Thomas Marks.
When we meet, Country Mouse is all talk of Appleby Fair, of the mutter of horse-dealers and the leathery smell of the animals. It’s his enthusiasm, paired with a visit to The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot at the British Museum (until 30 September) that has me watching for horses and their ghosts in London this month. Sitting in the quiet July dusk of Canonbury Square, it’s not long before I imagine the clean clip of hooves in the distance…
Jon Day
Appleby, a small market town in Westmoreland, sits snugly in its loop of the river Eden. For the last five hundred years or so Gypsies and Travellers from across the land have gathered in the town in June for an annual horse fair; an opportunity to trade animals, to trade gossip. Many make the journey over several weeks in trailers and caravans, stopping along the way. I take the train from Leeds, travelling along what must be one of the most beautiful railways in Britain, the Settle-Carlisle line. I leave London behind. England slides past in a flicker of green and grey. Knock, Dufton and Murton pikes look on, impassive, wreathed in cloud…
Thomas Marks re-orientates his London bearings at the prompting of a not-so-discreet new skyscraper.
A shard is a piece that’s been broken off something else and, as such, it tends to take on an accidental and often dangerous shape. So there’s an inevitable irony in pointing out that Renzo Piano’s vast London Bridge skyscraper, known as The Shard, has now been completed. The building is an extraordinary structural achievement that’s been made to resemble a colossal fragment. Piano has gone for stylised breakage: vast staggered planes of glass, a scalene tilt, a splintered steel spire…
Jon Day finds a taste for wild country food.
There is a cottage in the South Downs with a small valley of a garden, sunk below the brows of the surrounding hills. It is right on the wood-pigeon flight path – at dawn and dusk hundreds of birds cruise along the tree line, finding or leaving their roosts in the dense copse behind the orchard at the bottom of the garden; taking off with an explosive rattle of leaves and branches, landing with a series of exhausted coos. In the undergrowth, lords-and-ladies stand proud like fluorescent orange hand grenades jutting through the leaf-litter, startling and incongruous. Behind the copse is a field, and in the field a dynasty of rabbits dig the ground to pieces. The farmer who owns this land is always happy for someone to take a few for the pot…
Following Jon Day’s appearance as Country Mouse last month, Thomas Marks now takes to the streets of London as Town Mouse, eagerly watching clocks for the coming of summer.
The clocks change this month, and London shrugs off its dark winter. I have always loved that active verb, ‘change’, since it lets me imagine the clocks flickering into life, adjusting their own mechanisms before they retune the mood of the capital. Out of Mean Time comes the kind light of summer: the hour’s leap forward seems so enigmatic, when I hesitate over it, that it might just as well be some trick of natural magic. Each year, it draws my thoughts down the river to Greenwich, to the meridian line – and to the unfathomable way that time fans out from this city…
In the first of what we hope will be a regular column, Jon Day embarks on new adventures as Country Mouse, so named after the Aesop fable The Town Mouse & the Country Mouse. Our Town Mouse, Thomas Marks, will make his first appearance soon…
On the shelf above my desk I keep my small collection of found objects: a piece of razor-sharp flint; the tail of a squirrel; a rabbit’s skull, light and brittle as parchment. Pride of place is a malevolent aged jaw, six inches long, curved like a scimitar and spiked with several lethal-looking teeth. It is the jaw of a pike. It must have belonged to an enormous fish; certainly double figures, maybe a twenty or thirty pounder. I found it one spring morning on the banks of a lake in Oxfordshire, though how it got there I’ll never know. Who, or what, could have caught such a fish?
