Society

The unclued lights, one of two words, and the others when paired are of a kind. One individual unclued light does double duty.   Across 1    Women’s painting seen initially returning by tube (5) 4    Look about, right and left, in a jaunty manner (9) 9    Home I leave — priests’ centre’s defining acts of wickedness (10) 11    Give address that’s fancy, not new (5) 12    Porcelain broken, lacking no true copy (7) 16    Trojan horse finally gains access to a stable backwards (6) 21    What is going beyond The Pale? (8) 24    Fair during the 70s (4) 27    Nemesis from Bremerhaven, Germany (7) 28    Fielder at opponent’s ground has to

J. A. Baker, an arthritic and short-sighted birdwatcher from Chelmsford, compared the British wilderness to ‘the goaded bull at bay, pierced by the lance of the picador’. Baker found solace in the unblemished solitude of the Dengie Hundred, where he wrote one of the strangest and most influential nature books ever written, The Peregrine, which tracks the daily lives of a pair of peregrine falcons. He died in the 1980s but the wilderness of the Dengie Peninsula, 50 miles east of London, where Essex marshland meets the Northern main, is still largely as it was. Here, wildfowl still come and go in their thousands. Waders take refuge in the glasswort

Autumn’s wild bounty is a cause for celebration across the Continent. In France and Germany, people rush into the woods, motivated largely by greed. Families drink, eat and forage, while the elderly show their grandchildren what is — and isn’t — safe to eat. In Britain, attitudes are different. Even conkers now seem suspect. We are particularly nervous about fungi, because we are told that picking mushrooms is both dangerous and bad for the environment. This is a shame. Britain has the perfect climate for some of the most flavoursome wild mushrooms known to man. They grow in our woods, pastures and hedges, yet almost all of us ignore them.