is difficult to give.

My father was never too interested in cars, but I always have been. I remember when the Veyron first appeared, as whispers, then in a triumphant roar, in 2005. The idea of a road car having 1,000bhp was beyond exciting to a 12-year-old, who would spend his Sunday evenings watching Top Gear while his parents played bridge downstairs. It was one of many posters on my walls, and I have never got bored of seeing a Veyron in the flesh.

And so what was just another car show became something more special. A moment where my father finally understood why it was that I cared so much. As we paced up and down the immaculately presented tiers, and I pointed and explained the things that made each car special, I could see a genuine interest in his eyes and a sense of wonder. I never cared that he didn’t care about cars, but for one afternoon, we were on the same page. A special moment, in a special setting, surrounded by special things.

Heveningham Concours and the Heveningham Hall Country Fair will take place on June 26-27, 2027.

Pity the dogs of the Middle Ages, for their collars could be distinctly uncomfortable. Although some hunting images show hounds wearing leather bands, in others, says Ciara Farrell of the Royal Kennel Club (RKC), they sported formidable, broad, iron collars fitted with spikes, which were intended to protect their necks from wolves and bears and would later be echoed in the models with sharp protruding teeth at the top and bottom rim used for animal baiting.

Rather more stylish, although probably not terribly comfortable either, was the pearl-encrusted collar, complete with coat of arms, that was recorded in the inventory of Philip II of Spain in 1558. Before making his way to the neck of Spain’s royal pooches, it had belonged to the Duke of Burgundy.

The oldest specimen in the RKC collection dates from 1692: made of brass, it belonged to a dog of Somerset merchant George Balch, who would later become MP for Bridgwater. ‘We don’t know the breed of dog that wore the collar, but its value to its owner is clearly signified by the manufacture and wearing of this item,’ says Farrell.

Brass collars, bearing the dog’s name and the owner’s address, became increasingly popular over time: the band was usually adjustable and featured rolled edges to avoid chafing; some models were even articulated. Auctioneer Cheffins is offering two dating from the 18th century at the Fine Sale on September 16: both belonged to the dogs of a William Turbutt Esq of Ogston, Derbyshire and one is articulated.

By the 19th century, brass collars had become so commonplace that Henry Mayhew, in his book London Labour and the London Poor, recorded street traders selling them in the city: prices, explains Farrell, ranged from sixpence for small ones to three shillings for larger examples, with matching padlocks available.

Much rarer, but also popular for pugs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were medal collars, such as the one now preserved at the RKC. It was worn by Ch Little Geisha, the dog of a Mrs Benson, who Farrell describes as ‘a well-known pug fancier of the time.

The silver medals all date from 1900–02 and were won at shows as far apart as London and Liverpool, with an Edward VII coronation medal in the centre’.

The RKC also has the carte de visite of Ch Little Geisha: it shows her wearing her collar, with Benson sporting an equally eye-catching hat.

Cartier

Founded in Paris in 1847, 50 years before the inception of Country Life, Cartier grew from a small jewellery workshop into one of the world’s most celebrated maisons. Under the direction of Louis, Pierre and Jacques Cartier, the family expanded into London and New York, winning royal patronage and an international clientele. Queen Alexandra, Maud Alice, Lady Cunard, Victoria Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville, Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor and Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester were notable British-based clients.

Cartier’s jewels are synonymous with the great styles of the 20th century, from the garland style of the Belle Époque to the geometric exuberance of Art Deco. The house pioneered combinations of platinum and diamonds, while its fascination with India, the East and exotic materials produced some of its most distinctive creations.

Boucheron

Frédéric Boucheron opened his atelier on the Place Vendôme in 1893, becoming the first major jeweller to establish himself there. The house embraced the naturalism of Art Nouveau before moving towards Art Deco; all the while, its designers experimented with unusual materials and sculptural forms.

Boucheron’s celebrated clients included royalty, Maharajas and society figures, notably the Maharaja of Patiala. In August 1928, he arrived at Boucheron’s Paris premises carrying six iron safes filled with his own gemstones: more than 7,500 diamonds and 1,400 emeralds, as well as rubies and pearls. He commissioned Louis Boucheron to turn them into 149 pieces of jewellery, including emerald-and-diamond collars, multi-strand pearl necklaces, belts, earrings, sarpeches (jewelled turban ornaments) and bazubands (armlets).

Kutchinsky

Hirsch Kutchinsky fled Poland because of persecution and founded his jewellery house in 1893, in London’s East End — drawing on his family’s experience as jewellers to the court of Ludwig of Bavaria.

Under Hirsch’s grandson Joseph, Kutchinsky flourished after the Second World War, moving to Knightsbridge in 1958. Large-scale jewels in textured gold, diamonds and vivid stones such as turquoise, coral, lapis lazuli and tiger’s eye became its signature. The business was sold to Moussaieff in 1991.

Tiffany and Co.

Tiffany’s & Co. is arguably the world’s best-known jewellery brand. It was founded in New York in 1837 and by 1886 had perfected and introduced its six-prong Tiffany Setting, a single, brilliant-cut diamond elevated above the band by six slender prongs — better allowing it to capture and refract light.

Its gemmologists introduced Americans to rare stones including kunzite and morganite. In the 20th century, Jean Schlumberger introduced fantastical, nature-inspired jewels; Elsa Peretti revolutionised everyday jewellery with sculptural silver and fluid forms; and Paloma Picasso introduced bold colour and graphic motifs. Together, they established Tiffany as a byword for American jewellery.

Mappin & Webb

Founded in Sheffield in 1775, Mappin & Webb evolved from a silversmith into one of Britain’s leading jewellery houses, opening its first London showroom in 1849. Its jewellery became closely associated with royalty after Queen Victoria granted the firm a Royal Warrant in 1897, followed by commissions from royal households around the world.

The house produced elaborate diamond and gemstone jewels, embracing the changing fashions of the late Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco periods. Its commissions included striking jewels for the Siamese royal family in the early 20th century.

Garrard

Garrard started life as a goldsmith serving aristocratic patrons. In 1843, it was appointed the first official Crown Jeweller by Queen Victoria and subsequently created generations of royal jewels, from Queen Mary’s tiaras to Diana, Princess of Wales’s sapphire and diamond engagement ring.

The house is famed for its love of cluster settings (a design technique where multiple small gemstones are set tightly together to create the visual effect of one large, brilliant centrepiece or an ornate pattern), utilising it to create treasures such as a sapphire-and-diamond brooch, given to Queen Victorian as a wedding present by Prince Albert.

CHANEL

Gabrielle Chanel dipped her toe into the fine jewellery world in 1932 with Bijoux de Diamants, an audacious collection of more than 45 pieces. Its celestial motifs — comets, stars, moons and suns, alongside ribbons, feathers and fringes — remain central to CHANEL’S haute joaillerie vocabulary.

Chanel famously applied the principles behind her fashion designs to her jewellery, rejecting rigid clasps and favouring transformable pieces that could be worn in different ways.

CHANEL’s first dedicated fine-jewellery boutique in London opened in April 1997, on New Bond Street. Contemporary reporting in The Independent describes it as the first European CHANEL jewellery store outside Paris.

The first picture that appears on the Wikipedia article for 'Breakfast' is ‘a typical American breakfast, composed of a waffle, fruits, juice and scrambled eggs’. The meal in front of me at Simpson’s In The Strand looks rather different. Styled on the menu with a cartoon of a Devil’s head, it is called The Ten Deadly Sins. For the princely sum of £28.75, one is served the following: eggs any style, Cumberland sausage, streaky bacon, black pudding, lamb chop, devilled kidneys, bubble and squeak, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and fried bread. As my colleague James Fisher put it: ‘Ah yes: you ordered the gout express.’

Breakfast, we are often told, is the most important meal of the day. The catchphrase was first cooked up by Lenna Cooper in Good Health magazine and later lionised by Dr Kellogg of Kellogg’s Cereal. It is catchy, but it’s also nonsense: nutritionists are quick to call the aphorism a mere marketing tool and Prof Tim Spector, founder of the health app ZOE, has been vocal about the lack of clinical evidence suggesting that breakfast is more important than lunch. The Ten Deadly Sins would suggest that it isn’t especially virtuous. Why, therefore, am I here?

I am putting to test a theory that breakfast meetings are the best way to start one’s day. A press release recently informed me these were making a comeback in the capital and, although Londoners’ overall excursions to the restaurant have decreased in the past few years, breakfast outings have held steady. In a few lucky spots, they’ve even multiplied. Advocates of the breakfast meeting believe it offers something the lunch-hour talk cannot: a clear head, unencumbered by the tasks that pile onto one’s desk the moment one reaches the office and a feeling of carpe diem.

‘Breakfast meetings are chic,’ says Ed McGovern, a theatre producer. ‘You achieve something before the rest of the world gets going.’ It also encourages participants to have an early night and get their inbox down to zero so that the influx of messages that lands during breakfast does not end up tipping an already heinous number over the edge. What of the other draws? ‘It’s a smart way to take out someone for a meeting who you wouldn’t necessarily want to spend more than one hour with,’ says a source. McGovern confirms that breakfast meetings ‘typically last no longer than 45 minutes’.

You might think that, sooner or later, people would cotton on to the fact that some are using breakfast meetings as an avoidance strategy — a polite way of telling someone that they are second rate. ‘This is one of the reasons why I hate breakfast meetings,’ Fisher says — and he’s not the only one. ‘The other day, a contact from the motoring world asked me to a breakfast meeting and I suggested, instead, that we have a drink after work. Not only did he agree to it: he seemed relieved.’ Why suggest the breakfast meeting in the first place? ‘It’s a safer bet,’ Mr Fisher admits. ‘It is seen as unintrusive, inoffensive and risk free; the right choice, professionally.’

As someone who is categorically not a morning person and for whom the first two hours of the day have long been held sacred, a breakfast meeting seems inherently more intrusive than a pint after the working day. In truth, I have been a refusenik for close to 10 years, my mornings consisting of a glass of water and a coffee ever since I discovered the joy of going out and lying in at university. With so many now singing breakfast’s praise, however, I reasoned it would be professionally negligent not to try it out for myself.

Thus, I resolved to take a different breakfast meeting every day for an entire working week, inviting several experts to join me in my quest — with all of whom I would happily spend more than one hour. I prioritised those I knew would keep me most entertained at a time when I am usually still half asleep. Finally, I laid down some ground rules. One: thou shalt not order yoghurt, granola or avocado on toast, but try the star meal on the menu each time. Two: thou shalt choose a spectrum of establishments to study the range of early punters and how they interact with one another. (Is their heart truly in it?) Three: Martino’s, SW1, being close to thy house and among the less gouty options, shall bookend thy week of breakfasts in the hope of not developing scurvy. Four: thou shalt skip lunch wherever possible and exercise more than usual.

In between my trips to Martino’s, I decided to pay a visit to Simpson’s, WC2 — the grande dame of Zone 1 — then Claridge’s, W1, and, finally, the Regency Café, SW1. ‘I love it here,’ says Hannah Crosbie, The Observer’s wine critic, whom I take along to the latter. ‘But, you know Will, I don’t normally eat breakfast.’ Why? ‘Something about eating puts me in an inherently relaxed mood,’ my companion explains. ‘It signals to my body that I am now not working; that I need to rest; in short, that I am off.’

Crosbie is far from the only one to admit, once seated, that the most important meal of the day isn’t their usual cup of tea. ‘I so rarely do it, either,’ says Adam Hyman, founder of Code Hospitality, as we tuck into a pre-Ten Deadly Sins honeycomb crumpet at Simpson’s on Tuesday. The commonly held view seems to be that breakfast, on its own, is a bit of a waste of time, but incorporating a meeting into it gives the first meal a purpose.

The Regency Café hums with life when Crosbie and I arrive just after 9am. It is stocked to the brim with tourists, tradesmen and a few locals from the Grosvenor estate. ‘Please order at the counter — and wait for your number to be called’ reads a blackboard hooked above the menus. I opt for the most popular order: the set breakfast deal, consisting of a fried egg, two rashers of bacon and a sausage served with either beans or tomatoes; tea or coffee; and toast or bread (£9.99). Crosbie orders fluffy scrambled egg whites with mushrooms, bacon and a Cumberland. Can I learn to love this? It’s 30˚C outside: hardly breakfast-friendly weather.

The atmosphere inside is warm and convivial: a good spot for a natter, although not entirely conducive to the breakfast meeting’s more habitual trappings. For one thing, you have to interrupt your conversation to pick up your order when ready. It doesn’t prevent Crosbie and I from talking shop. A professional woman about town, she tells me about the book deal she’s just scored with 4th Estate: a collection of pieces and short stories capturing a moment in the culinary zeitgeist that she is too humble to admit she had a heavy hand in creating. I make sure to write down all her tips.

At the other end of the spectrum is The Foyer at Claridge’s: somewhere that not only means business (Swedish former footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović is a few tables down from us with someone who appears to be his accountant), but where the acoustics are designed for you to hear only the person opposite you. This, naturally, means people are desperate to eavesdrop. My guest, the menswear journalist Nick Carvell, orders an omelette as I tuck into an Arnold Bennett: a hotel menu favourite, alongside the Full English. It is creamy and delicious: Scottish haddock poached in milk, topped with a mustardy béchamel sauce and copious amounts of melted cheese (£32). An iced Americano accompanies this beatific monstrosity.

Carvell has just returned from a holiday in Sweden, coincidentally, where his husband was running a marathon, for which a decent breakfast is definitely necessary. ‘I am learning Swedish on Duo Lingo,’ he tells me. ‘It teaches you entirely useless phrases, such as jag älskar pengar.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I love money.’ We laugh and look around: everyone here loves money. The diners communicate in a manner I have only ever seen in five-star hotels and is best summed up by that time-worn phrase: ‘A withering look speaks 1,000 words.’

Claridge’s remains London’s most celebrated hotel for a reason. The room is a mix of both guests and wanderers who planned their breakfast here weeks ahead as if part of a pilgrimage. For Peter Rosengard, a life-insurance salesman after whom a dish is named on the menu — two scrambled eggs, hyper-crispy bacon and toast, which he has been ordering since 1981 — the matter is closer to ritual. This is the spot in which he has chosen to take nearly all his important meetings for the past 38 years. According to The Times, he has hosted as many as 10,367 breakfasts at Claridge’s — which means that, for every 10 days, he’s spent seven to eight in The Foyer closing a deal before most of us have even left the house.

To fully understand breakfast, one has to approach the subject linguistically. The word itself is a corruption of the Latin desjunare (to break one’s fast) — which, before giving us ‘breakfast’, gave us ‘dinner’. The latter was, for a long time, our chief fast-breaking meal, until the advent of lunch in the 15th century meant our largest gap in eating would happen overnight. Understanding which daily meal constitutes the breaking of the fast — and how this varies from culture to culture — might explain why the French like to take a three-hour lunch (desjunare gave them their déjeuner) and eat only a croissant for breakfast as we swallow a Prêt sandwich at our desk at noon and, occasionally, indulge in a Full English.

Simpson’s In The Strand has all the hallmarks of a place where one might break their fast regardless of which meal they’ve elected to do this in. Hyman and I are here during half-term, which means it’s quieter than usual by the time we arrive at 9am and busier than usual by the time we depart at 10am. ‘City boys like to take their meetings really early,’ he explains. ‘It’s a flex.’ It’s another reminder that I was never cut out for the world of finance or insurance. Words will have to do.

The breakfast at Simpson’s ends up being my biggest indulgence of the week. I learn there and then that breakfast meetings — like all others — are mainly about pace. An omelette is a savvy order, light enough to digest easily, yet giving you lots of energy. Smoked salmon is refined, but comes with the risk of small pieces getting caught between your teeth. An Arnold Bennett is a bold choice — for it is often smelly — although the one at Claridge’s suffers no such problems and is still light enough to leave room for waffles. This should be understood only in proverbial terms: no one should ever order waffles or pancakes during a breakfast meeting that isn’t expressly with a work colleague who has graduated to the status of close friend and confidante and won’t judge you for it.

Finally, The Regency Café is a gem of a spot in which to conduct a surreptitious interview and assess someone’s balancing skills when they carry two trays over to the table. Presumably important if joining the circus or MI6.

The star dish at Martino’s, where my week both begins and ends, is a cacio e pepe scrambled egg with focaccia soldiers. This is soft and buttery, best paired with grapefruit juice and shared with the kind of person with whom you really don’t want to rush a meal. The menu offers an Italian spin on British classics, the baked eggs arrabbiata packing just enough of a punch to serve as a substitute to a Bloody Mary — should one wish to avoid drinking before a client. The room is dotted with the kind of clientele who would once have been called ‘ladies who lunch’, as well as a few tourists in search of postcode supremacy.

I bring along my friend Hugh Rowan, a barrister, for my first outing. He is no stranger to an early breakfast. ‘Dad and I used to eat at Granger & Co down the road from where we lived,’ he explains, ‘leaving the house at 7.15am and getting there for opening. I was working late hours back then and it was a great way for us to spend some time together, as we couldn’t predict when I might get home in the evening.’ I realised that breakfast offers a kind of intimacy that other meals do not. Dinner, which Hyman claims as ‘most people’s big, communal meal of the day’, is a collective endeavour.

Lunch, in this country, is often al desko — and solitary. The common denominator among all my breakfasts this week, from opulent brasseries to local caffs via five-star legends, is the level of access it gave me to the people eating opposite me: pre-emails, pre-stress, simply human beings in their purest form. I return to Martino’s on Friday with Fisher, my fellow breakfast refusenik, and we order pancakes.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It's long been said that if there was to be a 'positive' of a warming climate, it would be English wine. But it seems that organic English wine is the real winner, with organic viticulture in England is increasing by between 15%– 20% annually, a trend already seen in Europe as growers convert vineyards to contend with extreme weather conditions.

As the hot sun beat down relentlessly this summer on the vineyards at Oxney Estate in East Sussex, owner Kristin Syltevik admitted that a warming climate is ideal for her organic grapes. ‘It’s the silver lining of climate change; I go to wine tastings around Europe and everyone says: “How can you make this kind of wine in England?”’

Fourteen hectares (35 acres) of vines were planted on the estate in 2012 and organic standards focus on cover cropping and composting to preserve topsoil and encourage deep root structure. Every once in a while, Syltevik’s vines receive tisane, which is made from yarrow, nettle and horse tail, steeped for several weeks and delivered from a large agricultural sprayer. ‘I make all my own compost,’ Syltevik revealed. ‘A neighbour grazes his sheep and cattle here and pays me in muck. I add woodchips made from willow, which has medicinal qualities. Organic is like a religion for me.’

Twenty miles inland over the Sussex High Weald into Kent, winemaker Will Davenport agrees that a warming climate makes growing grapes in England easier. ‘It is still marginal, but watch this space,’ he said, adding that ‘growers in Burgundy and Bordeaux will have to adjust their systems [following the wildfires] to cope with the weather — and we may be the beneficiaries’.

Davenport planted his first vines in 1991 and joined the Soil Association in 2000. ‘Our vines are good at coping with drought because of all the organic matter we put into the soil. That helps with heavy winter rainfall, too.’ The Davenport vineyards were picked last week. ‘It used to be September 20; we’re now looking at planting later-ripening varieties.’

Beyond wine, organic products form part of every-day British life, with 83% of households plumping for certified items, a trend that is behind the boost of organic sales values for the year to mid June. These rose by 5.4%, versus 3.7% (conventional), with volume up 0.1% versus -0.1%, according to market research tool NielsenIQ Scantrack.

Two major drivers of organic volume growth are eggs and milk, with the former rocketing by 16.3% (versus 1.8% for non-organic eggs) and the latter by just over 9% (versus 0.4% for non-organic milk).

Separate questioning of 2,000 adults by Mortar showed one in five trying to avoid pesticides, food contaminants and GMOs when food shopping and almost three-quarters admitted to being concerned about exposure to the likes of pesticides and PFAS ‘forever chemicals’. Meanwhile, only 44% of consumers trust food labels.

With suspicion over sustainability, sourcing and animal welfare, most shoppers admitted that seeing an organic logo would give them more faith in a product. ‘Attention-grabbing headlines around the contamination of everyday food and drink products with PFAS, glyphosate and artificial pesticides — including some pesticides that are still sprayed on produce in the UK, despite being banned in the EU for health reasons — is no doubt driving more consumers to buy organic, which people recognise as a healthier and safer option,’ said Alex Cullen of Soil Association Certification.

Colours come in and out of fashion, but black is forever. While the rest of the watch world spent the last two years dabbling in sorbet — Rolex's Oyster Perpetual in matte pastels, TAG Heuer's Formula 1 Solargraph in pastel green and lavender-blue — TUDOR was working on something completely different.

Its monochrome Black Bay Ceramic (£6,030) is not only eye-catching, it’s the company’s first model with a fully ceramic bracelet, designed to match the 41-millimetre, matte ceramic case and satin-finish charcoal dial. It has a self-winding mechanical movement, a 70-hour power reserve and is waterproof to 660 feet.

Ceramic, for the uninitiated, is a nightmare to work with — it doesn't bend to a maker’s will the way steel does — so building an entire bracelet from it, clasp included (above), is a notable feat of patience and engineering.

The Black Bay follows in the footsteps of some notable timepiece titans: the CHANEL J12, which is credited with transforming ceramic’s reputation from obscure technical material into something fashionable and luxurious; Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon; Hublot Big Bag Integral Ceramic; and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar in black ceramic, which is one of the more impressive examples of ceramic being used in haute horlogerie.

Short on time? Here are five things you need to know about watchmaking ceramic:

1. On the Mohs scale, ceramic scores a nine — bested only by diamond. On the Vickers hardness scale, ceramic measures around 2,300, compared with just 200 for standard stainless steel. However, ceramic is more brittle than steel, gold and titanium, and can crack or splinter on a hard impact — so it's wonderfully scratch-proof, but not indestructible
2. The ceramic used in modern watchmaking is closer to the ceramic NASA uses to protect satellites and spacecraft from extreme heat than it is to the ceramic in your kitchen crockery. It's produced by superheating materials like silica until molten, then cooling and milling them into shape — a world away from a potter's wheel

3. Rolex doesn't use standard ceramic at all — they've developed a patented alloy called Cerachrom. Others have gone further still: Omega blends ceramic with gold to create Ceragold, while Hublot has Magic Gold — both designed to stop soft gold from scratching by fusing it with something nearly indestructible
4. Despite feeling like a thoroughly modern material, the first ceramic watches actually date back to the mid 20th century. It took until the mid 1980s for the technology and material science to mature enough for ceramic to become genuinely attractive to watchmakers at scale
5. Ceramic is hypoallergenic — good news for anyone with a nickel allergy who can't wear stainless steel. It’s also highly UV-resistant, meaning it won't fade or discolour even after years in direct sunlight, unlike gold or dyed materials

Cruz Beckham made his Reading Festival debut this bank holiday weekend, North West appeared on the latest cover of Dazed magazine and Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere are starring in the new 80s-themed Disney+ series The Shards. 2026 is the summer of the nepo baby.

