Sick day today. I feel like crap and am confined to bed. The Lemon Girl has very kindly brought me the latest issue of Country Life.
You, or I in any case, can easily forget what a great magazine Country Life is. It's very well-written, chock full of good content.
It's easy to mock given that virtually no one can afford the country estates advertized on the opening pages and the tiny segment of the population who do buy such places are unlikely to go looking for a new house in a magazine. But this magazine, like most, is aspirational. The people who buy and read such things see the image that goes with the magazine as something to aim at. I suspect the vast majority know they will never have a large country estate with hunting and fishing rights for two thousand acres and most probably don't really want that in the sense that they woukld spend the money on other things if they had the money which, in any case, they don't.
But there is a style here and it is a style worth emulating, this second point is something that could not be said of The New York Times, People or Vanity Fair.
The owners of houses, meanwhile, get the pleasure of seeing their wealth and status advertized in a magazine. That, oddly enough, is actually at odds with the country-life life, which is private and dignified. The person who puts twelve million pounds to buy the place on page two would not want to advertize that they own it once they do but they will get some pleasure out of knowing that the place was listed in Country Life before they bought it.
For the rest of us, the life style offers a way of buying out of a degraded politics and culture in favour of something that is elegant and sophisticated and yet manages to not take itself too seriously.
My favourite bit so far is a write up about Archbishop of Canterbury had forced his workers to do penance for having the temerity to deliver straw in sacks instead of open on carts. This apparently offended the Archbish's aesthetic sensibilities and he forced the offenders to march about carrying the straw on their own backs. The editors show a fine sense of irony by including a sentence that begins,
You, or I in any case, can easily forget what a great magazine Country Life is. It's very well-written, chock full of good content.
It's easy to mock given that virtually no one can afford the country estates advertized on the opening pages and the tiny segment of the population who do buy such places are unlikely to go looking for a new house in a magazine. But this magazine, like most, is aspirational. The people who buy and read such things see the image that goes with the magazine as something to aim at. I suspect the vast majority know they will never have a large country estate with hunting and fishing rights for two thousand acres and most probably don't really want that in the sense that they woukld spend the money on other things if they had the money which, in any case, they don't.
But there is a style here and it is a style worth emulating, this second point is something that could not be said of The New York Times, People or Vanity Fair.
The owners of houses, meanwhile, get the pleasure of seeing their wealth and status advertized in a magazine. That, oddly enough, is actually at odds with the country-life life, which is private and dignified. The person who puts twelve million pounds to buy the place on page two would not want to advertize that they own it once they do but they will get some pleasure out of knowing that the place was listed in Country Life before they bought it.
For the rest of us, the life style offers a way of buying out of a degraded politics and culture in favour of something that is elegant and sophisticated and yet manages to not take itself too seriously.
My favourite bit so far is a write up about Archbishop of Canterbury had forced his workers to do penance for having the temerity to deliver straw in sacks instead of open on carts. This apparently offended the Archbish's aesthetic sensibilities and he forced the offenders to march about carrying the straw on their own backs. The editors show a fine sense of irony by including a sentence that begins,
The Archbishop's behaviour was evidently regarded by some as unforgivably high handed ...
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