Nearly a year ago, on the last day of 2017, my wife and I had walked only a few miles across the South Downs when the rain began to sweep relentlessly across the bare upland, forcing us steeply downhill towards a little settlement called Firle. The pub there was crammed with walkers as soaked as ourselves, who boasted they had never been so wet in all their lives. The rain made us comrades, turning the pub into an idealisation of English decency, so that when we walked onwards to the station at Glynde – the rain now subsiding – we felt in good spirits, which lasted until we reached home through the suburban dusk and learned that Gavin Stamp, a good friend, had died the day before.
Gavin would like Firle, so I’d thought on the train, guessing that he probably knew it already. He knew something about most places, and it was always worth getting in touch with him before travelling anywhere to see what he could tell you. Mainly it was buildings – he was the country’s pre-eminent architectural historian – though his knowledge and opinions never stopped at stone and brick. Many years of writing the Nooks and Corners column in Private Eye gave him a sound knowledge of local politics, and of local corruption, through his campaigns to save good architecture from the wrecker’s ball. He believed that Britain’s postwar destruction of its Victorian heritage amounted to a form of national self-hatred.
Whenever I was in a church in 2018 I thought of his feeling for them. “Oh, I love churches,” he said after I complained I’d been taken to see too many of them in Lincolnshire. I have never been a believer, but the more churches vanish as a functioning part of the British landscape, the more valuable they seem as rare agents of thoughtfulness over profit. Other than public libraries, few institutions now stand so apart from commerce. One of them begins my list of 10 good memories from a year in which private escape from the public realm became ever more attractive.
1 Stained glass
David Hockney’s new window at Westminster Abbey has been celebrated for its vibrant colours and lack of religious symbolism. It shows a red country path, blue skies and the white hawthorn blossom of the Yorkshire Wolds, without a saint or cross in sight. But this isn’t a new departure from ecclesiastical tradition. In late summer in Cumbria, just over the border from Hockney’s native county, I visited a disused and neglected church with beautiful windows that depict nothing but the northern landscape. St Gregory’s near Sedbergh – the “railway church” – was erected in the 1860s to serve a congregation that originally included the navvies who were building the line through the Lune valley. The windows came later, the work of the stained glass designer Frederick George Smith circa 1900. They are worth seeing.
2 A secondhand bookshop
Wemyss Bay has one of Britain’s most handsome stations, built to serve the trains and steamers that connected Glasgow to the Firth of Clyde’s islands and resorts. A few years ago, a local support group opened a gallery-bookshop in one of its several empty offices. There’s always something tempting in stock. I’ve bought Ruskin there, and Douglas Bader. No station, possibly anywhere in the world, has a more intellectually rewarding place to wait.
3 My step-counter
What a childish thing a step-counter is. Each of its little white lights represents 2,500 paces; when all four of them are lit, a green light blinks to say you’ve achieved 10,000 paces. Childish – and yet how much you yearn for the approval of that little green light, leaving the house late at night to take several turns around the block and several more around the kitchen until the target has been reached. After many weeks, an incredible message announces that you have now walked the length of Italy.
4 Strawberry tarts
One of the many reasons the step-counter exists. Those from Helmi’s, the patisserie opened on the island of Bute this year by a Syrian refugee family, are the most delicious I’ve tasted. One of the owners was trained in Damascus in the French tradition of pastry making. The many branches of Patisserie Valerie offer no competition.
5 London’s infinitude
After nearly 50 years in the city, I’m pleased that there are still millions of people I shall never meet – many of them people who live in much the same way as I do, with similar incomes and tastes. I can go to any of the cultural temples – the British Film Institute, the English National Opera, the theatre (West End and otherwise), the Wigmore Hall – and never expect to see anyone I know. I’m not sure why I find this pleasing, but I think it may have something to do with an idea of strength in depth; that, though you might think of yourself as a music-lover, you are surrounded by people who know more than you do. The same with London places: I’m still discovering new and interesting scenery only a couple of miles from home. This year’s haul included All Saints church in Margaret Street, in stunning brick neo-Gothic, and the semi-wild spaces of the Walthamstow wetlands.
6 Speeches in parliament
The debate on the EU withdrawal bill produced several good speeches, including a particularly eloquent one by Caroline Lucas. What was the point? The Commons chamber was nearly empty; speeches are no longer much reported in newspapers; only a devotee of BBC Parliament would see them on TV. Yet however pointless, that MPs bothered to make them was heartening.
7 Swimming
This summer’s sun and heat brought out the best in the coasts of Britain and Ireland. On holiday in County Cork, we swam to a cavern in a sandy cove that might have been built to design by Enid Blyton.
8 A good book
Helen Parr’s Our Boys deserved more attention. Its central thread was the story of how the author’s uncle, a paratrooper, died in the Falklands war; but it ranged far beyond those specifics to produce a profound and often moving study of military behaviour and the military’s role in British life.
9 A good film
With its suggestion of falseness, “charming” tends now to be a pejorative. It’s a hard word to avoid, however, in any description of the documentary Faces Places (Visages Villages), directed jointly by the French director Agnes Varda and the French photographer who goes under the pseudonym JR. It was charming from start to finish; delightful, too – and somehow, despite the looming possibility of an appearance by Jean-Luc Godard, never pretentious.
10 Waders
In May, we went to the Wash to look for avocets and eventually found them on Frampton Marsh, a nature reserve just south of Boston. There they were, not so much pecking in the mud as shovelling it forward like long-legged stokers. And there too were bar-tailed godwits with their more decisive straight bills, and lapwings and redshanks. Beyond the pylons in the middle distance, the grey shape of Boston’s famous church tower, the Boston Stump, rose on the horizon. In the EU referendum, the town recorded the highest leave vote in the United Kingdom: 75.6% wanted out. For an hour or two, we looked at birds and managed not to speak of this.
• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
