I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature which came out in October, just a few months before the great man’s death aged 100. And so a weekend holiday in Suffolk was calling to me. I went to Aldeburgh, on the coast, north of the river Alde. The town appears to be thriving – full of bustling cafés and London money. It is fashionable and chic. In many respects it is a world away from Blythe’s Akenfield. But there is much here to charm you.
I lingered by a wonderful second-hand bookshop, Reed Books 4, its window display with Peter Kent’s Fortifications of East Anglia, George Ewart Evans’s The Farm and Village and Hugh Barrett’s recounting of a rural Suffolk morning in Early to Rise. Is this what Scruton meant by oikophilia? Here was heart-warming local pride. Here was love for this place, which made me want to love it too.
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