Town mouse, country house

There is nothing good to be had in the country," wrote Hazlitt. "Or if there is, they will not let you have it." There is something strangely modern about this vintage apercu, with its uneasy mixture of contempt and longing. It is the authentic voice of the city sophisticate, musing on the countryside. Urban Man knows the country to be a place of repulsive agricultural smells and sounds, where everything shuts at 5.30 sharp and the pubs fall silent as you enter.

Yet flicking through the advertisements for wisteria-hung Old Rectories in pale gold stone that cluster lusciously among the property pages of the weekend papers, the grittiest townie cannot suppress a certain quickening of the heart. Living in cities is a harsh business: a kind of lowgrade guerrilla warfare. What would life in an Old Rectory be like, we wonder, fleetingly. Might there, after all, be something good in the country?

Who better qualified to say than Clive Aslet, editor of Country Life, who has, as he explains in the introduction of this book, "spent 22 years of my life ... not living in the country"? In autumn 1999, however, he had reached "a point at which ... a finger beckoned, and it pointed to the Heart of England." Despite the misgivings of his town-loving wife, Naomi, he installed his young family in a cottage in the village of Geddington, in Northamptonshire, and began to immerse himself in rural life.

His book is a diary of the first year of that process from the opening of the foxhunting season in autumn 1999.

He was unlucky with his dates, for though he does his best to cover the foot-and-mouth epidemic in his introduction and epilogue, his diary, as he remarks in his opening sentence, "ends in winter 2000. Already ... it has come to seem almost nostalgic in recording an era before Britain went mad". In other words, the text is permeated by the melancholy sense of having missed a huge news story.

The diary, despite its title, is as much domestic as equestrian. The twin strands of the narrative tell of the private comedies and mishaps of transferring a sceptical wife and two small boys into a picturesquely inconvenient cottage, and of the equally tortuous business of integrating the family into a new community of which it is only a part-time member.

Of course, a rural community is not a single organism, but a constellation of related entities. By energetic involvement with the pub, the parish council, the church, the volunteer fire brigade and the Pytchley Hunt, Aslet contrives in an astoundingly short time to embed himself in his new milieu.

Gratifying though this acceptance must have been, it constitutes a problem for the would-be diarist. How to write about people and institutions among whom you propose to continue living? The answer is, unless you are Alan Clark, with extreme circumspection.

Only when Aslet is writing about the hunt - his nerve presumably stiffened by the shattering forthrightness of the mounted field - does emotion get the better of caution. These passages, as a result, have a verve and energy that lifts them well above the pleasant, mildly entertaining, but rather low-calorie quality of the rest of the book.