Contents
About the Book
Title Page
Foreword: Fiona Reynolds
Preliminary Thoughts
The Science of Simplicity: JAMES LE FANU
PART ONE:
A Sense of Place
The Path to Llangranog: RICHARD HARRIES
Seaton Delaval Hall: CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH
On Exmoor: RACHEL JOHNSON
A World Apart: KATE HUMBLE
A Copse Near Bath: JUSTIN WEBB
Lancashire Pride: CHARLES NEVIN
In Combe: ROBERT MCCRUM
Away from It All on Lundy: ROBERT HARDMAN
Ramsgate Sands: CLIVE ASLET
The Middle of Nowhere: GILBERT ADAIR
PART TWO:
Home and Hearth
A Nice Hot Bath: PRUE LEITH
Music: CAROL ANN DUFFY
Life and Knitting: SALLY MUIR
In Love with the Clarinet: GEOFF MULGAN
A Good Log Fire: ANN WIDDECOMBE
The Aspiring Pianist: JOHN JULIUS NORWICH
On Cleaning: MARY KILLEN
PART THREE:
Creature Comforts
Grooming the Dog: ROY HATTERSLEY
In Pursuit of the Purple Emperor: MATTHEW OATES
Porcine Pleasures: ROSIE BOYCOTT
Lambing at Wimpole: SARAH MUKHERJEE
Walking the Dog: TREVOR GROVE
Collecting the Eggs: JONATHAN DIMBLEBY
In Praise of Zoos: ALAIN DE BOTTON
Owls at Night: ANTONY BEEVOR
PART FOUR:
The Great Outdoors
Running in the Rain: PATRICK BARKHAM
Looking Up: LUCINDA LAMBTON
Four Out of Five for Tennis: RICHARD LAYARD
Gone Fishing: TOM FORT
The Joy of Walking: ADAM NICOLSON
The Pleasure of Litter-picking: VALERIE GROVE
Foraging for Mushrooms: SAM KILEY
Painting the Landscape: MERLIN WATERSON
A Fascination with Soil: CHARLES DOWDING
Working Wood: ADAM HART-DAVIS
Welsh Rain: STEPHEN BAYLEY
Window Gazing: LIZ ELLIOT
Amaryllis: ANTONIA FRASER
PART FIVE:
The Pleasures of the Table
Bread and Cheese: A. C. GRAYLING
A Soothing Recipe: YOTAM OTTOLENGHI
The Great Offal Lunch: MATTHEW FORT
The Morning Sun and Cornflakes: ARTEMIS COOPER
Growing Your Own Food: SARAH RAVEN
Home-grown Honey: MARTHA KEARNEY
Baking with the Children: ZEINAB BADAWI
PART SIX:
Talking and Ruminating
Conversation versus Discussion: PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Gossip: SARAH SANDS
Reading Aloud: RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN
A Grasp of Grammar: SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Cancelled Lunches: LUCY KELLAWAY
Portrait of a Marriage: SANDRINE BOYD
Lonely as a Cloud: JOHN SUTHERLAND
PART SEVEN:
Final Thoughts
Meditation: ANTHONY SELDON
The Gratitude Diaries: SUE CREWE
Copyright
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Published by Random House Books 2010
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Copyright © The National Trust 2010/individual contributors
Illustrations by Philip Smiley (www.illustrationweb.com)
The National Trust has asserted its right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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ISBN 9781847946416
The deepest pleasures almost always come from the simplest sources.
It is one of the great delusions of our age that we can only find pleasure in ultra-sophisticated, expensive or complex situations. We strive to be in the most glamorous company, to have the latest hi-tech piece of equipment or to be part of the latest fashion.
Yet so often what gives us pleasure comes from the simple reality of nature, architecture, the view, the garden or friends and family enjoying time together. These impulses are a million miles from the illusion that happiness depends on celebrity and wealth. It is so often found in little, usually unremarked things and the cherished places in our lives that evoke comfort, joy and memories as surely as Proust’s madeleine.
