Diarists and letter-writers

 Ronald Blythe had a rule for organizing his bookshelves. 

The diarists and letter-writers squeeze against each other on the top shelves otherwise where would I be? Glued to their confessions and not working a minute.

 

I’m of like mind. I read fiction, but the literature I talk about was usually written by diarists, letter-writers and memoirists. I’d include essayists like Montaigne and Lamb in that group; their essays read like letters to friends.

I’d put Blythe himself in that group. His essays were weekly newspaper columns. He had a standing spot on the back page of The Church Times.

He described the column as a kind of diary. Each installment contains a line about the weather and the season. He goes on to say what people in the village of Wormingford were doing, thinking about, talking about. Many columns contain a note about one of his cats.

I’m a child of Texas who is learning to live in Georgia. I’ll never get to live in the English countryside. It astonishes me that I have some sense of what it’s like. 

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 447.