An interesting call, in the latest edition of Country Life magazine. The editorial says we need a “ruralist Harry Potter“, to do what Potter did in reviving interest in learning Latin, boarding schools, school uniforms and more. This new ‘CountryPotter’ would at least aim to revive interest the wide range of wild herbage, encouraging children to learn tree types and what “a meadow clary or a hairy mallow” looks like. More ambitiously, also the old dialect words, the ins and outs of rural crafts inc. den-making, the more reliable bits of our weather-lore, the seasons and their foods, and the ways of wildlife and horses. A healthy disdain for health and safety, and irrational far-left eco-politics, would probably also add to the appeal to intelligent children in middle-childhood. It would have to be about magic in some way, tightly plotted but also epic, and probably a bit ‘alternative history’.