The life of a nepo baby, however, can be a win-win or a lose-lose. You could profit from a successful career without any talent of your own, riding on the coat-tails of a famous family. Or, you could be talented in your own right, but no matter how successful you become people will always accuse you of not having ‘earned’ it.

Our obsession with celebrities' children has only increased in recent years with the rise of social media. An increasingly difficult job market, too, has thrown their success under the spotlight. You’d be within your right to assume that Emily Roux may have lived to rue the day she entered the family trade. But fear of nepotism allegations has not deterred the granddaughter of Albert Roux and daughter of Michel Roux Jr. Her Michelin star restaurant, Caractère, now nearly nine years old, has been going from strength to strength.

The fine dining restaurant in Notting Hill, which the 35-year-old co-owns with her husband, chef Diego Ferrari, previously of Le Gavroche, is immensely popular. With hospitality struggling amidst the cost of living crisis, Caractère’s success cannot be put down to the Roux surname alone. Although it may have helped her to get a foothold in the industry, it has taken years of grit and determination for Emily to step out of her father and grandfather’s towering culinary shadow.

That shadow began with Albert Roux, the renowned French chef, who opened Le Gavorche in Mayfair with his brother Michel. It was the first restaurant in the UK to gain three Michelin stars, and was taken over by Albert’s son, Michel Jr, before its closure in 2024.

‘The passion for food, eating out, has always been there,’ Emily says. In her early teens she spent a few evenings at Le Gavroche. ‘It opened my eyes to the camaraderie and little family that you had in the kitchen. I’m an only child, and I thought, I quite like these older brothers and sisters. It seemed like a lot of fun.’

Combined with a phobia of ‘sitting down and being behind a computer in an office’, cooking soon became ‘the only thing [she] wanted to do’. Her father is now 66, and enjoying a life away from the day-to-day business of running a world-renowned restaurant. This means he is regularly free to babysit Emily and Diego’s young children.

It’s clear that he couldn’t be prouder of his only daughter. ‘I think it was fairly obvious that she was going to end up in the hospitality industry,’ he says, although he is quick to add, ‘We never pushed Emily into cooking, that’s for sure.’

‘She was always interested in food… at a very young age she already knew flavour profiles and what was good, what wasn’t good.’ Michel Jr remembers going to restaurants with Emily as a little girl aged six. She would give him feedback after each meal.

‘On the way back home we would talk about it and she would make a note and say: “This one deserves a star, this one doesn’t.”’ Little did she know, she’d one day have a star of her own.

Emily decided not to take on the family business, and instead strike out on her own. Michel Jr says: ‘I took some advice from my father, but it was always more inspirational, and I think my father was always putting his nose in my business, so I tried not to do that with Emily.’ He adds: ‘It was a struggle in itself because he never really let go, and the actual business was struggling immensely. It was not making money. In fact, it was losing money — loads of money. So it took a long time for me to address that and to make it back into a profitable business. But Emily and Diego started from scratch.’

Emily adds: ‘He’s always a phone call away,’ and recalls how, during covid, she was on the phone with her father every other day, discussing how their restaurants’ respective landlords were reacting and how they would organise things to ensure the future of their businesses. ‘There’s always been help in the background. Always,’ she says.

When Emily studied at the Institut Lyfe in France as a young chef, she enjoyed anonymity — Roux is a much more common surname in France. ‘It was ideal,’ she says. ‘I was Joe Bloggs, and treated like everyone else. Most of the places that I worked never knew my family history or where I came from, probably until the time I was about to leave. It was perfect. I just lived my young commis chef life as anyone would.’

The pair agree times have changed since Michel Jr started out in the industry. ‘I think my team has a good work/life balance at the moment… I think that wasn’t the case when I started out in my career,’ says Emily. Her restaurant is shut on Sundays and Mondays, as well as for the Christmas and New Year period — ‘It’s a time when I want to be with my family, and I think everyone wants to be with their families’.

They also close for the last two weeks of August to coincide with the Notting Hill carnival and grant a reprieve for those with children, and are only open for lunch on Fridays and Saturdays. ‘We have lunch when they arrive. We have dinner together,’ she adds, about her staff.

Michel Jr says: ‘I worked 100 plus hours a week when I was training, and Emily probably not far off the same, at times. We have to do better than that. But I certainly don’t look back at my training period with any anger or ill feelings.’

Now his daughter is a parent to young children, does he reflect on his life as a busy chef with a young family? He is certainly on duty as a grandfather a lot of the time these days. Emily’s eldest son, a precocious six-year-old, enthusiastically interrupts our interview a few times, clamouring for his grandad’s attention, or perhaps a Michelin-starred snack.

‘Emily was put into a nursery and daycare as a child, so it certainly didn’t stop us working,’ says Michel Jr. ‘I tried my best to spend as much time as possible with Emily, because I felt that my father didn't spend enough time with me when he opened Le Gavroche, but it wasn't easy. I was still working ridiculous hours.’

For Emily, things were slightly different. ‘We already had the restaurant when the kids were born and they adapted to it as we did… but we make a really good effort to spend a wonderful day with them on a Sunday when we’re all together at home, and on Monday afternoons.’

What about that adage about ‘too many cooks’? Especially considering Diego, Emily’s husband, is in the mix too. ‘It works very well,’ Michel Jr says. ‘They’re coming over to France very soon and Diego might do a barbecue, I might do the vegetables, Emily might do something else.’ Emily adds: ‘It’s very natural and very easy. If there’s three of us, well, there’s three more ideas and three more hands to do something.’

Rivalry would not be unexpected in such an accomplished family, especially in a business that can be measured in awards. For Emily and Michel Jr, however, working with food brings them together.

The only downside seems to be that Emily’s children have a distinguished palette, like she did as a young girl. They eat the same food as the adults in her household. ‘He’s never had a dull pasta,’ she says of her eldest. ‘So when we go to a restaurant at an airport, for example, inevitably he won’t enjoy it and will be very disappointed.’ Ditto grandma’s homemade pizza dough, Michel Jr relates sadly. But, if this is the only problem, it seems the family are doing very well indeed. In this instance, too many cooks don’t spoil the broth, or in this case, the roux, at all.

Emily and Michel Jr will be collaborating on a Christmas menu at Caractère. Visit their website for more information.

Whenever I drive one of my vintage cars, I make a bet with myself that at the first traffic stop someone will lean out of a modern car and gravely assure me: 'They don’t make them like that any more.' This is undeniably true. But then they also don’t make electric light bulbs or radio sets, or so many other things, like they used to, so why do we car enthusiasts drive — and by choice, in all weathers — cars of such great age?

This is an easy question to ask, but has many answers. For me, the first reason is that I like it. Vintage motoring is fun. Old cars are all characters, some good, some bad, whereas modern cars, with several notable exceptions, do not possess such charisma. Most look alike, many are alike. They are totally bland, suitable for a sanitised society, where to conform is too often considered too important. Cars, like clothes, mirror social and political change.

When the old cars that I prefer were new, the world was a livelier, larger place and the cars made then reflect these characteristics. In addition to such famous makes as Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Bugatti, Delage and Alfa Romeo, there are many others less well known. All have their own personalities, often stemming from the attitudes and outlooks of their entrepreneurial designers and manufacturers.

What motor manufacturer today, for example, would proudly advertise his tiny two-cylinder car as having 'The Pull of an Elephant and the Appetite of a Canary'? Or, in describing its performance, would claim, 'With Spurs, would climb Trees'? Jowett from Yorkshire did for years, and in its day was very successful.

Then there was the enormously long Burney, designed in 1930 by the R100 airship engineer, Sir Dennistoun Burney, with a wheelbase of 13 feet and 5 inches, and an eight-cylinder engine hanging out for several feet beyond the rear wheels. At another extreme, the Trojan ran on solid rubber tyres, powered by an engine lying on its side under the front seat, and behind a bonnet empty except for the petrol tank. And what modern car, even with ABS braking, possesses the style of the mighty American Duesenberg, whose driver could adjust the brakes as he drove with a control marked Dry, Rain, Snow, Ice?

These days, my old-car driving is mainly confined to three cars, in order of seniority: a 1935 Auburn cabriolet, a 1936 Cord roadster (both made by the firm in Indiana which produced the Duesenberg), and a 1937 Jaguar SS100.

The Cord has a coffin-shaped bonnet, blunt as a blue-nosed whale; the sort of car Toad of Toad Hall would have enjoyed. The little SS100, so called because it was made by the SS car company, later Jaguar, and could reach a speed of 100mph, is light-footed as a mountain pony, slightly built and, in the wet, skittish as a trainee ballerina.

No one could deny that the Cord is well made. Clutch and brake pedals move on roller bearings, every nut and bolt is plated, and after 50 years, the body of high-grade metal is still free of rust. It was also the first American car to combine innovations such as retractable headlamps, independent front suspension and an engine and gearbox built on a special frame for easy removal.

The Cord had an integral body, totally soundproofed and without running boards, a built-in radio, rheostat-controlled instrument lighting, variable-speed windscreen wipers, headlamp main-beam warning light, concealed door hinges, and many more examples of ingenuity. But it had — and has — a weakness that neither time nor the expenditure of large sums of money by subsequent owners to experts of various kinds has been able to cure completely. This is its means of changing gear.

As an early front-wheel-drive design, the car has the gearbox laid out in front of the engine and front wheels. Gear changes are made by moving a tiny electric switch in a miniature gate on the steering column. No doubt, this seemed a very good idea at the time, because it did away with any need for complicated mechanical linkages. This switch activates solenoids, to open and close valves controlling vacuum servos, which, in turn, manipulate a lever that actually changes the gears. Many a garage mechanic, contemplating for the first time this nest of magnets, wires, valves, tubes and levers, must have echoed Shelley’s words: 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.'

I have often felt this despair acutely when, after half a century, the solenoids suddenly show their age and I realise with alarm that I cannot engage any gear at all. I coast around roundabouts or across intersections, usually in rush-hour traffic, with irate drivers hooting, my V8 engine racing away, but not transmitting any power whatever to ever more slowly turning wheels. Then, miraculously, energy returns to the stricken vehicle, and the gear changes as slickly as ever.

The Auburn takes its name, not from the colour, but from the town of that name where it was made, and provides another kind of vintage motoring. In contrast to the Cord, it is as temperamental as a superannuated building society clerk. The engine’s eight cylinders fire obediently in line, pistons the size of flower pots pound up and down, and the car’s sheer size metamorphoses even the shortest drive into a stately progression.

An ingenious device, controlled by a small lever in the centre of the steering wheel, enables the driver to change the back axle ratio as he drives. This has the effect of doubling the gears available (six forward gears instead of three) and also enables him to drive long distances without changing gear manually — useful in the conditions for which the Auburn was designed, tooling leisurely along broad American highways under a high mid-Western sun.

The Auburn was intended, after all, for a big country and an unhurried time when in the USA petrol cost less than the equivalent of 2½p per gallon — and in Britain not much more than 5p. At such prices, who but a miser would complain of the speed at which its Carter carburettor drinks the 20 gallons of petrol which the tank contains?

While the SS possesses such a narrow cockpit that driver and passenger sit thigh to thigh, so close together that the doors have cut-away tops so that their right and left elbows respectively can hang outside in the slipstream, the Cord and Auburn have high doors and weigh around 2½ tons. The feeling is of travelling in an open tank. A 4.7-litre engine churns away about 6ft in front of the occupants’ legs and somehow seems totally divorced from the wheels. In all three cars, after a few miles on a warm day, there is a sensation of heat and the constant drone of many mechanical parts all working hard that is, of course, totally absent in a more modern car.

I acquired a Cord more than 20 years ago, after putting an advertisement in the London Evening Standard. This brought a reply from Australia. Apparently, a ship’s engineer who owned the car had bought the paper in Southampton, but did not read it until his ship docked in Sydney. On his return, he sold me my first Cord. I then heard of another that had lain in a shed in Staffordshire for years and bought that and, out of the two, built one.

I liked this car so much that I 'gave' it to a character, Doctor Jason Love, whom I created in a series of adventure novels. When the first, Passport to Oblivion, was filmed, I was asked to hire the car to the studios in Elstree. It lay neglected in the studio garage for months, next to the yellow Rolls-Royce that appeared in the film of that name.

No one heeded my warning that old cars, like old people, can become very crotchety and temperamental if not constantly cared for. Then, the Cord was suddenly required one morning for David Niven, as Doctor Love, and John Le Mesurier, as an intelligence agent, to drive through the winding lanes of Hertfordshire.

A studio employee drove it to the rendezvous, near Aldenham, but the old car was clearly much put out at being summoned so summarily and 'driven without feeling' by a stranger. The battery was flat, the tyres soft, and the engine overheated in protest. To show its total displeasure, it refused to start when the actors were ready. So, just out of camera range, a rope was attached to the front bumper for members of the crew to pull, and I pushed at the rear.

Then, as if to atone for this behaviour, the engine started perfectly and Niven and Le Mesurier drove away in splendid style to the next location.

Here again, temperament prevailed, the radiator boiled and the car stopped in clouds of steam. At this, the director wisely decided to shoot a completely new scene in which this unexpected breakdown had a part to play.

Now every time I see this film on TV — called Where the Spies Are —for reasons never made clear to me, I recall this instance when art imitated not nature, but mechanical mishap.

Since those days, the Cord has been totally rebuilt. In July last year, my eldest son Jeremy and I took it to Brooklands for the annual Reunion of the Brooklands Society, dedicated to keeping fresh the memory and traditions of what was the world’s first — and most famous — purpose-built motor-racing course.

The day was warm and, surprisingly for a Sunday in summer, the roads nearly empty. The big old car bowled along effortlessly. One sits higher up than in a modern car and is able to see over the tops of fences and hedges and the roofs of other cars. The shortest journey thus becomes as important as its purpose, to be enjoyed as an outing for itself, not simply as a means to an end.

Another reason why driving an old car can be rewarding is that something about its appearance, whether it is large or small, brings out the best in other users of the road. Camaraderie between drivers returns — and of course when these cars were new it was customary for motorists approaching each other in cars of the same make to wave a friendly greeting.

Once, I had a puncture, and the feeble jack I had borrowed for the journey from my modern car could not cope with the weight. Other cars stopped, and their drivers offered aid or advice, but the heavy metal defeated them all. Finally, the driver of a passing coach saw the little group of people in the layby with jacks of various types spread about, and instantly assessed the problem.

The driver pulled off the road and produced a huge hydraulic jack that could lift a bus, and once more the Cord was mobile. None of his coach passengers objected to the involuntary stop. They all climbed out and surrounded the car, praising its looks and workmanship. Old cars remind older people of their youth, when they might have owned models of that make. Younger people enjoy seeing examples of individual minds and a pre-computerised age.

While the Cord is a Cunarder among cars, the SS100 provides totally different sensations and reactions. The big car gives an easy, soft ride, but the SS, with its cart springs and shock absorbers set up tightly, feels like riding on a board. If the windscreen is folded flat it provokes such a rush of air that goggles are necessary. Similarly, the wind whips round the side of the screen, even if it is raised, so a leather jacket is a wise precaution. The car has a skimpy aluminium body so that the rear wings can buckle if anyone attempts to push it over the headlamps, and behind the windscreen two cowls that rise like metal breasts to shield the instruments, were not in the best of taste.

A deeper reason for this coolness was that the SS100 could outperform other cars that cost nearly twice as much.

The SS100 reeks of the open road — and, to some, of the open roadhouse — and so in my latest adventure novel, Tank of Serpents (Collins), when I needed to provide a raffish character with a pre-war sports car, I chose this one, which is rather unfair, since I have owned four SS100s and all have given me an enormous amount of fun at very low cost.

Indeed, I can remember being let down by a mechanical failure only once. This was on an unusually hot day, when the engine overheated, causing the condenser in the distributor to lose its ability to condense. I simply coasted off the road, allowed a few minutes for the engine to cool, fitted a replacement condenser, and went on my way.

Spares for vintage cars are rarely a problem. There are clubs for nearly every make, and dozens of small firms make replacement parts. The Vintage Sports Car Club caters for the interests of all vintage car enthusiasts. (By definition, 'vintage' cars refer to those made between 1919 and 1930, so my trio are all post-vintage Thoroughbreds.)

Samuel Johnson wrote that 'a man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected'. By this reasoning, drivers of vintage cars have to be people of resource and resilience, and, in my experience, they are. Our cars come to possess almost human qualities and failings. In essence, they reflect the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the people who built them — and our own. Perhaps this is really the reason why we like them so much?

This article first appeared in the October 16, 1986 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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One a track on a farm somewhere in Ireland, Florence leans against the steering wheel. Soft breezes from the car’s open windows ruffle her ears. It’s summer and the sun is shining. Florence, I learn, ‘loves to drive’.

A self-possessed, well-muscled, prepossessing little six year old, she is the smooth-haired miniature dachshund belonging to Lady Ana Johnson, only daughter of the late last Earl of Dunraven, and once in a while, away from public roads — and to her considerable delight — she sits on her owner’s lap as they crisscross the fields by car.

In Britain, miniature dachshunds — both long- and, like Florence, smooth-haired — are currently one of the nation’s favourite dog breeds: between 2014 and 2024, puppy registrations for long-haired miniature dachshunds quadrupled. In Ireland, too, their popularity is growing. For Lady Ana, the decision had nothing to do with trends: ‘As a child, growing up in a classic Jack-Russell-sheep-dog family, I always wanted to have a sausage dog.’

Florence, who was born during the pandemic, is Lady Ana’s second, but certainly won’t be her last. ‘I hope I’ll always have miniature dachshunds,’ she reflects. ‘I see myself at 85 surrounded by a little pack of them. They’re incredibly loyal: I’ve never had such loyal dogs as these.’

Dapple patterned in colouring, Florence’s tiger stripes, her fond owner suggests, ‘are not terribly obvious, although perhaps more obvious the more rosé you consume.’ She is named after a character in children’s television programme The Magic Roundabout, as was her predecessor, Zebedee, and is stoutly adored both by Lady Ana and her 11- and nine-year-old daughters.

Florence is not alone in inspiring passionate attachment in her human. Across the country, dachshund owners feel the same overwhelming enthusiasm for the German origin breed popularised two centuries ago by Queen Victoria, who once claimed of the short-legged, big-bark dogs that ‘nothing will turn a man’s home into a castle more quickly and effectively than a dachshund’.

‘They’re good, plucky little dogs, very brave, very sporting, very friendl y —and they’re huge characters,’ observes Jonathan Reeves, who, in his late eighties, recently acquired a black-and-tan, smooth-haired miniature dachshund puppy called Polly. Reeves ought to know. A great-nephew of Maj Claude Jarvis— t he former Governor of Sinai, who wrote a long-running Country Life column, ‘A Countryman’s Notes’, Reeves had his first dachshund as a small boy during the Second World War and, alongside working cocker spaniels and springers, has owned a succession of others over the following eight decades.

He admires their loyalty, their ‘great endurance’ and intelligence; he enjoys their love of country life and their concern for their own comfort: ‘They love Agas.’

The dachshund may well be the most instantly recognisable dog breed in the world, with its distinctive, elongated silhouette — which accounts for its soubriquet of ‘sausage dog’ — and distinguished, fine-featured head with almond-shaped eyes, black nose and long, silky ears. Typically, they have pretty faces, gleaming coats, a long stride and a determined sense of purpose.

In the early 1890s, novelist Henry James commended the ‘beautiful countenance’ of his dachshund Tosca (he was also rumoured to have claimed that she was ‘intelligent enough to be shocked’ by the suggestion that American women possessed less sex appeal than their European counterparts).

The dogs’ long bodies made them suited to their earliest working purpose: dachshund means ‘badger dog’ and these fearless, strongbodied little creatures were once used by German foresters to hunt badgers in their setts.

Unsurprisingly, this fearsome heritage made for a breed characterised by bravery and tenacity. Even today, dachshunds tend to appoint themselves guard dogs in any home they inhabit. Few well-cared-for, properly trained modern examples, however, inspire the reaction of Wadl and Hexl, who belonged to Wilhelm II early in the last century: the Kaiser’s dogs were described as ‘biting, snarling little brutes with jaws measuring half the length of their smooth bodies’.

By contrast, in August 1904, James described Tosca’s successor Max as ‘the best and gentlest and most reasonable… small animal of his kind’ and allowed the dog to sleep in his own favourite armchair at Lamb House, his home in Rye, East Sussex.

A century on, charm remains a byword for the dachshund. A smooth-haired miniature called Mouse, belonging to Clare Durdin Robertson, chatelaine of Huntington Castle in Co Carlow, Ireland, numbered the actor Rupert Everett among her conquests.

Queen Victoria’s first dachshund arrived at Windsor Castle in about 1841, but it was Deckel, brought over from Coburg by Prince Albert four years later, who really converted the redoubtable monarch; her attachment was only eclipsed half a century later, by another German breed, the Pomeranian.

Television producer Olivia McPartland-Brooke describes her wire-haired miniature dachshund Dot, a four year old with melting dark eyes and a characteristic grey-and-tansplashed rough coat, simply as ‘miraculous’: ‘I love the energy, I love the attitude.’ Like Florence and the many dachshunds owned by Reeves, Dot is at the centre of her mistress’s life. Lady Ana describes Florence as ‘by my side the entire time’. Dot went a step further and was one of McPartland- Brooke’s bridesmaids, accompanying her down the aisle on a pristine white lead terminating in a ribbon rosette.

In Britain and North America, dachshunds are recognised in two sizes — standard and miniature — and three coat types: smooth-, long- and wire-haired. Distinct in aspects of their appearance, all share the same extended, muscular body, short, powerful legs, long tail and large front paws, as well as their long, engaging, invariably animated faces.

Dachshunds share character traits, too: their curiosity, cheerful busyness and, in many instances, a streak of stubbornness. McPartland-Brooke is unsure if ‘curious’ adequately summarises Dot who, on Clapham Common, ‘needs to say hello to everyone as if she’s in her own garden’ and is impossible to take for a quick walk because ‘she’s too chatty, she wants to talk to everyone she meets’ — ‘nosy’ is perhaps more apt.

In towns and cities, in villages and on farms, the behaviour of the dachshund continues to suggest its working origins, even where there are no badgers to be seen. ‘They’re definitely little hounds rather than terriers,’ Reeves believes. ‘They use their noses a lot to track scents for a very long way.’ The Kennel Club labels the dachshund a ‘persevering hunter and tracker’ and paintings of the breed by canine artists such as Maud Earl, Frances Mabel Hollams and Friedrick Wilhelm Keyl frequently emphasise the dogs’ musculature, their broad shoulders and alert gaze.

Unlike other short-legged dogs, a dachshund’s body is clear of the ground, suggesting its practical backstory. Often, only water stops them in their tracks, although many owners have been surprised by an unexpected willingness to ford shallow pools or streams.

