La Vie: A year in rural France

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I’m featuring it in a summer post because, like Peter Mayle’s Provence series, it’s ideal for armchair travelling. While we were house-hunting and renting the mill in the hedged bocage of northern Deux-Sevres the birdsong was of medieval intensity. In this book, he describes a year on his farm, the birdsong, the wildlife, the crops, the villagers and some of the nuances of French culture, all in his beguiling, poetic style. Observing the traditional shepherd's calendar, The Sheep's Tale is a loving biography of ewes, lambs, and rams through the seasons.

The Private Life of the Hare - Penguin Books UK

His column on nature and farming in Country Life won him Magazine Columnist of the Year in the 2016 BSME Awards. Everyone who is British living in France profonde utters, as axiomatic, ‘France is like the Britain of our childhood’, by which they mean, depending on their certain age, the 1950s or the 1970s or 1990s. For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned to live in a rural landscape as he did in childhood. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use.I loved reading about life in rural France, the produce that he grew and the recipes he used for it! As a sort of Afterward, he compiles a list of all of the birds see on his own patch at La Roche in the Charente region. Such small woods play a vital role in the life of our countryside: they are the last refuge of many flora and fauna. Although it began as a practical enterprise, it quickly became an affair of the of learning to bite the end off the morning baguette; taking two hours for lunch; in short, living the good life - or as the French say, La Vie . There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language.

John Lewis-Stempel Books | Waterstones John Lewis-Stempel Books | Waterstones

After calming the terrified animal, Lewis-Stempel leads him back to his field where the cause of the alarm is revealed: a fire salamander, basking in the sunshine.The rituals of rural France, whether queuing for a baguette or sipping a noisette (espresso with a ‘nut’ of milk) while watching the world go by, are effective barriers to the rush of modern times. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Lewis-Stempel is a farmer of mediaeval heritage, with his family owning the same land for 700 years. In vivid prose, [John Lewis-Stempel] celebrates how, in an age when television cameras have revealed so much in our landscape, the hare remains as magical and elusive as ever. John Lewis-Stempel's story of a year on his smallholding in the Charente is warm and vivid and beautiful.