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. In an interview with this paper in the mid-1970s, he said: “When I wrote Akenfield, I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished just as the book came out.

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 SPECTATORBeginning 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.

The artistic couple even found him a small house near Aldeburgh and introduced him to Benjamin Britten, who put Blythe to work writing programme material and doing translations for Aldeburgh Festival. 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. In an interview in 2001 for Anglia Ruskin University he described himself as "a chronic reader", in his youth immersing himself in French literature and writing poetry. He served during the early years of the Second World War before being demobbed in early 1944 when he gained, what was at the time. his dream job as a reference librarian in Colchester's Old Library. I think Ronald Blythe is a genius in a special, but perhaps overlooked, journalistic genre – the nature notes or country talk columns. 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.

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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.”

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.” 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”. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe.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. 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. 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. This article was amended on 7 November 2022 to correct references to the location of Blythe’s home.