BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a moment, familiar to any man who has ordered a gin and tonic in a fashionable bar, when the soul recoils. The barman, a young fellow whose moustache suggests he has never done a day’s physical labour and whose tattoo suggests he believes himself oppressed, reaches for a bottle of something pink. He calls it gin. He calls it “botanical”. … Continue reading The Last Redoubt of Human Civilisation
BY JAMES BRADFORD Rural loneliness is real. Village life can make meeting someone harder, not easier, but the countryside already holds most of the answers, if we are willing to use them. Allison Lee wrote recently in these pages about the comfort animals bring, and she is right. Anyone who has done the late check in a lambing shed, or leant on a gate while … Continue reading Everyone Knows Your Name, and Nobody’s Single
BY RICHARD TAYLOR On 1 July this year, the Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) told us the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) for England and Wales (TPS) had magically gotten £3.3bn a year cheaper! It hasn’t. From April 2027, the employer contribution to teachers’ pensions falls from 28.68% to 17.68% of salary, yet every teacher will still retire on exactly what they were promised before, in a … Continue reading The £309bn Pension Fund That Doesn’t Exist
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, the last days of October are upon us, and the countryside is making its final preparations for winter. The hedgerows are stripped, the fields are empty, and the first hard frosts have touched the grass with silver. There is a stillness in the air, a sense of waiting. The year is turning, and we are turning with it. … Continue reading A Prayer for the Turning
BY ALLISON LEE It is often said that animal companionship offers significant benefits to humans, and having had the pleasure of owning a variety of animals—both domestic and farm—I can certainly attest to this. While cats and dogs are the most common domestic companions, many farm animals can also provide endless fun and companionship. Animal interaction brings a range of mental and emotional benefits, including … Continue reading Hooves, Snouts, and Heart
BY IAN MITCHELL In praise of unearned income The world owes to Darwin some ground-breaking insights into the history of life on earth. Mankind and its environment, he argued, was not a creation of God’s but the product of many millions of years’ evolution, starting from much simpler life forms. The theme of this book is how Darwin changed our view of history. No longer … Continue reading Darwin, Son of Capitalism
BY ROGER WATSON It is one of the greatest privileges of my life to have worked for years, and to continue to work, in Mainland China. In the early days, I would go to an ATM and take out a pile of renminbi to cover the week or two I was there. For other expenditure, there was always the credit card. But things have changed. … Continue reading The Long March to a Chinese Bank Account
BY ALEX STORY The children looked so young. The pictures were only taken a few years ago. They lived with us then. Chaos and life danced together, naturally, in harmony. They are gone now. Silence rules. When we speak, mostly over devices, and if time allows, their voices are deeper, intimating a gradual discovery of the world as it is. When we see them, time … Continue reading Life
BY JACK WATSON It is that time of year again in my hometown of Hull. The streets are bare, shops are deserted, and darkness descends earlier each day. No, the world is not ending. Everyone has flocked to an area in West Hull called Walton Street, just yards from the local football and rugby stadium. Where an empty car park stood weeks ago, a vibrant … Continue reading Hull Fair Forever
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a strip of concrete in a yard that slopes so sharply that the word ‘pitch’ feels like a courtesy. It runs uphill. It has grooves in it, scars from some forgotten building project, and when the plastic ball with the seam lands on one, it spits up at your throat like it has taken personal offence. The stumps are plastic. … Continue reading The Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian
BY JOHN MUSGRAVE John Musgrave spells out the importance of this winter’s hunting season. The last two weeks of October see the opening of the Hunting Season 2026/27. This may well prove the most important for the future of Britain. Packs of foxhounds, beagles and bassets take to the Field of Honour as torchbearers of resistance against the woke-joke authoritarians stamping down on the face … Continue reading If I Were a Carpenter
BY ALEXIA JAMES Take a look at this nonsense from Cwis Packham’s mate, Dale Vince: Dale Vince wants you to believe he is a brave truth-teller standing athwart the water industry, but a line-by-line look at his claims shows a man who has mastered the art of the ideological gobshite: take a real problem, inflate the numbers, conflate categories, and shout it loudly enough that … Continue reading Dale Vince and the 25% Fiction
BY SEAN WALSH The late Michael Wharton was the genius behind the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column. Therein he created a dystopian hellhole, fantasy when he wrote it, inhabited by a collection of ghastly Leftist caricatures (or at least they were at the time). This was all very prescient pre-lanyard cultural anticipation, and Wharton was smart enough to die before it all happened. The most … Continue reading The Thornberry Derangement Syndrome
VICAR Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, we are halfway through October now, and the countryside has settled into the deep, golden hush that only autumn can bring. The mornings are sharp with frost, and the leaves are falling in earnest—not the gentle drift of early October, but a steady cascade of gold and russet and bronze. The hedgerows are stripped of their berries, the … Continue reading A Prayer for Mid-October
BY ALLISON LEE Autumn is a busy time on the smallholding. It’s time to plan ahead for the winter months and complete all essential jobs before the weather turns. Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. Because the weather is unpredictable, it can feel like the end of summer rather than the beginning of winter. With animals and a smallholding to keep, I … Continue reading Autumn on the Smallholding
BY ED ANDERSON With national elections and political drama in Spain it may be easy for rural issues to get pushed to the edges of the national debate but as luck would have it, (what we are christening) the Great Sheep Run from Trashumancia Foundation will be taking place on 25th October in the heart of Madrid. From not existing 33 years ago before naturalist … Continue reading The Great Sheep Run
BY ALEX STORY So, Trump brought the big boys to town. More than $15 trillion sat around the table for the White House Artificial Intelligence summit, represented by twenty-one of the world’s biggest companies at the end of September. Robotics, artificial intelligence and the economic impact of both were on the agenda. It led, Trump said, to the signing of a morally binding document, “almost … Continue reading All is Flat
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Civilised England, what remains of it, makes a sound, and it does not. The sound it makes is weather, the clink of china, the murmur of a nation waiting its turn, and, when pushed past all endurance, the sharp, righteous crack of incivility, delivered once and never unnecessarily repeated. The sound it does not make is the horn. Watch a country road. … Continue reading The Quietest Virtue
BY ANDREW MILNE Holborn and St Pancras is a strange place and not indicative of the wider country. I worked there once and indeed was a student up the road at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. Disconcerted at the bizarre by-election as the dust settles, squires should take heart from several little-reported facts. First: In a constituency with 70,000 registered voters just 12,000 turned out … Continue reading A Walk Along High Holborn
BY SEAN WALSH I voted for Brexit because it seemed to me that the Russian bots who were trying to persuade us to leave the EU had better arguments than the UK officials who were cajoling us to stay. I judge these things on merit. I have seen nothing that has changed my mind. And one of those things I haven’t seen is Brexit, probably … Continue reading Was I Brainwashed by Russian Bots over Brexit?
