"The journalism of Lilliput", or How to get out of the city
Natural histories
“Over the years, nature writers and country diarists have developed an increasingly sophisticated ecological literacy of the world around them through the naming of things and an understanding of the relationships between them. They find ways of linking simple observations to bigger issues by remaining in the present, the particular…”A bridge between now and eternity - and how to fend off a furious swan
“The Guardian has always treated the outdoors with respect, mens sana demanding a no less sane relation with nature. The paper’s first edition in 1821 casually recorded the death of Napoleon alongside news that ‘a colony of rooks has lately established itself in a garden at the top of King Street’. Such shrewd news judgment has continued to this day. To read the diaries over the years is to sense the brain relaxing and life taking on a new tempo. It suddenly matters that a hive of Lancashire bees swarmed and was retrieved only when chased by a neighbour who happened to be a rugby three-quarter. The first world war is tempered by instructions on how to fend off an attack by a furious swan at Shepperton lock. This is news you can use…Few editors appreciate how limited is the reader’s tolerance for undiluted politics. We can all wax eloquent on the mutability of human affairs, but it takes a craftsman to stop the front page for ‘Loveliest of trees the cherry now’. The country diarist must find thrills in the unpredictability of the seasons and build a bridge between now and eternity…I am also indebted to Wainwright for unearthing two of the great opening sentences in journalism, both from Guardian Country Diaries: ‘The emergence of newts from their winter hibernation tends to go unremarked’ and, in September 1939, ‘I cannot help thinking that if only Hitler had been an ornithologist he would have put off the war until the autumn migration was over.’ This is not a literature of nostalgia or romance. It is the journalism of Lilliput, bringing down the mighty to miniature and making great the apparently trivial. It makes us see the world through new eyes - those of nature…”
A Gleaming Landscape, 100 years of the Guardian’s Country Diary edited by Martin Wainwright