Loyal themselves, this is a breed that inspires loyalty. Dot followed an earlier dachshund called Daisy, owned by McPartland- Brooke’s parents, whom she loved as a child; Reeves has remained dedicated to the breed his parents first acquired in the 1930s, despite his need, in adult life, for a larger working dog; and Lady Ana can imagine both her daughters owning dachshunds as adults. Why? ‘Dot is perfection!’ exclaims McPartland-Brooke. ‘She’s a lot of fun, she has no anxiety whatsoever, she’s very positive, she loves a cuddle and, really, she’s a bit of a joy.’ As for Florence, adds Lada Ana: ‘When she’s really, really happy, she howls.’

As with any pet, potential owners should exercise vigilance. Their long backs make dachshunds vulnerable to problems, including intervertebral disc disease (IVDD), which can be costly (and very difficult) to treat. Responsible breeders do their best to minimise the likelihood of IVDD by screening and active dogs that remain fit and well muscled often suffer fewer problems than their sedentary cousins or those that jump unnecessarily.

Is this a reason to look elsewhere, at other breeds? None of the owners to whom I spoke believe so. In 80 years, Reeves has had a single dachshund with IVDD and Lady Ana suggests that exercise keeps the back muscles taut and helps to prevent problems. ‘They’re really jolly, good little dogs,’ Reeves assures me. Can we doubt him?

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The celestial scoring system of the Michelin Guide currently anoints more than 3,700 restaurants, beacons of light that stretch from New Zealand to the Faroe Islands. Yet, before it became a universal blueprint, the guide served as a bible to specifically French petrolheads, recommending hotels and service stations along the Hexagon’s main motorways to spur car travel and, indirectly, tyre sales for its parent company.

The guide dished out one star to the restaurants worth making a stop for; two stars to those that might warrant a detour; and three to those that served as a destination in their own right. What began as a bit of PR for the automobile industry eventually morphed into the definitive anthology of taste. Thus it is that the destiny of global gastronomy is inextricably tied to that of the motorway — an odd analogy to the British, whose experience of stopping for lunch on the road might, at best, involve a Nando’s.

Compare this with France, where the country’s best roast chicken — according to chef Heston Blumenthal — is found at the Aire du Poulet de Bresse service station just off the A39 near Dijon and a dismal picture of our sceptred isle begins to form. Although British cuisine has come on in leaps and bounds since the first crop of maverick chefs took over our kitchens in the 1980s, their spirit has not extended to the diners that line our own cross-country motorways. These are prosaic, unmodernised spaces, dotted here and there by the airs of routine, where a mini M&S might offer a reprieve from fast-food.

Britain’s top service stations

Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire M40, Junction 2

The service station with the UK’s broadest range of retail outlets, 16 in total (12 eateries). Nearby attractions include the oldest surviving model village in the UK, Bekonscot, which welcomes upwards of 150,000 visitors per annum

Gloucester M5, between Junctions 11A and 12

Britain’s most elegant service station — constructed from Cotswold dry-stone walls and sustainably harvested ash stems from the Forest of Dean — serves 1.6 million hot drinks each year, including 1.1 million coffees

Lancaster M6, between Junctions 32 and 33

Designed by Bill Galloway and Ray Anderson, the juxtaposition of low-rise buildings with the now Grade II-listed Pennine Tower harks back to the golden age of driving. This was once the site of a restaurant serving steak and lobster, although that has since shut down. Lancaster also serves 900,000 hot drinks every year

Tebay, Cumbria M6, between Junctions 38 and 39

Serving 1.1 million hot drinks (including 836,000 coffees) every year, together with 287,000 pies and sausage rolls and 60,000 portions of fish and chips, this famous gateway to the Lake District is strongly committed to the local environment, with a well-frequented duck pond, on-site farm, dog walks and water and a pledge to plant 3,000 trees to establish wildlife corridors

Cairn Lodge, Lanarkshire M74, between Junctions 11 and 12

This most recent addition to the Dunning empire is accessed via a medieval fortress. The gateway to the Highlands is wildly popular, selling 836,000 hot drinks, including 255,000 coffees, every year

For some, the service station is a symbol of civilisational decline — a cultural no man’s land that typifies the UK’s woes and inequities. It wasn’t always the case: our oldest station, now known as Watford Gap Services, but first opened as Blue Boar in 1959, was a meeting point for rock-and-roll royalty: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Beatles were known to frequent its 24-hour café. For others, it feels akin to a time warp: somewhere that hasn’t been upgraded since the 1960s. The absence of a decent meal is far from the only grievance: other amenities that seem basic to other countries are often lacking here.

The loos, perhaps the only area in which Britain’s service stations outperform those on the Continent, are only slightly more salubrious than those on the Greek islands. ‘I think, in general, that they are all awful,’ laments author and conservationist Charles Rangeley-Wilson. ‘We’d do the world a favour by reverting to the habits of yesteryear and seeking out local cafés and garages in villages off the main route.’ ‘I don’t stop at service stations anymore,’ concurs Rosie Paterson, Country Life’s Travel Editor. ‘The average rural restaurant has improved so exponentially in the past decade that there is really no need to go via a service station, except to refuel and, perhaps, grab a Diet Coke.’

Yet rerouting via a village for a pit stop can be tricky. ‘It sometimes feels as if our motorways are designed to entrap,’ says Nicole Maslen, a producer at Goalhanger Podcasts who often travels for work. ‘We also lack awareness of local alternatives, having never benefitted from a dedicated guide the way that France has.’ The numbers, nonetheless, suggest that service stations remain immensely popular. Moto, the UK’s largest operator, records an average of more than 120 million visits from drivers every year. The same reasons to hate the service station are, for some, the reasons to love them.

‘Everyone has a favourite,’ notes Tabitha Steemson, a manager at CT Group, ‘and I love mine precisely because it is a bit s***.’ Her culprit is Leigh Delamere, of Gavin & Stacey fame — among the largest service stations in Europe and one of the many operated by Moto. It sits on the M4 between Junctions 17 and 18, near Chippenham, Wiltshire. Such a service station’s appeal is associative: a necessary evil en route to making memories.

There are, nonetheless, some green flags to look out for. ‘Take the Red Lion Truck Stop off the M1 near Northampton,’ points out motoring correspondent Adam Hay-Nicholls. ‘I was always taught by my father that lorries were an indication of a decent brekkie — and that is pertinent here.’ The service station is also somewhere we return out of loyalty for the familiar. ‘You know my favourite,’ says my friend Claudia Everest-Phillips, a paralegal and amateur artist. I do: it’s the beloved Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where we have often stopped when travelling to and from the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire.

The most popular service stations in the country have gentrified themselves in order to improve. When the M6 was built in the 1960s, slicing through land belonging to the Dunning family in Cumbria, its proprietors decided to open a service station that has grown, since 1972, into a beacon of the British road. Tebay Services offers none of the trappings found among its peers: no fast food, no slot machines, no unsanitised massage chairs. Instead, it has farm shops, selling produce that comes from Dunning-owned fields and other local growers. An accompanying hotel and caravan park have since been opened.

‘We were the UK’s first family-run motorway service area,’ Sarah Dunning says, ‘a friendly refuge sheltered behind a plantation of Scots pines from the sound and fury of the motorway.’ The food was — and is still — simple and local, served in a 40-seat restaurant next to a small shop selling crafts, as well as drivers’ essentials. The model worked. In 1992, the Dunnings opened a southbound station on the same site and have since expanded to other parts of the country.

Further stations were launched, in Gloucestershire in 2014 and at Cairn Lodge, Lanarkshire, in 2019 (on a site acquired from the MacInnes family). ‘Drivers will re-route journeys to go via Tebay,’ observes author and editor Simon Mills. ‘It’s like a pilgrimage. They show up with their hampers and their tote bags and load up their Rovers as if it’s the weekly shop. Come to think of it, for some, it might be.’

Britain’s worst service stations

Fleet, Hampshire M3, between junctions 4A and 5

Primary grievances: State of loos (avoid at all costs after Glastonbury) and the price of fuel

Thurrock, Essex M25, between junctions 30 and 31

Primary grievances: Awful shower queues and anecdotal reports of food poisoning

Rownhams, Hampshire M27, between junctions 3 and 4

Primary grievances: That the space is ‘packed with utter goblins’ and the apathetic McDonald’s staff

Bridgwater, Somerset M5, junction 24

Primary grievances: State of loos. Has a multi-storey car park despite being, by some accounts, ‘the size of a garden shed’

Heston, London M4, between junctions 2 and 3

Primary grievances: Conditions that have been described as both ‘cramped’ and ‘post-apocalyptic’. Harsh lighting

As overall standards improve, so do expectations: today, one in five drivers will make a point of avoiding certain service stations because they are deemed unsuitable (according to www.confused.com), in the same way that many will add their preferred service station as a deliberate stop. However, it’s more than the quality of produce and service that draws motorists, again and again, to the holy trinity that is Tebay-Gloucester-Cairn.

‘The idea [behind expanding to the Gloucestershire site] was born in 2007,’ Dunning explains, ‘when conversations began on the Matson housing estate [on the edge of the city of Gloucester] about how the M5 motorway could become an asset for the local community, creating jobs and generating sustainable income.’ Today, the Farmshop and Kitchen work with more than 130 local producers within a 30-mile radius, alongside a further 70 producers from across the South-West.

The service-station edifice itself has also proved inspirational to photographers and artists, such as the American realist painter Edward Hopper, since the early days of motoring. ‘Quite why this is is hard to pin down,’ states Philip Butler, a photographer whose anthology, 226 Garages and Service Stations, was published in September last year. ‘It started in the USA, where gas stations might be the only structure on a highway for miles — and the little illuminated outposts were considered to be a safe haven on a seemingly endless journey.’

Architectural historians may find more to love if they go further back. ‘The Texaco in East Sheen, London SW14, is a rare example of a 1920s filling station still in daily use,’ notes Butler . ‘For the Art Deco lover, the Clock Garage, now a Kwik Fit in Woodville, Derbyshire, is one of the best preserved 1930s sites.’ One in Worcestershire might look at home on the @accidentallywesanderson Instagram account, owing to its soothing symmetry: the Regal Garage in Upton upon Severn. Service stations are also ‘a symbol of escapism and the romance of the open road,’ Butler says.

For philosopher Alain de Botton, the service station shares a poetic language with the airport and train carriage. ‘In spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts,’ he wrote in 2002’s The Art of Travel, ‘we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.’

It is a profound, and no doubt truthful, statement, although it helps if the services in question offer more than a Starbucks.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

'Cucumber dipped in vinegar!’ begins Anne excitedly in Enid Blyton’s Five Go Off to Camp, reeling off with enthusiasm the sandwiches prepared for them for a moorland hike to their pitching spot. ‘Oooh, Mr Luffy, your sandwiches are much nicer than ours!’

It’s not hard to imagine that fresh, tangy fillings such as cucumber would have delighted post-war picnickers such as the Famous Five. In both fiction and reality, our affection for the cucumber sandwich has been enduring. Piled on patterned plates at cricket matches and summer regattas, it’s a snack that feels quintessentially English, yet its origins lie in India. Wilting under the searing heat, officials of the British Raj found relief in a refreshing local crop: the cucumber. They gave this fruit, made up of about 95% water, an English twist by sandwiching it between delicate slices of soft white bread — and then transporting the tradition back home.

The cucumber’s 4,000-year-old ancestor was a bitter-tasting gourd with a bulbous form and prickly skin, but it was gradually sweetened by selective breeding. Centuries before British colonials popularised the cucumber sandwich, Europe’s rulers were already developing a taste for the fresh green crunch. In the 1st century AD, on the island of Capri off Italy, the Emperor Tiberius was widely reported to have commissioned the first specularium (proto greenhouse) to ensure a year-round supply of cucumbers to satisfy his daily cravings. By the early medieval period, Frankish king Charlemagne had issued an edict, decreeing that his cherished cucumbers be grown on all his estates.

In Britain, cucumbers were also once the preserve of the elite, as much fuel and space was needed to run the hothouses in which they were cultivated. As coal became cheap and plentiful in the mid 19th century, the practice proliferated and these prestigious foreign fruits, forced into straight forms by hand-blown glass tubes, became a point of pride. As etiquette expert William Hanson recently shared with his followers as he enjoyed afternoon tea at The Goring: ‘In Victorian-era Britain, cucumber was the caviar of its day.’

‘A plate of delicate cucumber sandwiches soon came to be seen as a prominent signifier of social status, highly recommended by the many authors of afternoon-tea etiquette books that appeared throughout the Victorian era,’ Gillian Perry, author of Please Pass the Scones: A Social History of English Afternoon Tea, says. ‘Unlike the starchy English vegetables that graced dinner plates, cucumbers held a more exotic air. The delicacy [of the sandwiches] added to the understanding that afternoon tea was a treat confined to the upper middle and aristocratic classes.’ In the evening, they would sit down to a substantial evening meal, she explains. ‘As such, the afternoon tea-table items were not required to fully sustain.’

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, concurs that sandwiches confected for afternoon tea are ‘dainty trifles, pleasing to the eye and palate, but too flimsy to allay hunger where it exists’. The leisured classes did not need the hearty meal served to manual workers and these light, spongy snacks boasted the idleness of those who enjoyed them.

In P. G. Wodehouse’s 1932 short story Open House, such idleness sees the cucumber sandwich become a missile. The host, Eustace Milliner, is joined for afternoon tea by his formidable aunt, Lady Alcester, a woman who is described as ‘passionately addicted to cucumber sandwiches’ and prone to ‘fling herself on them like a starving wolf’. Yet when her cat, Francis, begins to stalk William, the canary Milliner is minding, the cucumber sandwiches are hastily hurled at the would-be killer. Although the canary survives, the featherlight refreshment proves an inadequate projectile.

‘The very nature of a cucumber sandwich makes it poor throwing,’ we’re told. ‘He could have obtained direct hits on Francis all day without slowing him up.’ Another cucumber-mad aunt, Lady Bracknell, appears in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, where cucumber sandwiches are again code for the trivial preoccupations of the satirised upper classes. Her nephew and host, Algernon Moncrieff, has a corresponding penchant for the ‘reckless extravagance’ of this sandwich and, before Lady Bracknell can lay a gloved finger on the delicacy, he has absentmindedly swallowed the lot. When she enquires about the promised sandwiches, Lane, the butler, supplies a swift lie. ‘There were no cucumbers in the market this morning,’ he fibs. ‘Not even for ready money.’

Not everyone, however, took to cucumbers so enthusiastically. They were once known as ‘cowcumbers’, as it was thought only cattle could digest them. This name was later deemed unseemly by Victorians such as Charles Dickens, who used it to send up the gin-soaked, snuff-loving nurse Mrs Sairey Gamp in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. ‘In case there should be such a thing as a cowcumber in the ’ouse, will you be so kind as bring it, for I’m rather partial to ’em,’ announces this corpulent woman with ‘a husky voice’ and ‘very little neck’.

According to Dr Johnson’s famous epithet, the ‘physicians in England’ feel that ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing’. The writer Sir Compton MacKenzie was equally disparaging about the conventions of the British afternoon tea. ‘You are offered a piece of bread and butter that feels like a damp handkerchief — and sometimes, when cucumber is added to it, like a wet one,’ he complained.

There’s no risk of a soggy sandwich at our most esteemed establishments. London’s Claridge’s serves an estimated 22,000 afternoon teas each year, slicing some 58,000 loaves into neat, crustless fingers. Cucumber-sandwich recipes vary, from a version with cream cheese, dill and horseradish root to a summery take with lemon crème fraîche. The perfect sandwich, it suggests on its menu, is ‘a delicately balanced two-thirds bread and one-third filling’. Meanwhile, in Marylebone, the Langham’s indulgent variations have included cucumber enveloped in clotted cream or pickled in Champagne and elderflower.

The sandwiches enjoyed by Elizabeth II also had a special twist. ‘The best cucumber sandwich I’ve had was at a Buckingham Palace garden party,’ recalls Country Life Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges, who has been a guest on several occasions. ‘The added chopped mint makes all the difference.’

As Clarissa Dickson Wright noted in her 2011 book A History of English Food, afternoon tea’s ‘delicate little sandwiches’ are ‘a culinary art form in themselves’. It was a lady’s maid who taught her how to cut slender slices of bread by heating a sharpened steel knife in a jug of boiling water and then wiping it dry. Sir Winston Churchill, who insisted ‘the bread must be wafer-thin, nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach’, would have approved.

The cucumber, too, should be sliced ‘very finely,’ Dickson Wright recommended. ‘Leave it to stand with some salt on it, then rinse the salt off and add a little oil and pepper.’ Mrs Beeton added ‘vinegar or lemon juice’ for acidity; and, in her 1894 tome Sandwiches, the pioneering American domestic scientist Sarah Tyson Rorer took the art form to extremes, requiring us to soak the sliced cucumber in iced water for one to two hours to make them ‘crisp and brittle’.

Let no one say that the cucumber sandwich is simple or ordinary. Food writers Hilda Leyel and Olga Hartley were surely on the right path when they proposed in The Gentle Art of Cookery of 1925 that such delicious morsels warrant a degree of formality. ‘The proper accompaniment of a sandwich is not the schoolboy’s ginger beer or railway station coffee,’ they assert, ‘but a glass of Champagne.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Charlie the smooth black-and-tan dachshund

Charlie — aka King Charles or HRH — is an extra-large dachshund with an extra-large personality and appetite. He is most likely to be found stretched out in a patch of sunshine or occupying the exact chair you vacated three seconds earlier, preferably while it’s still warm.

His greatest talent is interior design: using his remarkably strong snout to rearrange chairs into strategic positions from which otherwise inaccessible food can be reached. This ingenuity once resulted in the consumption of an entire packet of Marks and Spencer's Outrageously Chocolatey Dark Chocolate Rounds and a frantic Friday night trip to the emergency vet. He has taught me many things, but vigilance is chief among them.

Despite being permanently starved — according to Charlie, not his vet — he is outrageously cuddly. His most prized possession is Stanley, our tiny, blind and deaf 14-year-old dachshund, whom he absolutely adores. Life, according to Charlie, would be perfect if I were more generous with snacks and stopped mentioning the word ‘diet’.

Florence Allen

Zippy the Australian kelpie

Despite her breed’s reputation as Australia’s most dependable sheepdog, my 13-year-old kelpie is inexplicably terrified of sheep and cows. She will swim across fast-flowing rivers or commando-crawl through hedges to avoid crossing paths with them.

Her favourite game involves stealing golf balls in play from the course near the beach in Devon and racing off towards the water with them in her mouth. She's always utterly baffled when the golfers don’t cry out with delight and join in.

Her most impressive talent is her ability to escape. She once jumped a five-foot fence in order to embark on an adventure aboard a longboat down the River Thames. What has my dog taught me? That not all dogs calm down with age.

Even when we're nowhere near a beach, Zippy will somehow find one. Despite her escape artist antics, she is utterly irresistible (except, perhaps, her breath). She only wishes I took sticks as seriously as she does.

Bella Fulford

Dominic the cocker pug

When Dominic was a (long-legged) puppy, and to some extent even now, he totally destroyed anything he could get his teeth and paws on.

We previously had a homely, ie untidy, farmhouse kitchen, but today it is minimalist due to Dom. Some of his 'activities' have included eating everything in the fruit bowl, including bananas in their skins, ripping the blinds (now there are none), chewing a hand off the clock despite it being hung high on the wall, pulling the air fryer off the surface and completely separating the electric plug from the wire once it was on the floor, plus grabbing milk bottles in his mouth (the ones that were soaking in the sink to be washed later) and jumping down and smashing them on the floor.

He's more recently taken to jumping off the (high) garden wall and out into the road. He'll then do a 'circuit' around the road and jump the five-bar gate back into the yard where he is 'secure' again — until the next time. His favourite day to do this is Monday because this is recycling day.

His most prized possession is his bed (he can't, of course, have a lovely fluffy bed or he would eat it). He sleeps in his crate with a blanket and because he's so frenetic during the day by 10.30pm he's so ready for bed he can't wait to get there. He sleeps like the living dead.

In the last few months he's become slightly less naughty and extremely appealing. He has the most gorgeous face, and he's soft and squishy and wouldn't hurt a fly (although he loves chasing my six cats). He's also highly intelligent and knows instantly when he's done something naughty. We don't even need to tell him.

Julie Harding

Chequers the Jack Russell

Chequers can do plant recognition. If he sees nettles or thistles or gorse from several paces ahead, there is no way he will proceed without being picked up. He can also detect a hedgehog through 18-inch-thick walls and shut windows.

He once killed an enormous rat. I was worried he would let it go and was rushing around after him, swearing and wielding a shovel, but he despatched it and then did a victory lap of honour around the garden. Because of him, I've learned to run ever faster.

He's most likely to be found watching the BBC News at Ten. He takes it very seriously and likes the racing and tennis as well.

I love his long nose (like Beatrix Potter's Pickles) and short legs, his markings (especially the spot by his tail) and his way of snuggling up under your arm. He can pay a visitor no greater compliment than to fall sound asleep on them.

Kate Green

Dolly Parton the (suspected) kokoni

I knew Dolly was mine the moment I saw her little clown face peeking out at me from the social media account of a respected animal-rescue charity in Romania, after I had been considering dog ownership for some months.

I had always said that my first dog would be called Dolly Parton; this one was already christened Dolly. It was meant to be. 'That dog is far too ugly to be named after Dolly Parton,' offered a friend, clearly unaware that one must never say this about someone's baby (to their face).

The dog who had lived off Romanian street rubbish and arrived so hungry she once swallowed a rat whole soon settled in beneath my desk at the Country Life offices and learnt that she was now too good for dry dog biscuit. A saint with children, but a devil on the lead, I will never have another dog as devoted to me as this one.

Victoria Marston

Nimrod and Rocky the black and yellow labradors

My partners in canine crime are Nimrod, an eight-year-old black labrador, and Rocky, a four-year-old yellow labrador. Although they’re both (allegedly) working dogs, who excel (ahem, are you listening, Nim?) in the shooting field — in truth, they are pets, sofa slugs and my most treasured companions.

They follow in the pawprints of fellow black labs, Boot, Dinky and Sock, and I’d be utterly lost without them. Nimmy specialises in stealing the toys belonging to our neighbours’ obliging sprocker, Wilson — his favourite is a fluffy capybara, which he will only retrieve to hand in return for a spoonful of Greek yoghurt. Rocky, meanwhile, has 37 field-trial champions in his pedigree and will actually give you the game bird you asked him to fetch without demanding a snack tax.

Despite being rather too officious about border patrol around my cottage — the postman gets shouted at every time he approaches — both are first-class cuddlers and emotional-support operatives. If they could, they’d abolish my job so that, at 4pm, they would not have to stare so intently, willing me to step away from the laptop to feed them. As I constantly remind them, however, one of us has to work if we’re to afford their twice-daily equivalent of Cheerios.

