From here, Blythe spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries. In his 50s, Blythe wrote The View in Winter, a moving account of growing old which Collins feels is due a revival. “It’s a wonderful book, a very positive view of old age. He lives an incredibly contented life.” Collins helped his mentor “retire” in 2017 and began to manage his affairs after asking him about a pile of unpaid bills and receiving Blythe’s answer: “I’ve decided I’ve given them enough money over the years. I’m not giving them any more!” From his home at Bottengoms Farm Ronald Blythe has spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year, and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries.” A richly detailed guide to parish life in England from medieval to Victorian times, based on a wide range of churchwardens’ accounts and other records. It describes the parish and church our ancestors knew - a world of rood lofts and Easter sepulchres, of Maypoles and Midsummer bonfires, of foundlings and frankincense. With over 300 illustrations.” Slowly it dawned on me that nature could be a place of resistance to stories about the way you are supposed to be – a central concern of Hines’s Billy Casper in A Kestrel for a Knave. Billy is a persecuted soul, a loner, a troublemaker, a failure at school. He won’t keep goal, won’t work down the pit, fiercely resists the models of masculinity that surround him. Training a kestrel is an escape for him, but it is not a simple one. Hawks in literature so often stand in for emotional absences, are tutelary spirits of the lost or dispossessed. Kes grants Billy a contagious power. Explaining how he trained the kestrel lets him speak to his class with sudden, spellbinding authority, and Kes gives him a figurative and literal ability to silence his persecutors: “Steady on, Sir,” he admonishes Mr Farthing, “you’ll frighten her to death.”

We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”. Blythe recovered, and also survived a recent fall. His dear ones bring him three meals a day and everyone is determined that he will still be in his home, as he wishes, when he dies. Some of the best field naturalists I know grew up in working-class rural communities, skipping school like Billy Casper to practise forms of natural history that bent or broke the law: they ferreted rabbits, collected eggs, broke into quarries, kept pigeons, reared finches, climbed fences to poach for fish. Today they can still spot a linnet’s nest in a furze bush at 50 paces and possess fieldcraft skills that would put many a birder to shame. There’s little room for them in today’s culture of nature appreciation and even less so in nature writing, which tends to entrench a sense that the correct relation to the landscape is through walking and distanced looking. I treasure books such as A Kestrel for a Knave, Cynan Jones’s The Dig and Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming novel At Hawthorn Time for engaging with this marginal pastoral tradition, showing the depths of its attachments to nature, and for refusing to treat those attachments in a romantic, nativist way. Nature is not a singular thing; nor are we and nor are the practices that take us there.

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Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources – books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps and festival guides – Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they’ve been shaped by history, class and politics. He uncovers a complex history of rurality marked by a careful policing of who is allowed to be in the countryside and what they are allowed to do there. “I have seen charabanc parties from the large manufacturing towns …playing cornets on village greens”, wrote HV Morton in horror in the 1930s. Things we take for granted as part of the countryside – The Country Code and youth hostelling, nature appreciation, field archeology, orienteering, birdwatching and the scout’s “dibdobbery of observant walking” – all played their part in educating the citizen in the correct way of reading the landscape and interacting with it. The book has deep theoretical underpinnings but is a joy to read, particularly when Matless turns an arch eye on the assumptions underlying much of the material within: “If one enjoyed, for example, loud music and saucy seaside humour,” he writes, “one could not and would not want to connect spiritually to a hill.” He gained a social life cycling 15 miles to Colchester from his home in Sudbury to keep company with the young intellectuals and artists of the town – they progressed round the town’s traditional pubs having a half pint in each one putting the world to rights, expounding theories about the latest literary works they had just read, before heading home. I’ve been reading this over Christmas along with Guy Shrubsole’s brilliant new The Lost Rainforests of Britain, and I’ve enjoyed every moment. I think Ronald Blythe is a genius in a special, but perhaps overlooked, journalistic genre – the nature notes or country talk columns.

Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. Speaking to me later over lunch, Blythe expanded on the theme: “Akenfield is about the Suffolk people, it's about growing up, about moving away, about staying at home, about the countryside - it's about the generations. It's about us as Suffolk people. Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. By using the words of the real farmworkers and their families, Blythe dealt matter-of-factly with the notions of life, death, farming, religion and the countryside. For all the brilliance of his memory a decade ago, he has now been diagnosed with dementia. “He lives in a kind of dream world and he’s probably still writing books in his head,” Collins says. “He’s so fortunate to have this amazing physical strength. He’s never taken any medication apart from a bit of sherry. He caught Covid on his 98th birthday. A short course of antibiotics just sent him into space.”But alongside this faith, Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides, sharp portraits of fellow writers and unexpected notes of worldliness such as this: “On the radio, Evan Davis, Mammon’s angel, is talking to a Mr Warren Buffett, of Oklahoma, who is the world’s second-richest man. Mr Buffett lives in a nondescript house with a nondescript car, and there is no computer in his nondescript office. He likes Evan, with his sweet, crocodile grin.” A capacious work that contains multitudes . . . a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions' THE SPECTATOR And yet Blythe does represent a way of life that has all but disappeared and Williams detects a gentle moral in his writing. “He’s certainly saying to us, ‘This may be a way of life that’s passing, and it’s not perfect, but you’re going to be much worse off if you’re not ready to learn from it, so let me help you learn from it.’ He’s saying, ‘Society is moving on – don’t forget this.” Ronald agreed: “"I think what makes Akenfield so popular – both the book and the film – is that it captures the spirit of Suffolk. It's everyone's story. It's not the story of one person, or one family or even one village - it's everyone's story and I think that it strikes a chord.”