Walking is my pleasure above all others. The combination of physical exercise and an unfurling, ever-changing landscape taken at a pace one can relish combines a sensory delight with intellectual and spiritual refreshment. Add a map and my joy is complete. Champagne for the muscles and the synapses in equal measure.
So what a delight it is to find in these pages such a diverse range of different and unexpected pleasures, many until now unconsidered and uncelebrated.
The idea of the book came to us at the National Trust when we reflected on what it is we are really offering ‘for the benefit of the nation’, as our statute requires. The words in our founding Act say we exist to ‘promote … places of natural beauty and historic interest’, but the benefits are not just the places themselves. Of course they are the physical hardware, but they offer so much more.
The real benefits are the experiences people have in those places; what they can offer – anything from a much-loved view to a treasured memory of time well spent with a loved one, family or friends; the experience of being close to nature and the timeless quality of beauty; the joy of freedom from our over-busy lives for a day, or even an hour or two.
As the economic cycle once more switches from the biblical seven years of plenty to seven years of famine, simple pleasures are all the more important: a vital ingredient in the important business of valuing what we have, not regretting what we have not.
This little book is a celebration of things that do not require a lottery win or a banker’s bonus to make our lives pleasurable: the sensual, like Patrick Barkham’s urban run through rain, Artemis Cooper’s morning sunshine or Adam Hart-Davis’s working with wood; the delicious, like Zeinab Badawi’s apple and blackberry crumble and Prue Leith’s whisky and water in a hot bath; animal delights, such as Rosie Boycott’s pigs and Roy Hattersley’s doggie bedtime; magical places, like Charles Saumarez Smith’s Seaton Delaval Hall and Rachel Johnson’s Exmoor; activities, from Sally Muir’s knitting to Valerie Grove’s picking up litter; funny aperçus, such as Lucy Kellaway’s cancelled lunch and Mary Killen’s joy of cleaning; and sublime and transcendental experiences, from Anthony Seldon’s meditation to Matthew Oates’s love affair with the Purple Emperor butterfly.
Some of these will surprise you, some will make you laugh, some will make you think. All, we hope, will help to remind you that there are aspects of life – unrecorded in newspapers or on television – that, while so easily left unappreciated, are truly the things that everywhere and every day make our brief lives so worth living.
FIONA REYNOLDS is Director-General of the National Trust.
There is nothing simple about simple pleasures. The dart of gold of the goldfinch is made more magical still by the billionfold biological complexities of life that sustain it; the delight of a coal fire heightened beyond measure from knowing the warmth of its flames is the consequence of a natural process lost in the aeons of time. These and indeed all simple pleasures act as nodes of amplification of the astonishing in our everyday lives where, in William Blake’s immortal lines, it is possible to glimpse ‘a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower’.
It is the highest purpose of science to deepen our understanding, the better to appreciate the extraordinary concealed behind the ordinary – and no more so than the most recent findings of neuroscience and genetics in revealing the unfathomable profundities of the human mind and the living world.
To start with neuroscience and its implications for the first daily ‘fix’ of joy on waking: the cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Those bare brown branches silhouetted against the sky will shortly acquire the slightest emerald tinge of springtime buds before being blanketed in the purest, densest, white blossom. Throughout the summer they will remain wrapped in verdant green before transmuting into the reds and golds of autumn, made more iridescent still by the warm glow of early-morning sunshine. Colour – nothing makes the world more beautiful. ‘Of all the gifts bestowed upon us,’ wrote the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, ‘it is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.’
And yet, although that kaleidoscope of colours – emerald, white, green, red and gold – seems to be streaming through my bedroom window, they are no more than invisible, weightless, colourless subatomic particles impacting on my retina. It is my brain that impresses the colour upon them. ‘For the light rays, to speak properly, are not coloured,’ wrote the great Isaac Newton in his Treatise on Opticks. ‘In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour.’
