5/7/2023 0 Comments Smart notes in lawsonIn "French Country Cooking" she wrote, with characteristic elegance and directness: Back in London after the war she started to write about cookery and in the following decades she introduced thousands of English people who had never cooked with such exotic ingredients as aubergines, basil, garlic or olive oil, to the delights of Mediterranean cuisine. She then went via Yugoslavia to Greece, but in 1941 was forced to flee the invading Germans and escaped to Cairo. She had an extraordinary life: rebelling against the expectations of an upper-class English family, she travelled with her lover by boat from England to Antibes and then Sicily, where she was briefly held as a suspected spy. Pride of place on my kitchen bookshelf is reserved for the works of Elizabeth David. If you're ever in West Sussex on a Saturday afternoon in the summer, you may be lucky enough to catch a match and a pint or two in the Noah's Ark pub afterwards. Records show that stoolball was still played at Lurgashall as recently as the 1950s, but nowadays stoolball's out and cricket's in. One such revival, during the First World War, involved a match in Hove between a team of soldiers who had lost an arm in battle and were deemed "damaged by wounds", and a team of elderly lawyers who were "damaged by age". ![]() Indeed, stoolball originated in Sussex and from time to time experiences revivals in popularity. Cricket has been played on the green there for over 200 years, while stoolball a possible ancestor of cricket was probably played there long before. The picturesque village of Lurgashall, nestled in the fertile hills of West Sussex in the southeast of England, is home not only to an artist famous for her ecards, but also to a particularly well-established village cricket team. After all, it has been at the heart of at least two episodes of Midsomer Murders: you don't get much English-er than that. Or maybe it's just that it is so quintessentially English. Maybe it's cricket's reputation for gentlemanly behaviour: the phrase "it's just not cricket" is still widely used to describe something which is unjust or unfair. But even if you have no clue whether that gesture by the umpire indicated a four or a six, a bye or a leg bye, a wide or a no-ball, or whether he was just scratching an itch, there's something about watching a game of cricket on a sunny English village green which is curiously attractive. In 2018, the law in Saudi Arabia was finally changed so as to allow women to drive.įreshly washed whites, incomprehensible scoring, and the occasional tap of a willow bat on a leather ball: it can only be a game of cricket. Perhaps if he had done his research, he would have known that Her Majesty was trained during the Second World War as an ambulance driver! ![]() No doubt he was expecting that some uniformed servant would be at the wheel but no, it was the Queen herself who proceeded to tear around the narrow roads of the estate, prompting the Crown Prince to implore her to slow down. In his book "Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin", Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, sometime British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, tells the story of how Crown Prince Abdullah, de facto leader of that country which at the time did not allow women even to drive cars was invited to Balmoral Castle to lunch with the Queen.įollowing the meal, he was asked if he would like a tour of the estate in the royal Land Rover. Here at Jacquie Lawson, there was one simple anecdote which made us both laugh and cry, and we wanted to share it with you. In the short time since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the airwaves and the internet have been inundated with beautiful tributes and heartfelt messages of sympathy. ![]() Return to top Behind the Scenes Blog Articles Queen Elizabeth II
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