Paula Minchin

Daisy the working cocker spaniel

Daisy is an expert thief and often works as a tag team with Ernie the cat who will bat items off the kitchen table with his paw and then jump down before Daisy has golloped up all the spilt milk/ham/toast etc.

When young there was nothing Daisy could not consume with no repercussions other than human rage — an entire pat of French butter; an almost full packet of chocolate bourbons, a dish of lasagne from the cafe opposite and, over the years, numerous slices of Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake.

She got her comeuppance though when she swallowed a packet of rat poison. The vet nobly left off watching the Rugby World Cup final to administer an emetic and when we picked up her from the surgery declared her to be the most stupid dog he had ever treated because she wagged her tail throughout the procedure. But then she did win a red rosette in the village fête Waggiest Tailed Dog competition.

Tiffany Daneff

Patzy the Patterjack

Patzy didn't have the best start in life. She was abused (the vet thinks she's blind in one eye because she was kicked in the head) and abandoned, went on the run for three weeks, and is fearful of most men, especially if they're wearing big boots.

Despite being dealt a very bad hand, her most endearing quality is her determination to try and make the most of every day. She's now 14 (probably), but still gets the daily zoomies and likes to help with most activities (at the moment it's putting out buckets of water for wild animals; she's also partial to a yoga class). In recent years she's even warmed to strangers and, as long as things progress on her terms, will use their legs as a scratching post.

Her favourite thing in the entire world is my parent's bed (she's evicted my dad from it — he has to sleep in the guest bedroom) and running water. She will happily wreck a perfectly good hose and turn it into a sieve, or stand in a stream for hours and hours and bite at the water in a vain attempt to stop it — sort of like King Canute and his waves. How she hasn't waterboarded herself is beyond me.

Rosie Paterson

Histories of whisky often start with romantic waffle about Irish monks, misty glens or even Arabic alchemists. I’m not going to include any of that, because the truth is that uisce beatha, the Gaelic for water of life from which we get ‘whisky’, would have been nothing like the complex, golden spirit that is appreciated around the world today.

Whisky’s origins are also neither ancient nor mysterious — they are rooted firmly in the Victorian era. High-alcohol spirits made from cereals have been produced in the British Isles since at least the 15th century. These would have been flavoured with herbs and much closer to herbal liqueurs such as Chartreuse or a rough kind of gin.

Whisky as we know it came about when distillers sold their goods to taverns, merchants or private houses, which kept old barrels that had once contained Port, rum or sherry and used them to store the spirit. People noticed that the wood had a positive effect, softening the fiery liquid and adding sweet and spicy flavours. It would, however, be a long time before ageing in this way became systematic.

Two distinct styles of spirit emerged in Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the Highlands, small-scale distillation using only malted barley was the norm and, most of the time, this was done illicitly to evade the taxman.

In the more urban Lowlands, production was industrial and made use of other cereals, including oats, wheat and rye. Much of the end product was sent south to London to make gin. This was probably the best use for it: Robert Burns described Lowland whisky as a ‘rascally liquor’.

In Ireland, a different tradition developed, based on spirits made from mixed cereals, but produced to a higher standard than the rudimentary Lowland product. When George IV visited Scotland in 1822, he asked to try the fabled — but illegal — Glenlivet. The former Prince Regent, notorious for his gluttony and womanising, proved quite a hit north of the border, parading down Princes Street in Edinburgh in Royal Stuart tartan ‘to the roaring cheers of the loyal Scots,’ according to the historian Sir John Plumb in his 1956 book The First Four Georges.

The following year, 1823, was a momentous one in the development of Scotch whisky: it saw the passing of the Excise Act, which liberalised distilling and provided greater resources and powers to excise officers. Glenlivet, under Capt George Smith, became legal and, in the years that followed, dozens of distilleries were officially founded, among them Macallan in 1824 and Talisker in 1830. They were appreciated by Scots connoisseurs, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who saluted ‘The king o’ drinks, as I conceive it, Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet!’ in his 1887 poem The Scotsman’s Return From Abroad.

Most, however, encountered whisky in a rather different form: the growth of Scotch whisky was driven not by distillers, but by blenders, who ‘not only created the blended whiskies that still dominate sales around the world, but also shaped the style of the single malts that enthusiasts relish so much,’ says Nick Morgan, author of the Johnnie Walker history A Long Stride.

These blends owed their existence to an invention in 1830 of the Coffey Still, which enabled cheap, reliable alcohol to be produced. Although the results lacked the flavour of the Highland spirit made in a traditional pot still, shopkeepers such as John Walker in Kilmarnock and John Dewar in Perth discovered that blending them with malt whisky created a consistent product. Those plentiful sherry casks had an important role to play, as confirmed in 1864 by William Sanderson, creator of the VAT 69 blend, who wrote that ‘it is well known that whisky stored in sherry casks soon acquires a mellow softness’.

For most of the 19th century, however, the whisky capital of the Empire was not in Scotland — it was in Ireland. The big four Dublin distillers, Roe & Co, Powers, John Jameson and William Jameson, had giant pot stills in which they distilled a mixture of malted barley and other grains. They were ahead of the curve: the Irish were ageing their whiskies in sherry casks at a time when much Scotch was still being drunk unaged. The big distillers did not market their own products directly; instead, they sold to so-called whiskey bonders, who aged and sold it on (it is telling that two of the greatest Irish whiskey brands, Gilbey’s Redbreast and Mitchell & Sons’ Green Spot, were created by wine merchants).

They were also rather dismissive of marketing altogether, explains Irish historian Fionnán O’Connor: ‘John Jameson did not want to advertise at railway stations. Could they not drop off cards at better addresses in London?’ Contrast that with the energy of a firm such as Dewar’s. Founded in Perth in 1846, its White Label whisky was targeted at fashionable London society and designed to be drunk with soda water.

The Scots were cashing in on a gap in the market left by Cognac, which was in short supply following the outbreak of phylloxera in France in the 1870s. The company’s marketing was cutting edge: in 1898, Tommy Dewar commissioned the world’s first cinema advertisement for whisky. It was made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and featured paintings of Scotsmen in tartan regalia coming to life when the laird of a castle pours himself a wee dram.

Like much of whisky advertising at the time and, indeed, ever since, it plays on romantic stereotypes of Highland culture. Dewar’s London headquarters on the South Bank had an enormous electric sign installed in 1911 depicting a Highlander in a tam o’ shanter raising a glass of White Label; when he drank, his beard and kilt swayed. The Irish were left behind by such high-tech methods.

Even before the War of Independence (1919–21), the industry was in decline; then came Prohibition, which wiped out the American market, and a disastrous trade war with Britain in the 1930s. By the 1970s, Ireland was down to two distilleries: Bushmills in the north and Irish Distillers in Cork, which continued making Powers and Jameson.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Scotch whisky either. The boom years were interrupted by the collapse of Pattisons in 1898, a whisky blender owing millions of pounds to distillers. The firm had inflated its profits through dodgy book-keeping, like the Enron of whisky.

Many distilleries went bust then or later when the industry was hit hard by the First World War, the Depression and the prohibitionist tendencies of the teetotal Welsh prime minister Lloyd George. However, the government also passed legislation in 1916 stating that Scotch whisky had to be aged for a minimum of three years, which guaranteed quality. The industry consolidated into larger groups, the most dominant of which was the Distillers Company Limited (DCL), which by 1925 owned both Dewar’s and Johnnie Walker.

Whereas Ireland was in decline and the Americans had wrecked their own industry with Prohibition, Scotch was in good shape to conquer the world. Light, fruity whiskies — J&B, Cutty Sark — were developed to appeal to the American palate, which wasn’t used to the bold flavours of heavier blends. Europe and Latin America took to Scotch in a big way, as Johnnie Walker achieved iconic status in India and the Arab world. Indian drinks consultant Ruchira Neotia notes that everyone in India has an opinion on Johnnie Walker the way they do about cricket.

In Japan, an emerging industrial giant, Scotch whisky became the ultimate status symbol in the 1950s and 1960s: younger Japanese were looking to forget the privations of war and embrace Western culture exemplified by American sports such as baseball and, naturally, Scotch whisky. However, the Japanese were not content simply to drink whisky — they imitated it with a domestic industry that dates back to when chemist and businessman Masataka Taketsuru studied in Scotland between 1918 and 1920. He brought that expertise home, first at Suntory, today the dominant force in Japanese whisky (as featured in the Bill Murray film Lost in Translation), and then to his own company, Nikka. Japanese whisky was rarely seen outside of its home country in the 1960s and is treated as a novelty in the 1964 James Bond novel You Only Live Twice.

Blended Scotch still bestrode the world, but change was afoot. Single malts — whiskies from a single distillery — were yet to venture far from Scotland, as they were thought too distinctive for wider tastes. William Grant & Sons believed otherwise and, from 1963, began promoting its Glenfiddich malt, followed by others, such as Glenlivet and Macallan. ‘There was a lot of overproduction [in the 1980s], which led to more availability of aged stock,’ explains Dawn Davies of the Whisky Exchange. ‘Single malts were a way to stand out from the crowd and present a more premium product.’

A rival, however, was being developed closer to home. Whisky-loving Norfolk farmer James Nelstrop noticed how much of his barley was going north to Scotland to be distilled and wondered why he could not do it himself. He duly built a distillery, hired an ex-Laphroaig distiller and released England’s first whisky of modern times. It’s a curious historical footnote that some whisky was made in England during Victorian times, but the last distillery in the Lea Valley in east London closed in 1905, unable to compete with the Scots.

Nelstrop wasn’t the only one. A Cornish company, Hicks & Healey, began distilling in 2003, but didn’t release a whisky until 2011, and in Wales Stephen Davies founded the Penderyn Distillery in 2000. He encountered some difficulties explaining his wares, once encountering a man at a whisky show who kept referring to Penderyn as ‘Scotch’, before asking if Wales was ‘an island off Scotland’.

All over Britain and Ireland, small distilleries sprang up in the 2000s and 2010s, seeking to offer something different from the legacy Irish and Scotch industries. Whisky boomed as never before and the giants such as Jim Beam in America, William Grant & Sons with Glenfiddich and Irish Distillers dramatically increased production. Speculative money flooded in all over the world, driving prices to ludicrous levels, so that, in 2023, a bottle of 1926 Macallan sold at auction for £2.1 million.

Japanese whisky became highly sought after when Jim Murray, author of the influential Whisky Bible, selected a Yamazaki single-malt sherry cask as his World Whisky of the Year in 2015, describing it as ‘near-incredible genius’.

It felt as if the good times would never end. They did, however. Falling demand caused by an ageing clientele, an inability to recruit younger drinkers and stagnating economies in its largest markets were exacerbated by rising interest rates, higher energy costs and global instability. One whisky executive commented bitterly on the Ukraine war that ‘my biggest export market invaded my second biggest’.

The perennial problem with whisky is that because it takes time to mature, a minimum of three years, distillers always have to anticipate future demand, which means the industry is prone to cycles of boom and bust as production over-shoots. We are in a low phase now, with the American industry particularly badly affected. However, as Georgie Bell of The Heart Cut, an independent bottler that buys interesting whiskies to sell under its own brand, observes: ‘We talk about whisky being in dark times, but perhaps we should take a more global approach to that. When you look at certain whisky markets, such as Nigeria, India and China, things are booming.’

Whisky has come a long way from the wild days of illegal stills and smuggling, thanks to the energetic Victorians who marketed their wares with such élan. If it can channel some of their spirit then, despite the current troubles, it will remain the world’s most popular spirit for years to come.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There is much to see and do in Monterey in August during car week, and many of those things to see and do involve looking at, or driving, very expensive cars. It is also a time for manufacturers to show us new cars, with the Sauron-like gaze of the world’s smartphones beaming down on this small slice of central California.

It is perhaps indicative of the world we now live in that you can feel extremely present at an event occurring more than 5,000 miles away simply by clicking follow on a few Instagram accounts and letting the algorithm do the rest. Koenigseggs, Lamborghinis and whatever else doing burnouts along various beach-side roads while people chatter excitedly on voice-overs about just how impressive said car is and valuable and rare. Sheets are pulled off new designs and prototypes to various oohs and ahhs of assembled Ozempians. Cutting through is not easy, because at Monterey, there is always a bigger four-wheeled fish lurking right around the corner.

The McLaren McL 6GT is not the biggest fish, but it was certainly the most prized reveal of the week. Rumours had been swirling for some time that McLaren were releasing their first ‘manual’ car since the F1 ceased production in 1998. Those rumours swelled to a crescendo on August 14, when the McL 6GT blinked into existence and the internet roared its approval.

If such a thing as a prevailing wind exists in the world of car design, then it is surely blowing towards the past. The McL 6GT is inspired by (and takes most of its name from) Bruce McLaren’s own M6GT, the ‘genesis of McLaren’s road cars’. In the words of McLaren Automotive CEO: ‘The McLaren McL 6GT imagines what our inspirational founder had wished to complete but with six additional decades of innovation and passion woven through every element, creating a modern icon of driver connection.’

That 60 years of innovation might be found underneath the car's clean Can-Am lines, but the exterior is very much a celebration of the past. If you could criticise McLaren (and indeed many other sports- and supercar manufacturers), it would be that too many of their machines look like they were born on computers and grew up in wind tunnels; 3D-printed steaks wrapped in carbon fibre.

What they have lacked is provenance — a story, a feeling, something to talk to a petrol-station admirer or a dinner-party guest that is more than just numbers. The irony is, of course, that McLaren has plenty. It feels like it's finally manifested in the McL 6GT, a machine that looks like it was designed by a human with a pencil. There is a sense of heritage to the whole thing that feels timeless. A Kammback tail certainly helps.

And, of course, the manual gearbox. McLaren has always taken great care in trying not to overindulge their drivers, eschewing endless screens and buttons in order to keep the driving experience pure. And now with a full manual in the range, the experience is complete. Surely it will only be a matter of time before customers are asking for manual boxes in their own cars.

Could this be the beginning of a new dawn in the direction of design for the gang at Woking? It’s too early to say, but there is so much to like with the McL6GT that it feels the pressure will be hard to resist. The vintage McLaren badges, ‘Speedy Kiwi’ details and proper big headlights all feel like the beginning of a counter-revolution. McLaren will always make spaceships that people will buy, but so much of the joy of the brand is the story. Competition comes in many forms, but the most compelling argument will never be numbers, but sensations, heritage and style.

So, here is your answer. In between the palm trees, Pacific Ocean and plastic, what stood out wasn’t something new, but something quite obviously old. Not a race to the end of a quarter mile, nor bending the physics of drag in a wind tunnel. Rather, a carefully thought-out piece of human design, drawing together the many elements of a business and philosophy that began for so many of us on a bedroom wall. If you want to win Monterey Car Week, the solution is to keep it simple.

‘Gold has taken me to places I’d never have otherwise visited,’ Vincent Thurkettle says, as we stand on the deserted platform of Sanquar train station in Dumfries and Galloway. Like Bilbo Baggins, wrenched from his cosy home in The Shire, I have traded my loyal sofa for a remote Scottish river. The destination is the same — a cornucopia of riches. With Vincent as my Gandalf, I am going on an adventure. We are hunting for gold.

The journey begins with my housemate’s engagement. On returning from her holiday she held her left hand aloft and a ring sparkled tantalisingly. Beyond the congratulations, I wondered: where did that gold come from? Why do we prize it so highly? And what had it gone through before ending up on her finger? That is why I am in Scotland.

On our walk to Vincent’s car to begin our day’s panning, he notices a five pence piece on the floor. It is this Gollum-like pull to shiny objects that led Vincent, aged 49, to quit his full-time job. Ever since, he has been battling an incurable sickness: gold fever.

On our way to Wanlockhead, the (often debated) highest village in Scotland, Vincent tells me his story. He worked for the Forestry Commission for 28 years as the deputy director for the East of England, before chucking it all in to pursue gold panning full-time. He found the largest gold nugget (at the time) in Britain, worth an estimated £50,000, off the coast of Anglesey in 2012; it weighed 97 grams. It was pipped to being the largest by a 121.3 gram nugget found in 2019.

He also came fourth in this year's gold prospecting British championships, losing out to the current British champion Daisy, his daughter. Now, he has written a new book. Finding Gold: My life-changing treasure hunt with nature, in which he tries to explain civilisation’s magnetic draw to this honey-coloured metal.

Gold is 4 billion years old — older than the Earth itself. It was formed when massive stars exploded and when neutron stars collided. This became mixed with cosmic dust and rock when our solar system formed, which is how gold came to be spread deep within the Earth’s crust in small quantities. Landslides, volcanic activity, high pressure and erosion have brought it closer to the surface, and our tools for finding it have become much more advanced. It is usually found in quartz and river deposits (like the one we are searching today) where it has been washed by erosion.

In its pure form gold is very malleable and non-reactive. It is also very heavy — it has a specific gravity of 19.3, meaning that a piece of pure gold is 19.3 times heavier than the exact same volume of water, which makes it sink to the bottom of our rivers. It is this heaviness that allows for panning.

‘It is a treasure hunt,’ he says. ‘The river has hidden a few tiny specks of gold, and it's an incredible challenge to find them.’

He also runs gold prospecting courses for those wishing to acquire the Midas touch — telling them about how to gain licences to legally pan for gold, where to go to do so, how to use a gold pan, and so on. ‘On YouTube, half the people finding big gold nuggets are lying. They're painted stones. There are a lot of charlatans,’ Vincent explains. Everyone from divorcees to the dying attend his courses. Gold seems to give people hope. ‘It’s an enormous range,’ says Vincent. ‘Maybe 25% of people who come on the course are hurting.’ On a happier note, many are also looking to propose with a ring made, at least in part, of gold they’ve found themselves.

We arrive at the river and gather the various tools needed from Vincent’s car. Equipped with two gold pans, a pick axe (that I admit, does worry me at first, given that I am in a remote location with a man I have never met before), water pump, vials for our spoils, and Wellington boots, we trudge into the water. His favourite way to pan for gold is by lying face down in the river in a wetsuit with a knife, chipping away for nuggets. I decide sitting on a rock will be sufficient for today. After a bit of deliberating, Vincent chooses a spot — a reasonably shallow cranny where he thinks gold may be lurking.

He uses the pick axe to break away a few rocks, then, with the pump, extracts a pan’s worth of residue from the river bed. We will work this particular part of the river bed until it’s ‘clean’, Vincent says. I sit on a nearby rock and watch as he rakes the lighter material off the top of the surface with his fingers. Then begins the painstaking process of swirling the material around the pan and gently sifting off the lighter debris into the river. Eventually, small shiny things begin to reveal themselves amid the rubble. ‘There, there!’ I shout excitedly.

With the weariness of a man that has heard this many times before, Vincent informs me: ‘There’s a phrase in gold panning: If you think that it's gold, it isn't.’ He is, of course, right. I have spotted a shiny stone, not a gold nugget.

After a while, Vincent gets down to the real dregs of his pan. ‘Are you ready not to be impressed?’ he asks, pointing towards something that I can barely see, perhaps a quarter of the size of a grain of sugar. ‘To be a gold prospector in Britain you need to have good eyesight,’ he jokes.

Excitingly, we have found gold on our first attempt. Less excitingly, it is miniscule. ‘They’re not the size of baked beans — they’re the size of full stops,’ Vincent explains, of the nuggets to be found in the UK, before adding: ‘A full stop would be a generous one.’ Our tiny bounty, however, proves that the spot Vincent has chosen is worth plundering.

We return to the crevice and suck up a new load of rubble. It is my turn. Holding the gold pan on my knee, I carefully sift and sort for what feels like hours as the baking sun beats down. I am growing weary until one swirl reveals an unmistakable semi-circle of yellow shininess.

‘It’s gold. It is!’ I shout to Vincent, sure this time that I can’t have been mistaken. He starts to repeat the old adage until he spots my glowing haul. I have struck gold on my very first try and, compared to our previous haul, it is practically a mine. Around 20 small nuggets, all considerably larger than our first find, wink up at me. The feeling is exhilarating and all thoughts of my aching back, wet socks, and surely sunburnt neck are banished. Vincent beams, his smile almost as bright as the gold in my pan. ‘You’ve experienced the best of it,’ he says to me, safely ushering the precious cargo into a vial. ‘That’s yours to keep.’ I feel myself come over by something almost incurable. The excitement is almost unbearable. Gold fever is catching.

Panning with Vincent in a remote Scottish river isn’t the only way to find gold, otherwise people would have to propose with Haribo rings. Many do it on a more industrial scale. John Reade is a senior market strategist at the World Gold Council, a membership organisation that champions gold’s role as an asset. Their members are large scale gold mining companies that ‘produce’ gold around the world, of which there are 29 in total. Newmont and Barrick are the biggest and most famous.

‘These are very, very different from your Scottish gold panners,’ John confirms. ‘These are companies that that mine millions of tons of rock a year — hundreds of millions of tons — and produce, each of them, millions of ounces of gold.

‘They concentrate it to 70%-80% pure. It then goes to refineries that turn that concentrated gold into pure gold, and those refineries turn it into coins, bars and jewellery industry feedstock.’

How sustainable is this practice? According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, each year about 3,000-3,700 tons of pure gold is mined. ‘There’s around 55,000 tons of gold in reserves — that’s gold that is known to mining companies,’ John says, but he is confident that we will continue mining gold ‘for the foreseeable future’. However, he warns, it is ‘getting harder to find gold and to get the environmental and social permits you need to start a gold mine’. Gold is mined on every continent except Antarctica, but less than 1% of global gold production comes from Europe.

It’s clear that John could talk about this all day. ‘You’re literally just scratching the surface,’ he says, ‘talking to someone who used to work 2,000 metres below the surface. That gold in the ring on your friend’s finger could contain gold that was mined by the Incas, it could have been on the fingers of pharaohs’ — it could also have been, theoretically, a gold tooth that was chewing jellied eels in the mouth of an East End gangster. Nevertheless, I am keen to move onto the next stage in my journey from river to ring. For this I need to talk to a gold trader.

‘Gold is a continually fluctuating commodity,’ says Jon White, who launched Gold-Traders (UK) Ltd in 2008. ‘It’s no different to oil or wheat or any other commodity that is traded on the open markets, so every minute of the day, just like stocks and shares, the price goes up or down.’ In 2026, the price of gold hit an all time high. ‘Primarily because of international conflict going on overseas… but gold is the primary commodity we come to in times of instability.’

The irony is that gold is technically almost ‘useless’. ‘Obviously it’s used in jewellery and recognised as a store of wealth, but from an industrial perspective it has very little reuse,’ Jon says. ‘But it is the safest way that you can tie up your assets in times of instability, because there will always be someone who wants to buy it from you.’

Unfortunately, the trading of precious metals is entirely unregulated, meaning it’s down to the consumer to determine whether they’re being offered a fair price for their gold, although Jon is campaigning to get the law changed to introduce more transparency in the market. Much ‘recycled’ gold also has a tragic history. Plenty was mined by slaves, and plenty of innocent blood was spilled to acquire it. Nevertheless, our demand for it endures.

