WHEN a girl broke into our house tuck shop with a hockey stick and it was subsequently shut for a month, it was as if 60 pupils were suffering a bereavement. No Space Raiders, no Wham bars, no sherbet Dip Dabs to see us through those dark January days. We weren’t alone in our reliance on that saccharine oasis. At the bucolic Dorset prep school Hanford, such is the importance of the Sunday afternoon sugar hit that a parent of a recent outgoing pupil donated a bench with a plaque inscribed: ‘Keep your friends close and your sweets closer!’
Queues are so long for the tuck shop at Heathfield, Berkshire (housed in a storybookworthy, bay-windowed shop), that one old girl whose dorm was above it remembers presenting Tuck Shop FM with her boom box on the windowsill, to keep the feet of patient customers tapping. A girl who left Tudor Hall, Oxfordshire, in the noughties recalls being given 50p pieces by sixth formers to corridor creep to the vending machine when the tuck shop (run by Mrs Tuckwell) was shut, before lowering the goods out of the window to them in a bag tied with a dressing-gown cord—a sound grounding for a future investment manager. As the Old Radleian and man behind the sweet empire Candy Kittens Jamie Laing has said: ‘Sweets were like currency at school.’
この記事は Country Life UK の February 28, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の February 28, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Don't rain on Venus's parade
TENNIS has never been sexier—at least, that is what multiple critics of the new film Challengers are saying.
A rural reason to cheer
THERE was something particularly special for country people when one of the prestigious King’s Awards for Voluntary Service was presented last week.
My heart is in the Highlands
A LISTAIR MOFFAT’S many books on Scottish history are distinctive for the way he weaves poetry and literature, language and personal experience into broad-sweeping studies of particular regions or themes. In his latest— and among his most ambitious in scope—he juxtaposes a passage from MacMhaighstir Alasdair’s great sea poem Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill with his own account of filming a replica birlinn (Hebridean galley) as it glides into the Sound of Mull, ‘larch strakes swept up to a high prow’, saffron sail billowing, water sparkling as its oars dip and splash. Familiar from medieval tomb carvings, the birlinn is a potent symbol of the power of the Lords of the Isles.
Put it in print
Three sales furnished with the ever-rarer paper catalogues featured intriguing lots, including a North Carolina map by John Ogilby and a wine glass gibbeting Admiral Byng, the unfortunate scapegoat for the British loss of Minorca
The rake's progress
Good looks, a flair for the theatrical and an excellent marriage made John Astley’s fortune, but also swayed ‘le Titien Anglois’ away from painting into a dissolute life of wine and women, with some collecting on the side
Charter me this
There’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored and one of the most exciting ways to see it is from the water, says Emma Love, who rounds up the best boat charters
Hey ho, hey ho, it's off to sow we go
JUNE can be a tricky month for the gardener.
Floreat Etona
The link with the school and horticulture goes back to its royal founder, finds George Plumptre on a visit to the recently restored gardens
All in good time
Two decades in the planning, The Emory, designed by Sir Richard Rogers, is open. Think of it as a sieve that retains the best of contemporary hotel-keeping and lets the empty banality flow away
Come on down, the water's fine
Ratty might have preferred a picnic, but canalside fine dining is proving the key to success for new restaurant openings in east London today, finds Gilly Hopper