{"product_id":"one-long-and-beautiful-summer","title":"One Long and Beautiful Summer","description":"\u003cp\u003eOne of Duncan Hamilton's favourite writers on cricket, Edmund Blunden, wrote how he felt going to watch a game: 'You arrive early, earlier even than you meant . . . and you feel a little guilty at the thought of the day you propose to give up to sheer luxury'.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFollowing Neville Cardus's assertion that 'there can be no summer in this land without cricket', Hamilton plotted the games he would see in 2019 and write down reflectively on some of the cricket that blessed his own sight. It would be captured in the context of the coming season in case subsequent summers and the imminent arrival of The Hundred made that impossible. He would write in the belief that after this season the game might never be quite the same again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe visits Welbeck Colliery Cricket Club to see Nottinghamshire play Hampshire at the tiny ground of Sookholme, gifted to the club by a local philanthropist who takes money on the gate; his village team at Menston in Yorkshire; the county ground at Hove; watches Ben Stokes's heroics at Headingley, marvels at Jofra Archer's gift of speed in a Second XI fixture for Sussex against Gloucestershire in front of 74 people and three well-behaved dogs; and realises when he reaches the last afternoon of the final county match of the season at Taunton, 'How blessed I am to have been born here. How I never want to live anywhere else. How much I love cricket.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEnglish Pastoral \u003c\/i\u003eis the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"oxfordcool","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":35503560622246,"sku":"","price":16.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0445\/5864\/7462\/products\/9781529408379.jpg?v=1596438451","url":"https:\/\/oxfordcool.myshopify.com\/products\/one-long-and-beautiful-summer","provider":"oxfordcool","version":"1.0","type":"link"}