Perhaps this is because we associate it with gods and kings. Perhaps it is because we associate it with tangible coins. Maybe it is because gold cannot truly be destroyed, as it is a noble metal it doesn’t tarnish, corrode or rust and cannot be broken down by a single acid. I imagine it also has something to do with it being rather beautiful. Either way, it seems a fitting metal with which to pledge a lifelong devotion.

‘Every single gram of gold that has ever existed since the Big Bang, when planet Earth was first created, still exists on our planet — apart from the gold that's now been sent up into space, that’s floating around in satellites or sitting on the surface of the moon,’ says Jon.

Cassandra Goad, who makes fine jewellery in London, is likewise smitten with the metal. ‘It’s the magical brilliance, for me, of nature producing this metal from the earth, and then this holding of stories and history within it that is so important.’ But the gold market has not been kind to jewellers this year. ‘Inevitably one is affected by the price of gold. Of course you are. I mean it was terrible at the beginning of the year because the price just went ridiculous,’ she says. Her fellow jewellers agree.

In January, I spoke to Cece Fein-Hughes of Cece Jewellery. ‘It’s really stressful,’ she said. ‘We are going to increase our prices soon. We have to. It makes me really upset, because it just suddenly cuts out a whole market of people for fine jewellery.’

In the same month, Sheherazade Goldsmith, the brains behind Loquet London, agreed. ‘Being a jeweller, because you're affected so much by the price of gold, you know what's going on. I sort of know when the price of gold is going to go up again just because of what's happening in the news,’ she said. ‘We opened the year with war in Venezuela, and the Chinese looking at Taiwan, and basically with the Americans deciding that they can just go and depose anyone they like.’

Cassandra, however, is still doing lots of business. Her customers either have gold jewellery they'd like turned into something new, or want a new piece entirely. ‘Most gold nowadays is, by definition, recycled,’ she says. ‘Gold, in its purest form, is almost as soft as silver, and therefore it's completely useless to have a ring made of 24-carat gold because it'll just bend all over the place.’ In order to change the mechanical properties of the ring, it is alloyed with different elements like copper, zinc and silver, to improve its hardiness. The highest and most expensive carat that is really used in jewellery making is 22. Eighteen-carat gold, for example, has 75% pure gold in the alloy.

Cassandra begins by melting down the gold in a small crucible, then pouring it into a steel skillet. This creates a rod of gold, which she’ll then ‘pickle’ in some acid, clean and hammer it and then run it through rolling mills. She will shape the ring and size it, soldering the joint on the band, before sending it off to be assayed.

This is the final step in our journey, before a ring gets into the sweaty anxious palm of someone set to propose. Will Evans, the director of the London Assay Office at The Goldsmiths' Company, is responsible for making sure gold is what its makers say it is. ‘We've been testing precious metals here at the Goldsmiths’ Company for almost 700 years,’ he says.

‘Gold is the one thing that you can't really judge by looking at it. Nine carat and 22 carat and brass all have vaguely similar visible properties, so somebody has to check, and in the UK, the person who checks is not the same person as the one who made it or is selling it to you.’ This process is called hallmarking.

First, the assay office tests the gold product, in this case our wedding ring, using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry — a non-destructive technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. ‘Sometimes, especially if people are mixing various types of new gold and old gold, they get their calculations wrong,’ Will says. ‘Sometimes people may do it nefariously to try and pass things off as a higher standard. So that's what we're doing. We're making sure that when you buy a piece, you're getting what you pay for in terms of the precious metal.’ Once the hallmarking process is complete, and pieces stamped with the legal seal of approval — at Will’s company their emblem is a leopard’s head — the pieces are ready to be sold.

‘There is no diamond fever or sapphire fever or palladium or platinum fever, but there is a gold fever,’ Vincent said to me, as we left the river behind, and now I see why. It is a multi-faceted element. All at once totally useless and at the same time enduringly desirable. ‘People get obsessed about gold, and it seems like almost every civilisation on Earth has, throughout time,’ he said..After all, Bilbo wouldn’t have gone all the way to Erebor if the dwarvish treasure trove was made up of platinum. Likewise, I’m sure my friend would’ve said yes to a wooden ring, but the fact that she has a gold one makes it just that bit more special.

A month ago, preparing this magazine’s London Life pages for August, I wrote that the city is at its most verdant in summer. Our trees usually reach their apogee this season. How wrong I was.

The prolongation of the heatwave, despite last week's intermittent rain, means the trees are now experiencing so much stress that they have started shedding their leaves. Autumn has come early.

Perhaps none has suffered more than the apple tree. Orchards across the country started losing their fruit in July when the trees were forced to redirect wilting water reserves to their roots in order to survive. It is forecast to be one of the worst apple harvests in history — a nightmare for cider-makers. ‘The effect won’t be seen until 2027,’ says Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Somerset for 180 years, ‘when this year’s yield translates to sales.’

Last year produced one of the richest yields on record. Although not as voluminous as in previous years, 2025 benefited from last summer’s then record-breaking sunshine and produced an unusually, delightfully sweet mixture. Apples of exceptional potency translated to top-notch drinks. The fine cider on sale this summer has been phenomenal.

Too much heat, however, can be fatal. Until last week, it hadn't rained properly in the West Country — cradle of British cider-making — since late June. Producers are expected to make a heavy loss in 2027. Suggestions, from some, to diversify a specialist industry are as oxymoronic as they seem inconceivable.

Importing apples, meanwhile, offers little in the way of compensation. ‘Producers in Europe are most likely experiencing similar issues,’ Nick explains. ‘It would constitute an additional cost to import and potentially dilute [our] product’s quality.’ A fine cider, akin to the one made by his family, prides itself on using local ingredients. For more mass-market brands, a few things could still be done. ‘Instead of importing apples,’ Nick says, ‘they might look to import apple concentrate’: that is, transporting a higher density of product across borders at a lower cost.

As is the case for other, equally water-reliant industries, creating infrastructure to capture the winter rain is paramount to preserve our orchards’ future. Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992: the result of red tape and resistance from residents near suggested sites. This is neither fair nor right. Cider is one of our greatest and proudest creations — an industry with huge potential as changing tastes lean in favour of lighter booze and national produce.

Supporting our makers goes beyond merely buying their products: it demands a proper strategy. Even our most robust trees need deep watering in times of drought.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It’s easy to feel sorry for French presidents of late. I’m not talking about the constant strikes; resistance to raising the retirement age and lifting the cap on the 35-hour working week; the rise of the far-right and the radical-left; debt, immigration, Islamic terrorism, hi-viz-wrapped rioters, and wildfires. I’m talking about the official state cars they have to squeeze into the back of.

Governing the Fifth Republic is no easy task, made worse by some of the pretty awful motors seen parked outside the Élysée during the past half century. Poor Jacques Chirac suffered the brunt. His presidency (1995-2007) spanned the Citroën XM, the Renault Safrane and the Peugeot 607.

Things weren’t much better for François Mitterand, his predecessor, who did his best to maintain dignity in a Renault 25 and the particularly wretched Renault 30 hatchback. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher had been driven around in a mk1 Vauxhall Astra and you get the idea. It doesn’t exactly whisper ‘CEO of the nation’.

If you’re the premier of a country that doesn’t have a recognised car industry, the answer is simple: You get a Mercedes S-Class, specifically its armoured 680 Guard derivative. If you’re the Chancellor of Germany, the answer’s even simpler. If you’re the President of the USA, you get the 9,000kg Cadillac Beast, which is actually built on a truck chassis and maxes out at just 60mph. If you’re Vladimir Putin you get the Russian-built Aurus Senat limousine, which goes some way to explaining his anger management issues.

And if you’re one of our many recent Prime Ministers, you have a choice of Range Rover Sentinel or, if you insist on a saloon, the long-wheelbase Audi A8L. That’s because Jaguar haven’t built a saloon since 2019. The shame is not entirely France’s. I say stick Burnham in a Bentley, although if he had his way he’d probably be on a Lambretta.

Things started off pretty well for our Gallic chums. Before the Second World War, France was a leader in luxury automobiles. In the 1910s, the official car was the Panhard 20V, followed by the Renault 40CV in the 1920s, and in the 1930s les présidents had Renault’s Reinastella convertible and Nerva Grand Sport. After the war, President René Coty was chauffeured in Citroën’s iconic Traction Avant.

Charles de Gaulle followed him in 1959 by ushering in the Fifth Republic and the elegant Citroën DS, which became a big part of his image, mainly because it saved him from a hail of gunfire. Next, Georges Pompidou commissioned two special open top Citroën SM’s. This was peak avant-garde. And then, in the late 1970s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing approved the Peugeot 604 and France could never be taken seriously as a superpower ever again.

France makes decent family cars. They’re not as stylish as the Italians do them, nor as well-built as the Germans, but they tend to be jolly and relatively cheap. What they have always struggled with since the 1970s is luxury, which is weird when you think Cartier, Chanel, Hermès, Dior and Louis Vuitton are [checks label], yep, definitely French. Every 10 years, Renault and Citroën will have another go, wheeling out the avant-garde tropes, never entirely convincingly. Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, had the quirky Renault Vel Satis and the handsome Citroën C6, but they were replaced by François Holland and the equally bloated and disappointing Renault Espace V.

So what of the current incumbent, Emmanuel Macron? His ride to the top table of western diplomacy has been SUV crossover-shaped, in the form of the DS 7 Crossback, the Renault Rafale, and the car I’ve been driving this week: the all-electric DS No.8.

Citroën have taken the name of the car with which De Gaulle escaped assassination, and made a whole new brand out of it. It’s pronounced ‘Day Ess’, and is a sort of Lexus to Citroën’s Toyota. The flagship’s name is No.8, which makes it sound like a perfume. I shall refer to it as the Numero Huit.

Is it a saloon, a hatchback, a fastback or an SUV? Everything, all at once! There’s a lot going on in the amalgamate design. A mix of lines, folds and strakes going in lots of different directions. In the flesh, the Numero Huit looks quite stylish, but if it snatched your phone you’d have a dickens of a time describing it to the police e-fitter.

Inside, it’s smart but also quite eccentric, as if Jean-Paul Sartre were clad in Nappa leather and had eight speakers bolted onto him courtesy of French audio specialists Focal. The X-shaped steering wheel looks like it’s been liberated from a concept car. I tested the top-of-the-line Étoile spec Numero Huit with all-wheel-drive and a 97.2kWh long-range battery that’s good for 430 leisurely miles. The dual electric motors produce 350bhp. That’s more sensible than existential, but results in a respectable 0-62mph in 5.4 seconds. Top speed is 118mph — faster than Mr Trump’s obese Caddy, at least.

The emphasis is not on shifting, but wafting. This car is as smooth and silky as a Charvet shirt and tie (as worn by De Gaule, Mitterand, Pompidou and Macron), and yet the car I drove is £63,290. That’s pretty impressive for this amount of space and presidential refinement. It’s a budget Bentley. Bentley’s Flying Spur starts at £190k — and would cause the proletariat to dig out the guillotine. Whereas the Day Ess Numero Huit will save your neck, at least until the next union action grinds everything to a halt. And it will do so with more than a soupçon of French veuve.

So felicitations, Emmanuel, things in the Élysée car park stakes are finally looking up again.

‘Ugh! What hideous brutes!’ was the remark overheard by Country Life’s correspondent attending the Bulldog Club show in 1904. However, as the magazine reported only five years earlier, only the ‘uninitiated’ call a bulldog ugly, and ‘those who are admitted to the privilege of a bulldog’s friendship know that no other cast of features is so expressive of all the kindly and good emotions’.

It may be that the bulldog’s rugged appearance is a ‘cultivated taste’, stated the magazine in 1939, ‘but at second glance we understand that he is not half so bad as he looks. He is reliable partly because he has a quiet confidence in his own powers, and, like most strong men, he is not going to presume on his own strength.’

Of all Britain’s native breeds of dog, the bulldog is the one most associated with our desirable national characteristics. Staunch and stoic, whether at home or abroad, matter-of-fact John Bull is not correctly depicted unless there is a bulldog at his side. Indeed, synonymous with ‘tenacity, courage, and determination’, the bulldog is the very symbol of Britain and, as Country Life noted in 1995, ‘in times of national peril, the bulldog appears in cartoons, festooned in the Union Jack, jaw thrust forward with determination, eyes indicating that not an inch of ground will be yielded’.

As their name suggests, they were originally bred to bait bulls, a brutal pastime that would be enjoyed by many in Britain, including Henry VIII, both his daughters, and James I. The earliest recorded bull-baiting took place at Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1205. William, Earl Warren, of Stamford in Lincolnshire, is said to have enjoyed watching a recalcitrant bull being chased and chivvied through the marketplace by a butcher’s dogs. He granted the town a piece of land so the tussle could take place annually.

Derived from the same line as mastiffs, bulldogs were referred to in The Mayster of Game (1413) as the ‘alaunt of the boucherie’ and described as being large, short-headed, pugnacious, and inclined to hold on when attacking. The bulldog is first mentioned in literature under various names in about 1500 — Bondedogge, Banddogge and Boldogge — and by 1630 it is quite clear from letters of the period that bulldogs and mastiffs were certainly different breeds.

The gladiatorial heavyweight may have had a disreputable past by modern standards, but it certainly did not put off would-be owners. Lord Byron liked powerful dogs — perhaps a reaction to his own physical shortcomings, having been born with a club foot — and in 1807 he acquired two bulldogs at Cambridge. The first was Savage, and then Smut, an animal bred for bullbaiting and considerably nimbler and more ferocious than his modern counterpart.

During Lord Byron’s time in Italy, it is said that he pestered continually for English-bred bulldogs to be sent to him, claiming that the Italian variety lacked ‘the tenacity of tooth and stoicism of his canine fellow citizens’.

The 19th century sounded the death knell for the old bull-baiting type of bulldog when, after much controversy and discussion, Parliament passed the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1835, abolishing the ‘sport’. In Dogs: Their History and Development of 1927, Edward Ash wrote: ‘When bull-baiting ended, the dog was bred for “fancy”, and characteristics desired at an earlier time for fighting and baiting purposes were exaggerated.’

The increasing popularity of dog showing would give the breed a second chance. However, the pages of Country Life would record the debate about the ‘modifications’ to the bulldog’s appearance.

In 1931, Arthur Croxton Smith would note that: ‘In some respects they improved the appearance, replacing the repellant-looking head with one that is distinctive and rather fascinating with its ruggedness. Since the War, however, in many instances we have lost the old body properties, especially the tapering hindquarters and tucked up belly, and here breeders have ample scope for their abilities. Most emphatically, bulldogs ought not to be shown in a condition in which hard muscle is replaced by fat.’

However, Stonehenge pleaded for the perpetuation of the pure breed: ‘If it is allowed to drop, the best means of infusing fresh courage into degenerate strains will be finally lost, except with the addition of extraneous blood, which may not suit them; for I believe that every kind of dog possessed of very high courage owes it to a cross with the bulldog.’

The modern breed was accepted by The Kennel Club in 1873 — the Bulldog Club is the oldest single breed club in the world — and the bulldog remains a Churchillian symbol that has captivated Lewis Hamilton, David Beckham, Ozzy Osbourne and Brad Pitt.

The title of a 1960 comedy starring Norman Wisdom remains one of the most resonant bits of alliteration in our language — The Bulldog Breed.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

Highland folklore relates that, upon attending the Braemar Gathering in Aberdeenshire, Queen Victoria was disconsolate to discover that her sporting favourite, Donald Dinnie of Balnacraig, had already taken his turn in the stone-throwing competition, the event with which Braemar was most closely associated.

Hurriedly, an official was sent to ask the strapping Scot if he wouldn’t mind putting the 28lb stone again, for the benefit of the Queen Empress. ‘Aye,’ Dinnie replied. ‘For £2 and not a penny less.’ He got his money. That the Widow of Windsor and the stonemason’s son from Aberdeenshire should be linked in this likely apocryphal tale is apt, for the mismatched pair had done much to make the Highland Games — which had been outlawed for more than 30 years under the 1746 Act of Proscription — into something not only respectable, but fashionable, too.

Queen Victoria had been an enthusiast for Highland sports since attending an early iteration of the Games in 1848 (an event for which she would become patron in 1867). Braemar was convenient for Balmoral Castle and Her Majesty would remain an enthusiastic attendee at the gatherings for more than 50 years. Dinnie, meanwhile, lays claim to being the UK’s first global sporting superstar. Brilliant not only at putting the stone, but also tossing the caber and throwing the hammer, the great Deesider’s world tours ensured that he was recognisable to sports fans from New Zealand to Canada and from San Francisco to Cape Town.

In the late 19th century, the remarkable Scot was as much an international paragon of our island’s athletic prowess as Sir Roger Bannister and Sebastian Coe would later become. Although running, jumping, dancing and the music of bagpipes, fiddles and Gaelic harps play their part in the Highland Games, much as they did in the ancient Olympics, the cornerstone of the games are the ‘heavy events’ at which Dinnie excelled.

As their collective name suggests, these involve throwing mighty objects: hammer, stone, weight or caber. The heavy events have a power, grandeur and simplicity that echo the landscape in which they were created and, although there are subtleties to them that please the expert eye, even those watching for the first time can understand them.

There are no complex offside laws, bewildering umpiring decisions or video assistant referee (VAR) reviews. With a history dating back to the reign of Malcolm III (1058–93), the heavy events are as wreathed in legend as the local glens and lochs and they have created many heroes.

Dinnie was the first of them — a wonder of the Victorian Age to compare to Stephenson’s Rocket. Born in 1837, the Scot could sprint, hurdle, jump (long and high, possibly both at the same time) and pole-vault, as well as toss the caber, putt the stone and throw the hammer. He was Highland Games Champion for 21 straight years, from 1856 to 1876. The man from Balnacraig stood about 6ft tall with 15in biceps, a 48in chest and a bristling moustache. ‘He carried his sixteen stone of bone, flesh and muscle with an ease, grace and elasticity of motion rarely if indeed ever seen in a man of his proportions… his dark, finely moulded features revealed intellectualism of the highest order… his flashing penetrating eyes a sharp native wit,’ gushed the correspondent of The North Star.

He also had a swagger that bordered on arrogance. Often, he was so confident of victory he would toss the caber without bothering to take off his jacket. On other occasions, he issued a challenge to beat any other man’s two throws with one of his own. Bets and challenges added to his prize winnings (Highland Games competitors were and would remain professionals) and it’s said that, during his 50-year career, he won more than 11,000 events.

His global tours earned him about £25,000 (the equivalent of about £2 million today). Sadly, as many great sports-people did, he spent merrily and invested unwisely. Shortly before his death in 1916, he was reported to be ‘eking out a bare existence in Croydon’ — a cruel fate for any man.

The tartan-clad gladiators who followed in Dinnie’s considerable shadow might not have enjoyed the same global celebrity, but they were no less colourful. There was the ‘Highland Adonis’, who would go on to have an ill-fated assignation with a Hollywood film star. This was dark-haired Jay Scott, who stood 6ft 2in in his stocking feet and had powerful muscles developed from rowing himself to school across Loch Lomond from the family farm on Inchmurrin Island.

Scott was a superb all-round athlete who excelled not only at the heavy events, but also at running and jumping. Handsome and charismatic, during his 1950s heyday, the rugged farmer was as unstoppable as a runaway train. At the games in Tobermory on the Hebridean island of Mull, he once carried off first prize in all the heavy events, as well as the 100yd and 200yd, the triple jump, long jump, high jump and pole vault.

Scott was handed the award for best athlete at the Aboyne Games seven times on the trot and, if his performances often seemed to be accompanied by the sound of music, that was likely the vibrating heartstrings of watching ladies. Little wonder he was said to have inspired the burly hunk on the Scott’s Porage Oats box (porage, incidentally is an amalgam of porridge and potage that was adopted by the makers in 1914).

The great athlete married the glamorous English actress and singer Fay Lenore after the couple’s eyes locked at the Braemar Games, but she had competition. At the peak of his fame, her husband toured the US and Canada, where his powerful physique and matinée-idol looks attracted the attention of Jayne Mansfield, a film star of such improbable proportions she made Sophia Loren look like Twiggy.

A romantic tryst on Mansfield’s heart-shaped bed seemed set, but, when the Scotsman tried to shoo the blonde bombshell’s yapping chihuahuas from the boudoir, she took umbrage. Her minders were summoned, lifted the thwarted paramour into the air, carried him down the stairs and dumped him in the swimming pool.

In the days when athletics in Britain was strictly amateur, the prize money on offer at the Highland Games made them very attractive to strong men from south of the border, too. Cambridgeshire policeman Geoff Capes was a double European and Commonwealth shot-putt champion and was pretty invincible during the 1980s Highland Games heavy events. Bearded and fearsome, he stood at 6ft 6in and was built like an oak tree. He might have come from the flat country of the English Fens and bred budgerigars as a hobby, but, in kilt and vest, he was every US film producer’s ideal of a Highland chieftain.

Capes followed a trail blazed by another shot putter 20 years earlier. Arthur Rowe was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and worked in a coal mine, training for athletics behind his local pub using weights made from the wheels of pit wagons. He was British champion five times and also won golds at the Commonwealth and European Championships in the 1950s. However, things went sour for Rowe at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Tipped to win a medal, he suffered a terrible upset stomach, lost close to 10lb in weight and failed to qualify for the final. Disillusioned and broke, he quit the rarefied world of amateur athletics and headed for the Highlands, where the best performers were paid in cash.

The gruff Yorkshireman made his debut at the Braemar Games in 1962 wearing a borrowed kilt and promptly broke the all-time record for putting the stone. The offers and money soon flowed in. At his peak in the mid 1960s, the former pitman was being paid £30 appearance fees per event — a substantial sum in the days when an experienced office worker might take home £15 a week.

The burly Yorkshireman struck up a fierce yet amiable rivalry with ‘Big’ Bill Anderson, a mighty slab of a fellow from Bucksburn, Aberdeenshire, who trained on a diet of mince and tatties, worked out in his garage during the winter months lifting tractor tyres and was the first competitor in history to throw the heavy hammer more than 150ft. The mismatched pair pushed each other to greater and greater performances and became firm friends in the process. In one celebrated incident on a rainy day at Lochearnhead, the two giants lifted up a car that had got stuck in the mud ‘as easily as if they were popping a cork from a bottle’. It was a sight that would surely have amused even Queen Victoria.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Riley Harper remembers the first time he saw a professional stuntman at work. He was four years old, he was on the set of the 1995 Kevin Costner action film Waterworld in Hawaii and it was his father. ‘I think that was probably where the seed got planted,’ he says.

Riley is the definition of cool — and not bad to look at either, if you care about that sort of thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles-born stuntman has been performing daring feats since the age of seven, when he appeared in his first film. Soldier (1998) starred Kurt Russell and saw childhood Riley fall down a set of 20 stairs. ‘I was always pretty fearless,’ he says.

