Mark Cocker writes 1,000th Guardian country diary column — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Mark Cocker is completing his 1,000th Guardian country diary column, 39 years after writing his first in autumn 1987 while watching a jay burying acorns in a field near Norwich.
- The Guardian country diary, running since 1904 (started by Thomas Coward) and billed as the world's oldest such column in an English-language newspaper, now fields about 30 diarists from Cornwall to the Cairngorms, including farmers, scientists, a vicar, a thatcher and a forager.
- Cocker is now the longest-serving diarist after Phil Gates retired nearly 40 years on the column; he first became a regular when Lakeland diarist Enid Wilson fell ill, with the pair together covering 76 years of the column.
- Cocker says mastering the diary took him 10 years — the craft distills rural life into just 360 words, which he likens to haiku and requires 'awakening the subject from its dormancy' before linking it to the universal.
- Earlier this month, Cocker published 'The Nature of Seeing,' a collection of recent diaries alongside new essays on experiencing nature more fully, including an anecdote about Inuit fishers navigating by the patterns of snow bunting songs.
- Cocker calls the diary 'a repository now for a sense of the impending crisis which assails all life,' arguing climate change, biodiversity loss, the rise of the right and overconsumption are all 'one meta-story' about humanity's relationship with the rest of life.
Why it matters: Cocker, now the longest-serving diarist at 1,000 entries, anchors a literary tradition that has run continuously since 1904, and he argues the modest column has gained philosophical weight as a place to process climate and biodiversity crises through close attention to everyday nature.
Ask SkimNews