More than three centuries on we are still not reconciled to this extraordinary proposition that the world ‘out there’ in all its vivid and exquisite detail is created within our brains. Until recently the prevailing view held that my cherry tree must (somehow) be impressed on my visual cortex as on a photographic plate. But the sophisticated scanning techniques of contemporary neuroscience have revealed precisely the contrary. Rather, that image, like an exploding firework, fragments in a fraction of a second into thirty or more specialised sites in my visual cortex concerned with the particularities of its colour, movement, shape, position, and so on. There is not the slightest hint here of how their monotonous electrical activity ‘translates’ into, for example, my subjective awareness of emerald, white, green, red and gold – nor how they are reintegrated back into my unified coherent perception of the tree itself.
‘This abiding tendency for attributes such as form, colour and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question of how they are all reassembled,’ writes David Hubel, past winner of the Nobel Prize for his experimental investigation of vision. ‘But where and how – we have no idea.’ And that ‘no idea’ is no idea, we no longer have the slightest inkling of the physical basis in our brain of every single, fleeting moment of our lives.
And, moving on from the mysterium fascinans – as revealed by neuroscience – of my first glimpse of the cherry tree on waking, there are the equally perplexing insights of modern genetics into the further simple pleasure of visiting the fishmonger and admiring the crab, lobster, squid and oyster, bream, turbot, sole and salmon so elegantly displayed on his counter. Just over twenty years ago when scientists developed the ingenious techniques that would permit them to spell out the full sequence of genes (the genome) of fly and worm, mouse, man and many others, they anticipated, reasonably enough, they would finally understand ‘the secret of life’ – the genetic instructions that determine the unique characteristics that so readily distinguish one form of life from another.
They were thus more than disconcerted to discover that virtually the reverse is the case – a near equivalence of a modest tally of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of complexity from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was similarly disconcerting to discover that the same regulatory genes that cause a fly to be a fly cause humans to be human and that our genomes are virtually interchangeable with those of our fellow vertebrates, such as the mouse and our primate cousins.
So, while the genes determine (as they must) the nuts and bolts of the cells from which all living things are made – hormones, enzymes and proteins of the chemistry of life – the diverse variations of form, shape and attribute that so readily distinguish flies from worms from humans is nowhere to be found. The ‘instructions’ must be there, of course, for ‘life’ to reproduce itself with such fidelity from generation to generation, but we have moved in the recent past from supposing we knew the principle, if not the details, to recognising we have no conception of what it might be. And so, too, at the fishmonger. Scientists could, if they so wished, spell out the genomes of crab and oyster, bream, turbot and salmon, but the really interesting question of how and why they are so recognisably distinct from each other would remain as elusive as ever.
It is remarkable the difference it makes to acknowledge that we no longer know (as until recently we thought we might) the nature of those genetic instructions. Suddenly the sheer extraordinariness of that rich diversity of shape and form jostling for attention on the fishmonger’s counter – and the florist’s and the greengrocer’s and the whole glorious panoply of nature – is infused with a deep sense of wonder of ‘how can these things be?’
‘The world will never starve for want of wonders,’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘but only for want of wonder.’ And we could scarcely be more indebted to the science of the recent past for its revelation of the profundities concealed behind those simple pleasures that reaffirm the ‘natural miracle’ of our enchanted world. The cherry tree and fishmonger’s counter – and my perception of them – are governed by nature and its laws, but their ‘true cause’ lies so far beyond our comprehension they might as well be miracles.
JAMES LE FANU is a practising doctor and writes a twice-weekly column for the Telegraph newspapers on medicine, science and social policy. His most recent book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, has just been published in paperback.
My family roots lie in West Wales and I first walked the coast from New Quay (Ceinewydd) to Llangranog as a boy at the end of the Second World War. At that time it was a very isolated place: I would have to cut my way through ferns and there would be absolutely no one about. I would look down the coast to the wonderful outline of Ynys Lochtyn jutting into the sea and say, as I still say, ‘The most beautiful view in Europe.’ On the way there is a stream that goes down from Nanternis into the sea, and a short detour up the valley leads to a hidden waterfall that is always magic. A little further up the valley there is the church of St Teilo, set in an ancient pre-Christian circle. Along the coast there are the ditch and banks of an Iron Age settlement. I like to think that my Celtic ancestors lived here, away from the Romans, who did not get this far west. Then, after a break in Cwmtudu and a very steep climb, I would pick my way through the gorse, where there was no path and no right of way, to Llangranog.