He has followed in the motorbike tracks of his father and uncle, appearing in films such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). ‘Anything with Christopher Nolan as a director is amazing to work on,’ he says ‘Those Batman movies are so fun. Putting on the suit was very cool.’

The job doesn’t come without its risks. Riley describes how, for the ‘really frankly bad remake’ of Point Break (2015), he had to jump down a 25-feet high cliff on a motorbike in the pouring rain, to land in between a cluster of trees. Oh, and roll a car over again and again next to a cliff's edge. ‘There were a lot of scary things that could have gone wrong.’

It’s safe to say that, as he gets older, Riley is (somewhat) slowing down. ‘All through my twenties I was just going from movie to movie to movie, all around the world, nonstop.’ In his thirties he has branched out into photography, directing, writing and growing a social media following to showcase his work — he has 441,000 followers on Instagram at the time of writing and works with brands such as Porsche and Belmond.

This has allowed him to spend more time at his home in Calabasas, which he shares with his wife, model Paige Harper, and their two-year-old daughter. ‘Nowadays I do strive to have a simpler life, because everything is complicating life, you know? For example, phones are supposed to make our lives easier, which they do in a lot of ways, but I think they complicate life more than they simplify it,’ Riley says.

‘Going out of your way to do less. It’s a really strange thing… I think being aware is important because our attention is being stolen, basically all day long, with these tools that we need to survive and make a living.’

Riley has not, however, totally taken his foot off the gas. ‘I’m still doing stunts, but I do more hand-picked jobs now. Usually more driving work. When I was younger I did a lot of motorcycle stunts, which are more dangerous than cars, for the most part, but yeah, it is still dangerous.’

So, where’s the line? Is there any stunt Riley won’t do — particularly now that he is a father? ‘I’ve never said no to anything. Primarily because anyone who’s hiring me understands what I’m capable of.’

Your aesthetic hero

Probably Anthony Bourdain, not really for his aesthetic in the traditional sense, but more for how he lives life and looks at stuff. Outside of him, I would say I usually admire older men who don’t have social media. Just random people, for example, a guy I see in Paris who opens his same store every day and is just bettering himself over time.

An exhibition that has impressed you

I mean, this is kind of corny, but for me it’s the exhibition of life. I love those mundane moments in life that most people don't see, and I like to look for those now and appreciate them.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Well, I’m an extreme car person. I've always been into cars and vehicles and motorcycles, and I would say it's close to a sickness. So, I just bought myself a new Porsche 911. I got to actually build it top to bottom. I’ve ordered a baby seat for the back. I'm biased, because she's mine, but I'm doing my part to make my daughter as cool as possible.

Your favourite painting

I can’t remember the name of it, but I took a photo of one in Reid's Palace [a Belmond] hotel, Madeira. It was a sailboat in a storm, hung over the fireplace in their lobby. Everyday that I walked past I would just stare at it.

A possession you would never sell

I would probably say my 1969 Triumph Bonneville. It’s an iconic British brand. They’re as authentic as it gets. I always loved those as a kid, and dreamed of having one one day. And so I found this motorcycle in pieces, I actually traded a vintage car I had to a mechanic for it. I knew it was gonna be a lot of work but I spent probably a year and a half building it with my dad, my uncle and a mechanic that I used for engine stuff. We basically brought it back to showroom level.

I finished that bike when I was 20 or 21, so I've had it for a long time, and I've now raced it at desert races. I've driven my wife on it for date nights. It's just the most beautiful motorcycle in my opinion, so I don't think I could ever part ways with that. It's too sentimental. Nothing could replace it.

A book you’ve found inspiring

Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus, I'm in the middle of that right now, which is fun. James Salter, I'm getting into recently, so I'm bouncing between a few of his. The Anthony Bourdain Reader — I read that when I’m in my sauna.

Another book that comes to mind that I’ve read probably five times is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I've always been a fan of Rick Rubin, I've met him many times, and I've always respected what he does — and that book is just so good.

The music that you work to

Mostly jazz. I love jazz.

The last podcast you listened to

I think Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton. He always has really interesting guests on, such a wide variety, and he's a great interviewer — a very curious guy.

The person that would play you in a film of your life (and the person that would perform the stunts)

That's an interesting question to have to answer. God, I don't know. That is so hard. I don't know if my life's worth having a movie about. Maybe, if I could go in a time machine, I would say Pierce Brosnan in the 90s. He was my James Bond. And then to do my stunts, maybe my younger brother? We're pretty similar looking and he’s alright at stunts too, I suppose.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My wife and daughter. Safety in numbers, we would survive.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Also my daughter, for sure. But probably, more broadly, my curiosity. And a morning coffee, it’s just the most exciting thing. I think about it the second I open my eyes.

The items you collect

Cars and motorcycles.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Splendido Mare [a Belmond hotel] in Portofino. My wife and I got married there. We've been going to Portofino at least twice a year since we met. It's just our favourite place, and we have a lot of friends there.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

The dinner at our wedding, but also my wife and I used to go on sailing trips and the dinners we’d have on them — local fish that you’re buying off other boats and cooking on the boat — were always such great meals.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife got me a Cartier tank watch for my wedding and she engraved the back. That’s sentimental, and something our daughter will wear one day.

Ever since my book Fashioning the Crown (Faber & Faber, £25) was published earlier this year, I have often been asked to identify my favourite of Elizabeth II’s superb outfits. Although I admire her majestic evening gowns and regal ceremonial robes, I particularly love the off-duty clothes she wore in Scotland. These have a quiet and timeless elegance, as well as being practical, and they remind me of the occasions when, as the wife of Prince Philip’s godson, I saw her on shoot days at Balmoral, wearing a tweed jacket, tartan skirt, woollen stockings and sturdy brown leather brogues.

It has sometimes been said that her heart was in the Highlands and she certainly looked at ease there, as well as beautifully dressed — even in the yellow Marigold gloves she donned to wash up after picnic lunches in a bothy.

After the Queen’s death in 2022, when I was researching my book, I was fortunate to be allowed to study many of her clothes in the archives at Windsor Castle, where they were being catalogued for the current exhibition at The King’s Gallery (‘Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style’).

Amid the magnificent examples of royal couture deployed as sartorial statecraft and dress diplomacy, I was drawn to an impeccably tailored ensemble from the late 1940s, before she came to the throne.

The Scottish tweed jacket was made by Norman Hartnell, who created her fairy-tale wedding gown in 1947 and would go on to design her spectacular coronation robes in 1953. Examining it closely, I could see it was cut along similar lines to Christian Dior’s famous Bar jacket from his debut New Look collection of 1947, with a defined waist, neat buttons and gently padded shoulders.

If a contemporary model were to appear in the same tweed jacket at a Paris fashion show next month, it would look as perfect as it did eight decades ago on the young Princess Elizabeth. Needless to say, it would be no less appropriate on a heather-clad Scottish hillside this season.

The Princess’s Hartnell jacket was paired with a Balmoral tartan skirt: the same distinctive fabric that had been created in 1853 for her great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the year after they had purchased the Deeside estate.

The tartan is relatively discreet, at least by Victorian standards — predominantly grey, with red and black overchecks — and said to be designed by Prince Albert, who was inspired by the rugged granite of the Aberdeenshire landscape.

It was, of course, Victoria and Albert who made this area so fashionable during her reign, drawing tourists and tartan-buyers to the Highlands. The royal couple’s highly romanticised version of Scottish style was writ large in Balmoral Castle itself, which was constructed as a vast neo-Gothic building in the mid 1850s and bedecked with an abundance of tartan upholstery and furnishings to match the swirling royal kilts.

This idealised 19th-century aesthetic, subsequently dubbed ‘Balmorality’ or ‘tartanry’ by its cultural critics, has been derided as inauthentic and sentimental. Yet the decorative Balmoral tartan — which can only be worn by members of the Royal Family and the Piper to the Sovereign — has aged wonderfully well, as is evident in The King’s Gallery exhibition, where visitors can admire the late Queen’s skirt.

Pleated, but with less fabric than a traditional kilt, it has the same ageless appeal as her Scottish tweed jacket and, for me at least, it is impossible to see without remembering the last public picture of Elizabeth II, taken only two days before her death.

Framed in the reassuring surroundings of the Balmoral drawing room on September 6, 2022, as she prepared to meet the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, the Queen was smiling and wearing her signature pearls, with a soft grey wool cardigan, silk blouse and familiar-looking tartan skirt.

Although clearly frail, she looked every inch our monarch, as she always did, but also a natural Scottish countrywoman, at home in her favourite place in the world.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Last week, a friend, who shall remain nameless, took his watch, the brand of which will also remain nameless, to the shop that it came from for some necessary repair work. It is an expensive sailing watch, gifted to him by his wife on the occasion of their wedding, so he wore it while competing in a few sailing competitions. It was, unsurprisingly, a bit salty. The shop staff were baffled, but overjoyed. According to them, my friend was their first customer to use the watch as it was intended to be used and to make the most of its extraordinary roster of features.

Sure, these watches work just as well accessorised with a suit in London’s Square Mile, but you wouldn’t buy a speedy sports car and take it to Tesco. Luxury watches and cars are beautiful feats of impressive engineering and not using them to their full potential is a middle finger to the brains behind them. (The exception here is the proliferation of timepieces designed to operate in space. I’m not suggesting you all retrain as astronauts.)

Enter Seiko’s new offering. The Prospex Mechanical PADI 60th Anniversary Limited Edition ‘King Turtle’ watch, designed for another watery pursuit — diving. Seiko is a Japanese manufacturer of watches, clocks and electronic devices. It was founded in 1881 and is probably most famous for producing the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch in 1969 and Japan's first diver's watch, rated to 150 metres, in 1965. This year, they’re celebrating a decade of collaboration with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI).

PADI is the world's largest recreational scuba-diving membership and training organisation, and operates through thousands of dive centers in more than 180 countries. It has certified more than 30 million divers globally — that’s a lot of available wrist space.

The Turtle design is one of Seiko’s most recognisable dive watch shapes and gets its name from the cushion-shape case, which resembles the animal’s shell. This latest iteration is water resistant to 200 metres which is more than you’ll likely ever need because while advanced recreational divers can sometimes reach 40 metres, only extreme technical divers can push past the 100 metre mark.

The day-date display has a handy magnifier tool and the hands and indices are coated in Seiko’s Lumibrite, a luminous paint that absorbs light quickly and glows briefly in the dark, so that you can tell the time in murkier conditions. Most importantly, the bezel can only rotate anticlockwise so you can track time spent underwater, safe in the knowledge that you cannot knock it clockwise, which would make it appear as though less time has elapsed.

The timepiece comes with a deep blue dial, to symbolise the colour of the ocean, and two straps. The silicone one (above) is designed to fit over a wetsuit.

Limited to 8,000 pieces, the King Turtle is remarkably well priced (from £650), especially considering its blue ceramic bezel, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal case and excellent construction.

Before you buy, however, please ask yourself where and when you’re going to wear such a wonderful thing. Afterall, the greatest luxury is not just owning a watch capable of going 200 metres beneath the surface, but having the good sense to take it there.

There was once a French nobleman by the name of the Marquis d’Albignac. Impoverished by the Revolution, he fled Paris for London and one day found himself in a tavern renowned for roasting the finest beef in town. As he was polishing off his superlative piece of sirloin, a well-bred young man approached, and asked whether he was French. ‘Mais oui,’ he replied. ‘Well, then,’ came back the Young Buck, ‘we hear that your country excels in the art of making salads. Would you be so kind as to make us a dressing?’

After a little hesitation, the Marquis agreed, mixing his vinegar and oil with expert élan. The dressing was a resounding success, the gentleman took his address and he was tipped most generously for his efforts. A few days later, the Marquis was summoned to dress a salad in one of London’s grandest houses. Stocking up on ingredients, he arrived on time and whipped up another stirring symphony, which was met with an even more rapturous response — as well as an even more lavish tip.

From that moment on, D’Albignac became known as the ‘fashionable salad dresser’, quickly becoming the darling of London’s beau monde. Such was his renown that he struggled to keep up with demand, racing from one mansion to another in a brand-new Brougham carriage, specially fitted with a bespoke mahogany work box. This contained oils of every hue and flavour, rare vinegars, caviar, truffles, ketchup, meat essence, egg yolks and everything else needed to work his magical melanges.

Soon, his clients begged him for their own versions of his box. He duly obliged, knocking them out by the hundred, and quickly amassed a small fortune. He returned to France a rich man, retiring to a small country estate in Limousin — which goes to show that salad dressings are always a serious business.

A dressing can be as simple as a sprinkle of salt and a dribble of oil — the sweetest summer tomatoes, picked warm from the vine, need nothing more — or as fiendishly, fantastically complex as a Diophantine equation.

You’ll find them in every culture, made with oil and vinegar, sour cream and mayonnaise, soy sauce, tahini, lime juice and sesame. They use pine nuts and cheese, spices and herbs, buttermilk, ketchup, anchovies and eggs. Without dressing, salad is little more than an incongruous jumble of clueless vegetation, a listless rabble of gormless green — the dressing’s job is to unite. Like a brilliant conductor, great dressings draw together dissonant noises into one harmonious whole.

Classic vinaigrette

As ancient a combination as bread and olives, the alchemical emulsion that the French call ‘vinaigrette’ is perhaps the most classic and best known of salad dressings. I prefer one part vinegar (red or white wine are the French classics, although sherry, balsamic and apple all have their fans) to four parts oil.

I know, I know, many recipes recommend three to one, but dressings are an intensely personal thing. One man’s mellow is another’s overbearing. Sometimes, I feel an urge for walnut oil, others, a peppery Tuscan Laudemio Frescobaldi or something fresh and fruity from Provence.

I use what is good and close to hand — the joy of vinaigrette lies in the endless variations on a theme and the final call is yours. Always start by mixing the vinegar and salt, then add your flavourings (mustard, perhaps, or minced garlic). Pour the oil in a slow stream, mixing or whisking all the time. Keep tasting.

This will keep in the fridge for up to a week, although anything involving fresh herbs and garlic is best used within three days. When dressing the leaves, use the biggest salad bowl you can find (preferably wooden) and mix with your hands (or salad servers if you must) at the last possible moment before eating. You want enough to ensure each leaf glistens like a Greek warrior, but not so much that they drown. Eat sharpish.

Spring

Wild-garlic vinaigrette is the very essence of spring and is as good on crisp endive as it is on cold asparagus.

Ingredients (enough for two big salads)

• 1tbspn white-wine vinegar
• Big pinch of salt
• Hearty screw of fresh black pepper
• 1tspn Colman’s English Mustard powder
• 4tbspn good olive oil (I like something soft and easy, such as Perelló Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Brindisa)
• Handful of wild-garlic leaves, roughly chopped

Method

Mix vinegar, salt, pepper and mustard in a small bowl or clean jam jar with lid.

Add the olive oil in a gentle trickle, mixing as you go. Or simply put all the ingredients into a clean jam jar, screw on the lid and shake.

Mix in chopped wild garlic and serve.

Summer

South-East Asian dressings are all about punch, acidity and vim, usually involving some combination of fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and chilli. One of my very favourites is the prik nam pla used to dress a Laotian larb, or minced meat salad.

Just combine equal amounts of fish sauce and fresh lime juice and throw in as many bird’s eye chillies as you dare.

Nuoc mam cho goi (fish sauce for salad)

The recipe below comes from a brilliant book called Vietnam: The Cookbook by Anaïs Ca Dao Van Manen. It’s rather more mellow and works wonders on noodle salads with prawns and fresh trout. Better still, it can be easily transported in a bottle to Ascot and Glyndebourne, where it adds instant zing.

Ingredients (enough for two big salads)

• 35g garlic, finely minced (I use a fine Microplane grater)
• 1 long red chilli, finely sliced (or 2 bird’s eye chillies, for more of a kick)
• 85ml fresh lime juice (about 3 limes)
• 75g white sugar
• 65ml fish sauce

Methos

Mix garlic and chilli with fish sauce in a small bowl. Add the sugar and lime juice and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Autumn

As nights draw in, all thoughts turn to comfort, but it’s not quite time to bid summer adieu, hence an iceberg wedge salad with blue-cheese dressing, where the pert and crisp meet the creamily soothing.

With the obvious exception of that Tijuana-born beauty, the Caesar salad, I have little time for creamy dressings and I find the popularity (in the US, at least) of ranch and thousand-island dressings baffling. Made properly, they have their place, I suppose, but too often, they’re a cloyingly gloopy mess, bound together with cheap emulsifiers and second-rate ingredients.

Iceberg wedge salad

This is an American classic, from food writer Marion Cunningham in Saveur Cooks: Authentic American.

Ingredients (serves 2-4)

• 1 head iceberg lettuce
• 120ml sour cream
• 120ml mayonnaise
• 2 spring onions, minced
• 2–3tbspn lemon juice
• 120g of mildish, creamy blue cheese (Dorset Blue Vinny is ideal)
• Freshly ground black pepper

Method

To make the salad, remove the core from the iceberg lettuce by banging the core end sharply on a counter. Then, grab the core, twist and pull. It will separate cleanly. Plunge the cored head of iceberg forcefully into a sinkful of cold water. Drain, wrap in a towel, and refrigerate overnight.

Combine the sour cream, mayonnaise, spring onions and lemon juice in a bowl and mix well. Stir in the cheese, cover with plastic wrap, then refrigerate for at least four hours.

To serve, cut the lettuce into four large wedges, spoon the dressing over it and season generously with pepper.

Winter

It’s cold, it’s dark and you’re looking for something with a little more heft. Pasta salad, I hear you cry. Get thee away, Satan. The only place for a pasta salad is the compost heap. Beans? Well, that’s a whole different matter, tumbled with masses of herbs and chillies, in a sharp, lemon-heavy dressing. Bliss.

Better still, is the recipe here, made with bacon fat. I stumbled across it somewhere down in the Deep South of America, a place not exactly known for the delicacy of its salads. The hot dressing wilts the leaves, hence the name ‘killed’. This recipe comes from my book Let’s Eat Meat.

Killed salad

Ingredients (serves 4)

For the salad

• 8 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
• 2–3 romaine lettuce hearts, pulled apart
• 3 tomatoes, each cut into 6 wedges
• ½ red onion, thinly sliced

For the bacon vinaigrette

• 2tbspn white-wine vinegar
• 1tbspn runny honey
• Big pinch of mustard powder
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• About 6tbspn extra virgin olive oil

Method

Fry the bacon in a heavy-bottomed pan over a medium heat until crisp, then drain on kitchen paper, pour off the fat and reserve for the dressing. Crumble the bacon.

To make the vinaigrette, heat the vinegar, honey, mustard and salt and pepper in a small pan until warm, then whisk in the reserved bacon fat and enough olive oil to make up to 100ml/3½fl oz, until smooth and emulsified.

Arrange the lettuce leaves in a bowl, add the tomatoes and red onion, sprinkle with the bacon, then pour over the hot dressing. The leaves should wilt. Eat immediately.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There is no noise except the rush of exhaled bubbles and the loud hiss of breath, the deep water near the sea bed muting and magnifying the sound. Contrast that with loud voices bouncing metallically off stainless-steel surfaces, the dull thud of a knife on a chopping board, the jarring clatter of a saucepan meeting a hob and the explosive hiss of oil as cold, raw ingredients hit a searingly hot pan.

These two opposing worlds — one serenely and coolly underwater and one within the heat and clamour of a professional kitchen — blend in one man, Andrew Baird, executive head chef at Longueville Manor Hotel and Restaurant, which has three AA rosettes.

Most chefs worth their proverbial salt understand intimately how to curate, coax and compose ingredients to create a formidable dish, but Baird, who has worked at Michelin-keyholder Longueville for four frenetic decades, takes this several steps further and occasionally dives for the scallops that he serves up in the restaurant at supper time.

‘If there’s one area where I feel totally in tune with my ingredients, it’s with a scallop,’ says Baird quietly, the antithesis of many booming television chefs and a man more in harmony with the natural world than most. ‘I can be at the market and look at one and know immediately whether it’s fresh or has been defrosted.’

Three decades ago, this father of two — who is married to Eilish, a lawyer — began to collect these delicately sweet cylindrical shellfish nestled in fan-shaped shells himself. His partner in dive was Bob Titterington, a virtuoso at finding the best Pecten maximus Nature has to offer on the sea bed.

Today, a blindingly sunlit Tuesday in June, Baird has arranged to take me to the reefs and islets that make up Les Écréhous, six miles from the shoreline. We will rendezvous with Titterington and his nephew, Toby Woolley, plus Toby’s friend Harry Jones, on their rigid inflatable Humber, The Black Knight, before they backflip into the relatively shallow waters that encourage scallop growth in search of encased booty resting on the seabed.

Sitting on a bench seat on one of a trio of rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) run by Jersey Seafaris and with a font of local knowledge, co-director and skipper Dan Luce, at the helm, my cheeks are suddenly tugged taut, hair instantly untamed, sunhat sent skittering across the deck as he applies the throttle and Seafari Phoenix races effortlessly across the silken, still waters.

As we slow to a near halt and hear the piercing chee chee chee of oyster-catchers, an unexpected (for me anyway) smattering of houses that now function as holiday homes or fishermen’s refuges, comes into view. Luce reveals that one Philippe Pinel lived on this archipelago, initially on Maîtress Ile and then on Blanque Ile, for nearly half a century from the mid 1800s. What isolation, what fear when wild seas rose and all but engulfed his remote outpost.

Even before Pinel became a resident, this area was a magnet for oyster fishermen, but unregulated dredging devastated the beds and today’s key captures are lobster, crab and scallops, the latter often collected by hand. We pull alongside The Black Knight, the Seafari Phoenix bobbing in unison with her.

‘We dive four days a week and you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. In the winter when it’s blowing, it’s not quite so wonderful. It’s also time-consuming and labour- intensive. They’re 14-hour days,’ shouts 64-year-old Titterington across the boat divide.

He began diving aged 13, in part to escape his land-locked allergies. He points out the nets and lift bags in which the flat-lidded, curved-bottomed scallops will be collected, the bags inflated underwater and sent to the surface when ready, the scallops being counted on the boat and placed into bins, sometimes graded and shelled, then delivered fresh that evening to restaurants.

There is a size restriction. Every shell collected must be no less than 105mm at its widest point. ‘Stocks are very good due to this warming, but the biggest threat is the predatory octopus that is now in the deeper waters of Guernsey,’ explains Titterington, adding that chef Baird has capitalised on the current boom time for scallops.

‘Andrew understands all about the tides and the weather and he used to do a lot of scallop diving himself so he gets the notion of the sustainability of picking by hand. Since we’ve been diving here, stocks have gone up in this area.’

Conversation over, Titterington slips beneath the sea’s surface and vanishes into the deep blue; Seafari Phoenix is throttled into life and we return rapidly to St Catherine’s Bay, unable to make ourselves heard over the roar of the wind and the engine, except that I catch Baird saying: ‘It’s not just a scallop to me any more. I know the blood, sweat and tears that goes into capturing every one.’

Back to the relative serenity of St Saviour and the luxury oasis that is Longueville Manor, Baird, nestled into a sofa, explains that, as a teenager, a stint of part-time work in a Cantonese restaurant close to the Sheffield home that he shared with his four siblings and divorced mother, a nurse and accomplished cake-maker, brought him into contact with never-before-encountered ingredients, igniting a life-long passion for food.

A touch of the rebel in him didn’t want to follow his father into cheffing — he was the head chef on The Master Cutler train service from Sheffield to London St Pancras — but the pull was too powerful and eschewing an almost equally strong desire to be a silversmith, he headed to catering college, where the new head of department was Kevin Woodford, later the BBC’s Ready Steady Cook frontman.

‘Within a couple of weeks I was enjoying college and starting to shine. I’d be making a consommé or a stock and whereas other people weren’t getting it, I was thriving.’ At 18 he found himself at The Ritz, where he honed his craft via ‘larger than life’ head chef Michael Quinn, at one point cooking for the Queen, and then he followed another culinary wizard, Barry Foster, to Jersey. ‘I’d never even heard of the place and the only way I could find out about it was to visit a travel agent and pick up a brochure.’

He arrived, lived in bedsit land and, aged 23, secured a job at Longueville Manor, also immersing himself in the local environment, learning to scuba dive, joining fishermen on their trawlers, foraging and studying the moon and the tides.

‘I looked at how I could take the ingredients around me and make them work for the hotel. A lot of chefs have come to me from some wonderful places and you send them to the garden to get some chervil and they’ll come back with carrot tops.

'Seeing people stumble made me realise that you can be a great chef, but it doesn’t mean that you understand where your ingredients come from and, until you do, I won’t say you’re fake, but you don’t know the whole package.’

This evening, in Longueville’s restaurant, where the diners murmur in low tones and my table is swathed in pristine white linen, I ponder whether I’ll plump for a starter of ceviche (raw) hand-dived local scallops, served with pickled rhubarb, blood orange and seaweed tuile, or hand-dived local scallops with salad leaves sourced from the hotel’s kitchen garden and drizzled with a smoked aioli dressing.

I choose the latter and discover from Baird after he has emerged from the kitchen in his chef’s whites that these were ‘cleaned and lightly seasoned, then placed in a heavy cast-iron pan with a drizzle of oil and pan fried for 40 seconds before being finished with homemade garlic butter’. However, the handling of the 50,000 scallops consumed here each year is every bit as important as the cooking.

‘We buy them by the bongo [drum load], and, as I like complete control, we open them all by hand. That way, I know how fresh they are.’ Not that Baird is a one-trick scallop pony. Far from it. My main course — griddled local aubergine with marinated cauliflower, garden squash, creamed cashew nut and lentil dahl — makes for a balanced celebration of Jersey produce, each element bringing texture, depth and divine flavour.

Pudding, a caramelised garden lemon tart (the lemons grown in the greenhouse here) with garden rhubarb and hibiscus sorbet, is refreshingly zingy for the perfect finale.

Talking of finales, it will soon be time to leave my chic room at this friendly and fabulous hotel and, as we say goodbye, Baird drops into the conversation that he will be doing a spot of foraging on his way home this evening. That comes as no surprise. In fact, I wouldn’t expect anything else.

Rooms available at Longueville Manor Hotel in October from £160 a night. Click here for more information.

his feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchesse du Berry held a costume ball to mark the arrival of Mary Stuart of Scotland at the Tuileries in 1829, she insisted on a quadrille (a dance performed by four couples in a rectangular formation) that could only be done if one carried a fan.

It revived a fashion lost during the French Revolution and transformed Jean-Pierre Duvelleroy’s dream into an illustrious business.

The 25-year-old éventailliste (fan-maker) established his company in Paris in 1827 to produce hand fans from fine materials using artisanal techniques.

Designs were inspired by artists, the natural world and culture, painted onto paper or threaded with feathers. Mounts (the part held in the hand) were made with wood including birch, ebony and beech; mother-of-pearl, ivory, and galalith can be chosen today.

In 1843, Duvelleroy patented a mould that made it possible to cold-pleat delicate fabrics enabling silks, lace and tulle to be painted or embroidered, at the same time as preserving their lightness.

About 2,000 métiers, including gilders, plumassiers, mirror-makers, painters, embroiderers, goldsmiths and engravers were sourced by Duvelleroy (up to 20 artisans worked on each fan), earning his metaphorical reputation as an orchestra conductor.

Materials are still decorated and individually hand-pleated, fold by fold, on an identical model.

Queen Victoria was so taken by the collection shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which included a fan made especially for her, that she swiftly appointed Duvelleroy as supplier to the Queen, and the European courts followed.

The London boutique opened at No 167, Regent Street in 1861 and published a booklet explaining the coded messages of fan gestures, such as twirling in the left hand (‘we are watched’) and carrying in the left hand in front of the face (‘desirous of acquaintance’).

The company maintains young Jean-Pierre’s founding vision: to craft exquisite fans and return them to the hands of all.

Duvelleroy's couture fans, handmade in Paris, start from €950; Fashion fans, handmade in Spain, start from €67. Visit the website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Can you believe it is already mid August? For many of us at Country Life, the thought is unfathomable. Our inbox is already full of emails warning about Christmas. Blink twice and it will be September.

The name given to the feeling that each year whizzes by faster than the last is Janet’s Law. A tribute to 19th-century philosopher Paul Janet, it explains the phenomenon via mathematics. One year feels like a long time when you’re 10. By the time you’re 40, it is a drop in the ocean. Many drops blur into one. It makes sense, to a point. I wish to offer a different explanation: that a year goes by faster when you’re busy.

Modern life — of which Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times offers, to date, the most searing critique — ensures that we are busy with every waking minute. Chaplin himself could not have anticipated the horrors of the 21st century: the endless news cycle; a different app for everything; the British Airways indemnity form; too many options on Deliveroo.

I often return to a line spoken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, a show every writer at the Edinburgh Fringe is still trying to ape: ‘I just want someone to tell me what to do.’ Amid the tribulations of our humanoid age, it is a statement I end up making daily. Paying an invoice? Returning a hire car? Claiming money back on a delayed flight? It takes three webpages, four departments and about 10 years off one’s life. Someone, please, please tell me how to get this off my plate.

Our lack of time boils down to a lack of autonomy. Surrendering all human processes to a device is no good. The programs get things wrong. They are lazier than us. I now have to get through three different automated voices merely to contact my GP receptionist.

Writing in FT Weekend earlier this year, Janan Ganesh lamented a world in which he believes there is too much spare time. Childlessness and the absence of grunt work — his projections for the West — will eventually render us idle. To me, this isn’t the case. If technology has sped up some processes, it has more often lengthened them. I have no reason to believe AI will be different. It took the chatbot Claude nearly three minutes to answer my question about Janet’s Law, by which point I’d read more than half of Psychology Today’s article on the subject.

Time is a funny thing. It speeds up and slows down. It is relative and potentially infinite. It is something we all wish we had more of. The longevity movement, although problematic in many ways, recognises that we could all benefit from a few more years on Earth. Some of these, one hopes, will go more slowly than this one.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The luxurious two/four-seater Aston Martin DB4 represents the logical climax of the many years of sports and Grand Prix racing carried out by the makers. Their intention has obviously been to produce a car that would combine the comfort and convenience of a grand touring saloon with the qualities and performance normally associated with a racing car. There are no features of the design that can be described as revolutionary, but its cohesiveness is based on the hard experiences of international racing.

The remarkable power output of 240 b.h.p. is obtained at 5,500 r.p.m. from the six-cylinder twin-overhead-camshaft engine, which is of light-alloy construction. A most rigid crankcase is employed, and there is a seven-bearing crankshaft. The bore and stroke are both 92 mm, to give a total capacity of 3,670cc. The compression ratio is not unduly high at 8.25 to 1. Two S.U. carburettors are fitted; on the engine of equivalent capacity used for the shorter Gran Turismo and for sports-car racing, three twin-choke Webers are used. The sump has the large capacity of 17 pints, and a full-flow Purolator filter is incorporated in the lubrication system.

Though the engine is at its best on the highest-octane fuel, it will run happily on any premium-grade petrol. On many modern cars the engine compartment is largely filled with extras, but, with the Aston Martin, when one opens the forward-hinged bonnet, little else is revealed but essential mechanism, and accessibility is good. The gearing is such that an engine speed of 5,300rpm gives a cruising speed of 120 mph. The engine is fitted with chrome-vanadium wet cylinder liners.

Front suspension is by coil springs and transverse wishbones, and large telescopic hydraulic dampers are incorporated. The suspension at the rear is by coil springs, trailing arms and piston-type dampers. The rear axle is located transversely by Watt's linkage.

Rack-and-pinion steering is used and exceptional care has been taken to eliminate friction and wasted effort by the driver. The steering requires only 2½ turns from lock to lock, and just over 32 feet is required to turn the car.

The four-speed gearbox has a remote control of sports-car type, but synchromesh is provided on all four gears. As one would anticipate on such a fast car, Dunlop disc brakes are fitted, and a vacuum servo is incorporated in the hydraulic system to prevent the pedal pressure from being too high because of the fade-resistant linings used.

The car's fuel tank has the sensible capacity of 19 gallons, which, with an average consumption of 17 mpg, gives a range of over 300 miles, even allowing a gallon for fuel-gauge inaccuracy; in fact, there is a controlled reserve of three gallons.

The body can almost be described as integral with the chassis, as a framework of steel tubing on the Superleggera principle is connected to the chassis and covered with aluminium panelling. Apart from the principle of construction used, the lines of the DB4 owe much to Latin artistry. The air entry on top of the bonnet is not entirely necessary to feed air to the carburettors, but, as it fits over the leading edges of the overhead camshafts, it allows a lower general bonnet line to be achieved.

Most owners of such a car will doubtless regard it as a two-seater, as its performance almost demands the modern long-arm driving position, with the seat set well back, which reduces knee-room in the rear to a great extent. The interior of the car is most luxuriously fitted, and the equipment includes two bucket seats of Reutter type, on which it is possible to adjust the rake of the squab instantaneously and while in motion. Both front seats are well shaped to resist lateral force, and the driving position approaches perfection because of the well-placed pedal controls and gear lever. A valuable detail is that it is possible to transfer the right foot from the full-throttle position to the brake without having to move one's heel from the floor.

Despite the car's clean and sweeping lines, skill has allowed a large luggage boot to be provided, and the rear seat can be used to increase the luggage accommodation. A complicated system of levers controls the heating system, but once understood it works remarkably well. The fascia and instruments are well laid out, with materials that prevent any danger of irritating reflections appearing in the wraparound windscreen. With the large doors fully open entry is very easy, but some effort is required to get out with any degree of decorum.

As the induction system is not pre-heated, it is necessary to warm up the engine before expecting it to pull cleanly after it is first started up; a radiator blind is fitted to make this more rapid. There is no danger of being caught napping by the great power of the engine; it is so apparent that even the most careless driver could not inadvertently give too much throttle. In town driving it is best to make full use of the gearbox and, in fact, to ignore top gear and use the silent-running third gear instead.

While I would not suggest that the DB4 is in any way intractable, even its most enthusiastic user would not suggest that it is the perfect car for everyday town use. It is meant for use on the open road, where it comes into its own. Its makers have advertised — and the performance can be repeated at any time — that it can be accelerated from 0 to 100 mph and braked back to 0 in under 30 seconds. This is a truly remarkable performance.

Theories about overall performance and potential average speed have to be looked at in a completely new light when one is considering a car capable of 50, 75, 105 and almost 140 mph. on the four gears. The ease and accuracy with which the race-bred Aston Martin can be handled makes all normal cars appear clumsy and sloppy, and, although the suspension has clearly been set with high-speed stability and perfect adhesion in mind, it is interesting to note that it can be most favourably compared with softly suspended touring cars built for comfort only.

The car is not as silent as one might expect, but this is a small price to pay for such outstanding performance, and what noise there is is indicative of mechanical efficiency. The overall efficiency of the engine is shown by the similarity of the times required to accelerate through widely varying brackets of speed in top gear. Even without using the gearbox it is possible to leap ahead of other traffic with the greatest ease, and, what is perhaps more important, without ever feeling that one is driving in an exceptional manner.

On suitable roads previous conceptions about cruising speeds can be ignored and anything between 100 and 120 mph can be accepted as reasonable. The car is equally at home on a wide variety of road surfaces, and corners can be taken at high speeds in safety and easy comfort. On everyday roads one probably tends to take corners more slowly with the Aston Martin than one might with a slower car; the dazzling acceleration out of corners soon whirls the speedometer needle back to the selected cruising speed. Because of the reflection-free instrument lighting, the excellent headlamps and the comfortable and secure seating, night driving is especially pleasant.

It was not possible in the time at my disposal to find an opportunity to check the car's maximum speed with accurate timing, but there is no doubt in my mind that the claim of 140mph is justified completely. Apart from my feeling that a car of this price and quality would be better were it more silent, my only criticism applied to the gear lever. While excellently placed, its movements were rather lumpy, and it was essential to depress the clutch fully on every occasion if a clean gear change was to be obtained. It was interesting to note that with the engine switched off, the vacuum servo thus being made inoperative, greater pedal pressure could keep the brakes effective.

Combining almost racing-car performance with the standard of comfort associated with a town carriage, the Aston Martin DB4 represents truly first-class travel. It must be close to the ideal for the motorist anxious to travel far and fast without strain or fatigue.

‘My dog Sirrah,’ once wrote the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, James Hogg, ‘was beyond all comparison, the best dog I ever saw. He had a somewhat surly and unsocial temper, disdaining all flattery, and refusing to be caressed; but his attention to my commands and interest will never again be matched by any of the canine race.’

The breed has been valued for its strength and hardiness in the field since its arrival in Britain, most likely with the Celts during the invasions of the third and fourth centuries BC. The sheepdog Hogg describes is said to have been a bearded collie, a breed once highly prized in Scotland on account of its ‘sagacity and indifference to the demands of the climate’, Country Life reported in 1914.

Geographic conditions have undoubtedly had a considerable effect on types of working dogs and, in the Scottish Highlands, a profuse and weather-resistant coat was required to give the dogs protection when they stood guard over their flocks at night.

Gainsborough’s portrait of Henry, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch and 5th Duke of Queensberry (1770), depicts an early example of the large, shaggy dog, which can also be seen in Philip Reinagle’s well-known painting, an engraving of which appeared in The Sportsman’s Cabinet.

The rugged charm of the breed was captured by Country Life in 1898, when the magazine visited the kennels of Panmure Gordon. The first breed standard was drawn up in 1912, but the bearded-collie population was in rapid decline and, by the 1940s, it was very scarce indeed.

In 1954, Country Life reported that ‘a great loss would have been that very charming old Scottish gentleman, the bearded collie — a breed which has had a very close shave in the battle for survival’.

The Kennel Club gave recognition to the breed in 1959 and, today, bearded collies sit on the vulnerable native breed list.

‘A keen, intelligent dog, still physically and mentally capable of doing a good day’s work with the minimum of training,’ Country Life said of beardies in 1960.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

'My favourite thing about reeling,’ says a trainee clinical psychologist to my left, ‘is that you sweat out all the alcohol you’ve consumed there and then — because you’re dancing so much.’

It’s Tuesday night at St Columbus church on Pont Street, London, a plush address only moments from Harrods, and a crowd of nearly 300 has crammed into the hall to groove along to Scottish music. Most people here are in their early to mid twenties, in professional careers that aren’t so demanding that they cannot leave the office before six.

Doors open at 6.45pm, with the first reel at 7pm. The opening bars of The Dashing White Sergeant prompt people to take their positions in rows of three. A caller —someone who directs the newbies or those who are out of practice — numbers people one, two or three and ensures they are in the right place for the start.

A man and two women, or one woman and two men, arrange themselves into boy-girl formation and dance with the trio opposite them, with one forming a bridge at the end of the routine for the other to wiggle under and greet their next partners. The trainee psychologist beside me is a seasoned reeler and gives her moves a little extra flair. Another shouts ‘yippee’ at the end of the sequence.

Reeling, I’ve learnt over the years, comes with a certain vernacular. A Scotsman near me calls it the final bastion of heteronormativity: many dances involve a ‘presentation’, in which a man introduces his female partner to another male dancer as they move down a line together, dancing with the people opposite (many bows and curtseys ensue). One of the best-known reels, the Eightsome, sees one dancer cavorting in the middle of a seven-person circle, encouraged to push themselves to the max. Men, true to form, will grab the opportunity by the antlers.

‘A lot of them would use the Eightsome solo to do press-ups when we were younger,’ says lifelong reeler Kat Holbrook, a communications officer for luxury hotels, ‘to impress the girls.’ Sometimes, the rules are bent and a pair of the same sex will hop into the middle of the circle together: when two men do, mimicking stags rutting proves a popular move.

Experienced female dancers discuss the whole thing with a jaded air. One says that, during the Eightsome, she has seen men ‘attempt flips and cartwheels’. Miss Holbrook reveals: ‘I went to an all girls’ school and grew up dancing the male parts because I was so tall.’ She eventually had to ‘relearn’ the women’s half of the dances to keep up as an adult.

Reeling, to the uninitiated, seems odd and complicated. The vernacular runs deep. The choreographies are difficult. Demystifying this, however, has been among the calling cards for the collective known as London Reels, which organises the weeknight gatherings at St Columbus.

The current chair, Eliza Lindsay, tells me how much reeling in London has expanded since it picked up again post-covid. ‘Reeling was one of the last events to be allowed again after social restrictions eased,’ she notes. ‘It has exploded since.’

The London Reels collective takes over the church for one night in the middle of each month, from September to June. ‘We exceptionally hold two sessions in April and in May,’ Miss Lindsay tells me, ‘to wedge in extra practice ahead of the balls.’ She is referring to those in the Highlands, such as Oban or The Northern Meeting, which prove continually popular with the Scottish diaspora across the UK and take place in August.

Yet against these fancy, black-tie affairs, London Reels offers something different. Most attendees aren’t necessarily revising for the balls, but choosing to let their hair down at the end of the working day. They learn up to four dance routines in a single evening (The Dashing White Sergeant and Eightsome Reel are guaranteed, plus another two, which London Reels rotates each month to cover all bases before the balls), followed by drinks and actual dancing (‘the social’), during which they put their practice to use.

On offer are red wine, white wine and soft drinks. There is always a bowl of squash. London Reels itself hosts two balls a year, in May and December at the Battersea Arts Centre, with individual tickets at £70. They are growing more and more popular. ‘The median age of attendees, there and at the practice, has fallen considerably in the past four years,’ Lindsay says. ‘We have concession rates for students and those who wear tartan. In 2022, only 15% of attendees claimed those rates, but now, it’s about 24%.’

The cohort with me at London Reels is a wonderful mix of expert reelers and greener practitioners, although few are absolute beginners. There are more accessible entry-points for the curious — Holbrook recommends Reel Thing, run by caller John Carver, which hosts reels and ceilidhs throughout the year in the capital — as well as more advanced options for the experienced.

At the upper end, the Royal Caledonian Ball (a white-tie affair) takes place each spring at Grosvenor House on Park Lane. Some even head to France: each summer, since 2022, the Royal Versailles Ball at the celebrated palace just outside Paris has raised money for The King’s Foundation and other charities, with tickets starting at €240 (about £204). Even the best, however, flock to London Reels’s events for the sense of community.

‘It’s a really fun way to meet new people and make friends in London in your twenties,’ Holbrook beams. ‘See you at the next one?’

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

‘He was an aquarius, I’m an aquarius.’ Perhaps Cordelia de Castellane’s tenure as the artistic director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior for more than 15 years was written in the stars?

‘When I arrived, I think I made a very clear and strong link with Mr Dior himself. I know how strange it is, but going through his life and what he had left behind…’ she pauses, before adding, in her thick French accent: ‘He was very superstitious, I’m very superstitious. He was loving flowers, I feel very well in my garden…’

Whether you believe in the power of this ‘imaginary conversation’ between Cordelia and Christian, or indeed the significance of the zodiac, there’s no questioning the reality of the artistic director's success.

As well as Dior, Cordelia also runs her own company, Studio Cordelia de Castellane, which provides bespoke interior decoration for hotels, restaurants and private houses. In her own words, she has ‘a lot going on’. She explains: ‘I don’t like to do only one thing, I get bored very easily.’

Dior is the perfect gig for Cordelia. ‘As a little girl, Dior was a fantasy, it was a dream. I have always been obsessed with fashion,’ she says. Style also runs in the family. Cordelia’s great-great-uncle was the neo-romantic architect Emilio Terry. Her uncle, Gilles Dufour, was Karl Lagerfeld's long-time right-hand man at CHANEL and her mother, Countess Atalanta de Castellane, is an interior designer.

‘I grew up really in the middle of fashion and art and everything. It’s something that’s been around me since I was a little girl, so for sure I have a very good excuse to do the work that I do.’

Cordelia was raised in the Swiss mountains. An only child, she spent a lot of time with her grandparents, and a lot more time with no one at all. ‘I’m not really a city girl,’ she says. ‘I was a unique child, I spent a lot of my time quite alone — which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.’ Perhaps because of this she has always had a strong imagination, ‘because I had my own world within myself’.

She had work experience at CHANEL, courtesy of her uncle, and landed her first job there aged 15. This was followed by a 10- year stint at Emanuel Ungaro that was originally only supposed to last for a month. ‘I arrived a young girl and left a woman with two children, married,’ she says. Then Dior came calling. ‘I knew very young what I wanted to do, and I wanted to work for a big house, so from the beginning I knew my goal.’

Your aesthetic hero

I’m quite obsessed with [Lorenzo] Mongiardino. I think that if I have to name one person with that kind of taste who pulls me away it would be Mongiardino, for sure.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I would say that Monet is the painter who has my heart, because the way he paints nature is really something that talks to me. It's nothing original, but it's completely the truth.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Nineteenth-century vases painted with irises that I found in a flea market. They’re really divine.

A possession you would never sell

I don’t know, because I think the most valuable things I have are not of monetary value. I’m not materialistic. I will never sell my soul, that’s for sure. Not for anything.

Your favourite painting

Something by either Monet or Renoir. With the latter’s paintings, like Bal du moulin de la Galette, you look at the people and you can imagine the story of what they’re talking about and who’s in love with who. It’s something that I love to do. That and Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, by Monet.

The music that you work to

I could say classical, but also I love Coldplay and English pop music. I love music but it depends on my mood, you know?

The last podcast you listened to

I listened to something with Monty Don on. It made me cry, actually. He had a tough few years as a younger man. I’m a huge, huge fan.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

My family and my mum. Oh, and my dogs — Bagheera and Mowgli. Maybe I would swap all of them for just my two dogs. Maybe…

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Life. I love life.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Meryl Streep. I love her. She’s so successful, so brave, so talented, but with such simple, good values. And to be able to be that beautiful and stay at the top of your game without touching your face — if we are talking about authenticity, she’s an authentic woman. I don’t know if I could be as brave as her.