For decades this walk was a very personal, private pleasure. It was, as it were, mine, all mine. No one else knew about it. But now, I am glad to say, thanks to the National Trust and others, it has been opened up and others are enjoying it as well. The Ceredigion Coastal Path has just been created, with 60 miles or so from Aberystwyth to Cardigan, complete with stiles and rights of way. If it is good sometimes to walk on one’s own, so that one can look at views and think, it is also a great pleasure to share this walk with friends. It is lovely that many others can now enjoy this stretch of coast with more than an occasional sighting of a dolphin, seal or porpoise.
RICHARD HARRIES was Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006. On his retirement he was made a Life Peer (Lord Harries of Pentregarth). He has written books on a range of subjects – most recently, Faith in Politics? and Questions of Life and Death. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The first time I visited Seaton Delaval was as an undergraduate at Cambridge when I travelled to Scotland in the passenger seat of a small red Triumph Spitfire driven by my friend Adam Bennett, now working for the International Monetary Fund in Washington. We were visiting mausolea in preparation for my undergraduate dissertation. In Volume 11 of H. Avray Tipping’s monumental series of volumes published by Country Life on English Homes, there is a description of the circumstances which led to the construction of the Seaton Delaval mausoleum:
John, the heir of the Seatons, perished in 1775, having been kicked in a vital organ by a laundry maid to whom he was paying addresses. Thus died the last of the Delavals by the foot of a buxom slut. Over the broken remains of so much hope, the dust of so long glory, his father raised a temple, less to commemorate his achievements than his genealogical significance. The old man stood, last of a dying race, surrounded by childless brothers and sisters, who had, all of them, given happy promise in their youth, and ordered the piling up of cyclopean stones for the reception of the least worthy, but the last of his line. The mausoleum was never consecrated, owing, tradition has it, to the exorbitant fee required by the bishop.
We liked the mock-heroic tone and Gibbonian cadences of this description and the fact that Tipping wrote about architecture as a record of people and historical circumstance, not of architect and design. I only half remember the house from that time, the incongruity and cruelty of its extraordinary landscape setting, close to Newcastle, with the North Sea not far away and the proximity of rough, Northumberland seaside towns.
The second time was driving down from Scotland with my children. We stopped at Seaton Delaval. On this occasion the sun was shining and my children were slightly surprised by my extraordinary and wholly uncharacteristic excitement – in fact, ecstasy – as I jumped out of the car, ignoring passing traffic, in order to take a photograph from the ha-ha by the side of the road. I was inspired by the pleasure of returning to an indisputable architectural masterpiece, looming, hunched, with a restrained sense of potency, now half-ruined, but still powerful, representing so clearly Vanbrugh’s response to the north of England and his ability to create blackened poetry in stone. In contrast to so many of Vanbrugh’s buildings, not so much is known of the circumstances of its construction or of his relationship to his patron: all that survives is his response to the landscape of the north and his understanding of how to construct an architectural epic on a small scale, packing a punch and demonstrating his resistance late in his career to the smooth, bland correctitude of Palladianism.
The third time was more recently when I took my son and two of his friends, one of whom was studying architectural history at Oxford, on a Vanbrugh tour. We drove to Castle Howard one afternoon in December, long after the end of the visitor season, and were taken out to the mausoleum. The following day we went to Seaton Delaval. We walked around the ruins of the interior and saw once again the nobility of the stables.
In the end, it is architecture which makes my heart beat: the feeling of the manipulation of space in stone. Nobody does it in the same way as John Vanbrugh, the great playwright of architecture. It is not a simple pleasure, but a sophisticated one – so much deeper and more intense than life’s more ephemeral pleasures – each generation creating places and spaces and architectural experiences for generations beyond, the still unborn who can experience the resonance of past people in the corridors and staircases and fireplaces left hanging in mid-air by the loss of the intervening floors.
CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy and was previously Director of the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. He is the author of The Building of Castle Howard.
On New Year’s Day, a woman came to interview me for the Exmoor Magazine