A hotel you could go back and back to

I love the hotels in Italy. Like Hotel Il Pellicano, for example.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I think it was something also in Italy. Probably pasta, because I’m obsessed with pasta. I’m always on a diet because I could eat all day. I love eating.

The items you collect

I am a huge collector of everything. Sylvanian Families — because I’m like a kid and I don’t want to grow up — books of flowers, erasers, frogs, vases, plates. I am quite an excessive collector of lots of things.

A book that you've found inspiring

I love Proust. He’s been next to my bed since I was a little girl. I also love the Paris of that time, which he writes about.

The best present you’ve ever received

My four children, for sure.

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Of all the many types of jewellery in the world, nothing says glamour, elegance or luxury like a tiara. Some experts believe that the reason tiaras are (literally) jewellery’s crowning glory is because they are worn on the head and are, therefore, more visible. Others reference the tiara’s association with divinity and its similarity to a halo. All point to the connection between tiaras and royalty.

However, for me, the answer is much simpler: a tiara always has the effect of making the wearer (no matter how accomplished or attractive) feel as if they are truly special.

My grandmother used to say that when she put on a tiara she became a different person: more graceful, more beautiful, more confident. As anyone who attended one of Elton John’s annual White Tie and Tiara Balls — a sort of tiara Xanadu — in the noughties will attest: tiaras can also be whimsical, entertaining, even fun.

And, of course, generally speaking, a tiara is likely to be the largest, least worn (with the possible exception of Dame Vivienne Westwood, who was frequently spotted cycling through London sporting one of her own design) and most expensive piece of jewellery that any of us will ever possess.

In short, for sheer extravagance, you can’t beat a tiara. This has been the case for well over three millennia. The jewellers of ancient Greece created beautiful gold tiaras: intertwined ears of wheat (sacred to Demeter, the goddess of the harvest) and branches of olive (for Athena), oak (for Zeus) and myrtle (for Aphrodite).

Floral tiaras — the flowers often mounted on trembler springs so that they fluttered as if in a breeze — were worn at banquets and weddings. The Romans adopted the tiara as the ultimate indication of rank and, for them, it became synonymous with imperial authority.

According to the jewellery historian Diana Scarisbrick, during the Middle Ages, every well-born woman expected to receive a coronal or jewelled garland as part of her dowry.

In the 16th century, tiaras were replaced by billiments (fancy, deeply unflattering headbands) and aigrettes (feathered hat ornaments), but by the middle of the 18th century, they were once again the height of fashion.

During this period, thanks to the discovery of diamonds in Brazil and the wider availability of coloured gemstones and pearls, tiara design went through something of a revolution. Gold (and silver) ceased to be the dominant element and became the framework into which gemstones could be set to best advantage.

The effect at court and other formal events must have been dazzling. Every married woman present would have been wearing a tiara — each one sparkling and flashing in the candlelight. For, until recently, there was always a strict etiquette surrounding tiaras. They were only to be worn by brides on their wedding day and by married women — and then only after dark.

It was Napoleon, or rather his wife, Joséphine, who did much to establish the popularity of tiaras. She wore a fabulous pearl-and-diamond tiara to her coronation in 1804, and between then and her death, she was given or commissioned countless others.

Her favourite jeweller was Marie-Étienne Nitot, whose creativity and skill took tiaras to another level. His firm eventually became Chaumet, which has probably produced more tiaras than any other jewellery house in the world. Indeed, it has just launched a dramatic blue enamel and diamond winged tiara called Envol.

Tiara is, of course, an umbrella term. There is the diadem (essentially a band), circlet (runs around the head), bandeau (a low, flat headband), kokoshnik (tall and broad), fringe (upright, graduated bars radiating from a horizontal base), halo (see the Cartier halo tiara of 1936 worn by Catherine, now The Princess of Wales, in 2011), wreath (self-explanatory), garland (swags, loops and bows), scroll (openwork built from volutes), meander (a geometric repeating pattern) and probably several others I have forgotten.

Many were designed as part of a set of jewels, or parure, featuring a particular pattern or gemstone; others for those in mourning.

As it was the custom to set the largest and finest gems into tiaras, for the past 300 years or so, jewellers have been adept at creating pieces that could be taken apart and worn in other ways. The Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara, for example, which was made by Garrard in 1893 and presented as a wedding gift to the future Queen Mary, converted into a necklace, coronet and bandeau.

My favourite tiara, however, is less versatile. Commissioned by the sixth Duke of Devonshire for Maria, Countess Granville, and made by C. F. Hancock, using diamonds, cameos and intaglios acquired by the second duke, it epitomises the English neo-Renaissance style and caused a sensation at the Emperor of Russia’s coronation in 1856.

But, then, I have never seen a tiara that doesn’t cause a sensation.

It is the ‘year of the tiara’, but what’s a girl (or guy) to do if they don’t have an heirloom laying about? You can read all about Felix Bischof's search for his own, here.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Wedding wine isn’t what it used to be. Where once you would be toasting the happy couple with Champagne (or, if you were unlucky, sticky demi-sec bought in bulk near the Calais car-ferry terminal), your glass is increasingly likely to contain English sparkling wine — and, if it’s a summer wedding, the chances are this will be pink.

One name in particular has become as ubiquitous in smart marquees as it has in the likes of Fortnum & Mason and The Savoy: Nyetimber. For Brad Greatrix, senior winemaker at the West Sussex producer, sparkling rosé ‘lends itself naturally to what English grapes provide. 'Because of our long, gentle growing season, we can preserve all those beautiful high-toned fruit flavours and carry them over. We say it’s English summer fruits in a glass’.

He and his wife, head winemaker Cherie Spriggs, worked with Nyetimber’s owner Eric Heerema to produce its first sparkling rosé in 2007, using Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir grapes (exactly the same blend as Champagne), the latter fermented with skins to lend a salmon-pink hue. This was followed in 2010 by 1086 by Nyetimber Rosé, a prestige cuvée (‘to be taken seriously on the world stage, we knew we needed them’).

As a nation, we can’t get enough of rosé: a recent report from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) revealed that some 129 million bottles of it were sold in the UK last year, with sparkling rosé proving increasingly popular at Christmas and Easter. Yet, when Nyetimber’s English version first came to market, people didn’t quite know what to make of it, recalls Greatrix.

‘There was a certain amount of initial apprehension because it wasn’t super pale.’ ‘People tend to drink with their eyes first and they think [a darker rosé] is going to be sticky, sweet and unpleasant,’ agrees Callum Edge, marketing director at Nyetimber’s West Sussex neighbour Sugrue, whose wines have been served at Windsor Castle.

Winemakers Dermot and Ana Sugrue bottled their first sparkling rosé a decade ago, after receiving a ‘glut of exceptional Pinot Noir grapes from a vineyard in Hampshire’. Rosé Ex Machina (‘because it came out of nowhere’) is ‘limpid, deeply coloured and fragrant… it’s now 10 years old and I think it’s absolutely in the zone right now’.

There was a second iteration in 2018 and a late release that year, which had spent 80 months on lees (in contact with its natural yeast sediments, which lend richness).

Cellar ageing of sparkling rosé is uncommon, but Sugrue has always strived to make ‘wines that are age-worthy and can go the distance’. Buoyed by this success, the Sugrues launched their first still rosé last year. Dear Noodles, named after a much-missed lurcher-greyhound cross, is an oak-aged blend of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier described by Edge as ‘an experiment’.

Unlike the first still English rosés, which tended to ape the popular Provençal, paler-than-pale style, it’s ‘almost like a pale red: we were inspired by those deep rosé wines of Bandol and Rioja’. He admits: ‘The whole idea was to create a bit of a two fingers to the likes of Whispering Angel.’

Despite its deliberately unflashy packaging — there’s no skittle-shaped bottle or even a label — ‘we made 2,000 and they absolutely flew out’. A follow-up, Dear Tara, named for another beloved dog, is being bottled as we speak.

It’s often said that global warming has been a boon for English winemaking, but the reality is more complicated, particularly where still wines are concerned. Unlike summers in the world rosé capital of the south of France, English ones remain unpredictable, if increasingly warm, which can lead to inconsistent ripening and disease vulnerability. A cold snap or downpours such as those the country experienced in May can potentially lay waste to a whole year’s work overnight.

‘I heard the phrase climate chaos rather than climate change recently,’ Edge says. For as long as English vineyards are relatively small-scale operations, meanwhile, cost will remain a sticking point for many consumers. ‘The biggest challenge is price: even still English wines are not cheap for most wine drinkers.’

Yet there are undoubtedly upsides to the fact that lots of the vineyards producing English rosé have a boutique set-up — the ‘farm-gate’ feel of many, with producers running informal tours and tastings as well as supplying local independent businesses, makes experimentation feel less daunting.

‘Our wines are very approachable,’ notes Tim Dutton of Two Beacons Vineyard. Proof that not all the best English wines come from the Home Counties, he and co-founder Ceri Phipps, an old school friend, have made their base between the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Beacons.

The area has a history of winemaking stretching back to the 13th century; before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Pershore Abbey had a flourishing vineyard, the name of which remains on maps. In 2016, after discovering they shared an interest in the burgeoning English wine-making scene, Dutton and Phipps settled on a low-lying, south-facing plot sheltered by shrubs and hedges at the foot of the Malvern Hills, which they planted with Bacchus, Pinot Noir Precoce (an early- ripening variety) and regular Pinot Noir, with the intention of making both sparkling and still wines.

In less than a decade, Two Beacons has grown into a serious contender on the international stage and was awarded three silver medals at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards, one of which was for its 2022 Late Release Sparkling Rosé Pinot Noir. Light, subtle and delicate, it has the juicy red-fruit notes so characteristic of English sparkling rosés. ‘I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t liked it,’ Dutton says simply.

Nyetimber, meanwhile, now has partnerships with the Lawn Tennis Association and Henley Regatta and its mint-green 1968 Routemaster is a familiar sight during the summer Season, drawing crowds wherever it goes. ‘It certainly wasn’t like that in the early days,’ Greatrix laughs. ‘During my first five years here, if I bumped into an acquaintance and they asked me what I did, they assumed we were buying the fruit from abroad because there couldn’t be any grapes in England. Now, I’ll be at the playground with my daughter and other parents will say: “Oh, we had Nyetimber for our anniversary.”’

Reaching for a bottle of English sparkling rosé when we’re in the mood to celebrate is certainly happy news, but Greatrix emphasises that there’s nothing lightweight or frivolous about the wine itself. ‘Rosé in general is a style that is underestimated by a lot of people, because the strongest association is the colour,’ he believes. ‘Ours isn’t a blush version of our white wines — we’re making a rosé for all the senses.'

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Have you heard of the Rolex Yacht-Master II (from £16,950)? Yes, it’s technically impressive and visually bold, but it’s also much less loved than a Submariner or a Daytona. Until — maybe — now. This complicated enigma for sailors and collectors of unusual Rolex watches was launched in 2007, discontinued in 2024 and resurrected earlier this year.

Water resistant to 100 metres, the new and improved Yacht-Master II features a clever synchronisation feature with mechanical memory that’s genuinely useful in competitive sailing. The wearer can set a countdown from one to 10 minutes, start it, stop it, reset it and even synchronise it to the official race signal if the gun sounds a few seconds early or late.

Helpfully, the clunky Ring Command bezel used for setting the countdown has been replaced by an easier-to-use push-button design. The buttons are shaped like boat sail winches.

Widely regarded as one of the most technically ambitious Rolex wristwatches, it is not in fact the most complicated (for context: a complicated watch features mechanical functions beyond telling the time. These extra features are called complications). That prize goes to the Sky-Dweller (from £14,800) which combines a dual time zone display with an ingenious annual calendar. The most complicated watch ever made is the Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Solaria Ultra Grand Complication — a miniature design marvel that packs an astonishing 41 complications into 1,521 components.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Yacht-Master II is substantially larger (case: 44 millimetres) than a Submariner (41 millimetres) or Daytona (40 millimetres). If I was forced to come up with a comparison, I suppose I’d describe it as the horological equivalent of a classic racing yacht: impractical for most people, but magnificent in the right context.

On Saturday, November 1, 1879, the Wakefield Express printed an account of a ‘substantial luncheon’. ‘Glasses were filled with wine and placed on the tables, and not a drop was spilled,’ its correspondent reported, after detailing a menu of mutton cutlets, mashed potato and green peas, cold meats, cheese and celery. ‘Ordinary decanters and bottles betrayed no tendency to topple over into the laps of the guests, or plates to empty their contents on the carpet.’

Nothing newsworthy there, you might think — except that this particular lunch had taken place on a moving train. Following America’s lead, the Great Northern Railway had shipped over a Pullman dining car from Detroit, turned it into ‘a model of elegance and luxuriousness… the only one in England’ and launched it on its Leeds to London King’s Cross Route.

The passengers, who dined in easy-chairs upholstered in crimson velvet and designed for ‘perfect steadiness’, were wowed, as was the general public. A new era of dining on the go had arrived.

The railways had already been changing the way the country ate for decades. Following the introduction of the public steam railway in 1825, it became possible to get fresh produce to the other end of the country in a matter of hours, still in excellent saleable condition. The most famous testament to this is the Watercress Line, originally known as Mid-Hants Railway: now a heritage railway, it helped to turn Hampshire’s watercress beds into a viable commercial enterprise.

Livestock could now be transported by train to be slaughtered and butchered rather than having to make the journey on foot and London cooks and chefs were able to obtain the finest produce from around Britain with relative ease, courtesy of the capital’s booming food markets: Smithfield as we know it today opened in 1868 (connected by a huge underground depot and tunnels to the Great Western, Great Northern, Midland and London, Chatham and Dover Railways) and Billingsgate in 1850, before being expanded in 1873. Borough Market benefited greatly from being a cabbage’s throw from London’s first railway terminus, London Bridge, when it opened in 1836.

Despite concerns that eating on the move would prove injurious to passengers’ health, dining cars were a hit, appealing to the very British love of keeping up appearances under trying circumstances. By the 1920s, six-course feasts were being served to passengers dressed for dinner amid Art Deco splendour.

Preparing hundreds of meals each day on the move was a serious test of skill; cooks were hired from steamships and, according to one legend, waiters were trained by being made to walk in a straight line blindfolded. Menus between the wars were frequently lavish: a London, Midland and Scottish Railway menu from 1935 features halibut with shrimp sauce and roast lamb with two different kinds of potatoes. In the heyday of Betjeman’s Metroland, commuters on the Metropolitan Railway (now the London Underground’s Metropolitan Line) could avail themselves of a special dining car on the morning train, which would return in the evenings to serve dinner.

Things ground to a halt with the outbreak of the Second World War: all British dining cars were taken out of service. When they returned in October 1945, it was under rationing even stricter than that which had come before, together with restrictions on crockery, cutlery and table linens. Six courses became three, prime cuts were replaced by iffy pies. In 1949, the Southern Railway launched mock-Tudor ‘tavern cars’ to try to capitalise on Britons’ love of pubs, but these surreal oak-beamed affairs never caught on.

By the 1960s, foreign travel had siphoned off even more of the glamour from the railways, with Beeching’s closures diminishing them further. Motorways and supermarkets cheapened food distribution just as the railways had: London’s Somers Town Goods Yard, a once proud two-storey hub for fresh produce, closed in 1973 (the British Library now stands on its site). The dining car wheezed on, menus changing to reflect the times: in 1970, there was an outcry when it was announced that kippers would no longer be served on the Brighton line. Sir Laurence Olivier, who enjoyed them aboard the Brighton Belle, led a campaign to save them, which succeeded.

Then, of course, there was the British Rail sandwich, the Winter of Discontent in edible form. According to Alex Johnson, author of Menus That Made History, its antecedents weren’t much better, with Anthony Trollope declaring that ‘the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich’ in his 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right. Curling under domes, the 20th-century version was both bland and mean: according to a 1971 British Rail catering guide, fillings were to be ‘laid diagonally across the bread where the sandwich is to be cut’, with the aim of ‘improving the appearance’ of the sandwich (making it look better filled than it actually was, in other words).

Looking back on his time as a young man in 1970s England, Bill Bryson recalled that ‘you couldn’t buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine’; Spike Milligan joked that van Gogh’s missing ear had turned up in one.

In the late 1990s, some 250 dining cars still served the now-privatised rail network, but they were found to be unprofitable and decommissioned one by one. This wasn’t the end of the story, however. When all of this was going on, Belmond, the luxury hospitality company, had been securing unwanted dining cars and restoring them. Today, Belmond British Pullman runs services during which passengers enjoy menus dreamed up by chefs such as L’Enclume’s Simon Rogan.

The starched tablecloths, burnished wood panelling and free-flowing Champagne all feel like return to the golden age of railway dining — and in a neat twist, several of the carriages currently in Pullman circulation were once part of the Brighton Belle, scene of Olivier’s kipper triumph

At some point in the recent past, someone, somewhere, was designing the interiors for a new car, and asked themselves a question. That question was: ‘Would it be possible for me to turn this vehicle into a mobile karaoke lounge’. The answer, apparently, was yes.

Being able to sing karaoke from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle naturally made my mind wander to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Dr Ian Malcolm, portrayed by Jeff Goldblum, informs the assembled that the dinosaur crafting scientists ‘were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. In the same film, Dr Malcolm/Goldblum also says that ‘Life will find a way’; However, I can guarantee you it won’t if my passenger starts belting out a tuneless cover of Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

Something has gone wrong. A cursory glance at most modern car interiors is a gaze into the panopticon. A recent trip in a friend’s new estate involved dealing with three screens, a continuous brushstroke of soulless interface splashed across the dashboard. Less car, more the bridge of the USS Enterprise on wheels, a command centre from where the sensation of driving can be deadened and destroyed, all in the name of whichever design ethos is currently the most fashionable.

De-cluttering is a useful tool after a divorce, but it has no place in the front seat of a car, which is a machine, and therefore deserves lots of buttons and switches to make it work. You wouldn’t look at an organ and complain that it had too many keys.

We are left with plain spaces, perforated only with screens which are windows to a hell of our own making. Colour palettes have been left on the cutting room floor, as uninspiring swatches of silver and grey run riot (at least, as riotous as the colour grey can be). If you want to open the glovebox, you have to visit a sub-menu of a sub-menu, because someone decided a simple switch or handle ruined the aesthetic. Gone are the knobs that control the temperature, which you can feel and touch and use without taking your eyes off the road. We are drawn back to the screen, like a neglected child being force fed dopamine hits.

What is the purpose of all of this? Who is it all for? It doesn't feel like it's for me or anyone else. Perhaps I am woefully out of touch, akin to the art critics who first laid eyes on the works of Monet at the Paris Salon and practically fainted in horror at his rushed strokes and waterlilies.

But these decisions are just that. When something must be new, something must be innovated for the sake of being innovative. But there is still a place for tradition: take the fabulous interiors of Bentley, Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce as an example. All three provide spaces that have the things you need, but rooted in an organic, well designed and tactile environment. They are well thought out and elegant.

There is a place for modernity too. The Fiat Grande Panda’s recent re-launch saw an interior garnished with delightful detail that left you with no doubt as to the car’s contemporary nature. It doesn’t take much either. Mini made their screen a circle instead of a square, and immediately created an interior worthy of an icon. The widely lambasted Ferrari Luce can at least claim that its interiors were well received, full as they are of switches and a coherent style.

The job of a designer, interior or otherwise, is to design, and I am sure that those responsible for creating these over-screened minimalist spaces do their best to provide the best product that they possibly can. But all too often it feels like things are being designed to impress other designers, rather than create value and emotion for the customers.

Driving used to be something that used all five senses. We could smell and taste petrol, feel the road through the wheel and engage with the tactile surfaces of a well-made interior. We could hear the engine and the wind and the tyres, and we could see it all working together in concert to make a journey all the more bearable.

Who is so determined to seal us away inside a stifling tomb? There is no touch, no taste, no feel. You will be comfortable, yes, as you silently glide down the motorway in your 2.5 tonne device, but you will not feel a part of it. You can keep your karaoke and Apple CarPlay. What I crave is connection.

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Farmers are being encouraged by British Wool to cash in on this year’s sheep clip by selling through the organisation, which is the UK’s last agricultural commodity board.

British Wool collects farmers’ wool to auction across the year and promotes it at home and abroad. It says that international interest in British wool is at its strongest for years, and it needs at least another 1,000 tons this shearing.

‘The price we can pay to farmers is at a 10-year high and it has increased 70% since last year,’ Gareth Jones of British Wool told Country Life. ‘However, our biggest challenge is volume. The national flock [the number of sheep] has been shrinking and there has been a trend for farmers to use their wool on farm as the price we could offer them didn’t cover the price of shearing. Now, however, there is strong demand and we want to encourage farmers to let us sell their wool for them again.’

Sheep numbers aren’t only falling in Britain, but globally, not least in New Zealand, another factor that has fuelled demand for British wool. A further element is the rise of shedding breeds — such as Dorpers, Easy Cares and Dorset and Wiltshire Horns — as the National Sheep Association estimates that there are at least 500,000 of these hair-coated sheep in the UK that produce no wool for the market.

Although some farmers were driven to burn fleeces during the years of rock-bottom prices, others became entrepreneurial and are unlikely to return to British Wool. Katy Allanby falls into this category. She keeps a small mixed flock near Pickering, North Yorkshire, selling the bulk of her wool privately to crafters by advertising online. ‘I get a better return,’ she explains.

Julie Robertson, who farms 160 ewes near Stonehaven, Aberdeen, produces about 500 kilograms of wool each year, getting the best spun at a local mill to sell and making more than she could hope to from British Wool. ‘[British Wool] is going to struggle to get people back on board,’ she believes. ‘The price for my best wool would now be about 97p a kilo, which is much better than it was. We used to get about 7p.’ However, now, she says, she ‘can sell a raw fleece, weighing about 3½ kilograms, to a spinner for about £10’.

Interest in wool as a ‘green’ alternative to petroleum-derived materials keeps increasing. It is used as housing insulation, packaging for parcels and in high-end upholstery. Small businesses such as Fliss Lewis’s Woolshred are using it in products for gardeners, with Lewis buying several tons of black Hebridean fleeces from British Wool over the past five years to clean up and sell as garden mulch, wool twine and garden felt. ‘Wool is good as a natural slug and snail deterrent, for keeping moisture in pots and as a weed suppressant,’ she says.

Wool bedding has also increased in popularity. Research from Bangor University earlier this year showed that wool outperforms feather, synthetic and down-filled bedding, being warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Bangor’s product design faculty is currently exploring the effectiveness of wool’s lanolin as an industrial lubricant.

‘The demand for wool keeps increasing — it is an incredibly versatile product,’ says Jones.

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