An absolutely delightful book-Counting My Chickens and other Home Thoughts by The Duchess of Devonshire. My cozy little used bookstore has a table at the very front where there put out off-beat or interesting-looking titles. I always stop there first and found this fun little book.

Chatsworth is the traditional home of the Dukes of Devonshire and under the Duchess's supervision it has become one of England's most fequently visited great houses with more than 400,000 visitors a year as of 2001 when the book was written. She has a very firm grasp on the rights as well as the responsibilities and burdens of those "privileged to own land". There is a fair amount of bemused frustration on her part about those who have no connection to the land whether it is farmland or fields or forests who think they know best how to care for them without taking any thought as to the science or art of keeping them in a usable and pleasing state. That forestry, including the cutting down of trees, is not vandalism but truly tending the land. As she puts it "In the 1970s, the Environment was invented."

She is also, a very funny writer, able to poke fun at herself and find funny situations in the most mundane of events. And she is acquainted with the likes of Tom Stoppard, Evelyn Waugh, John F Kennedy, and is the niece of Harold Wilson, a former Prime Minister. This was a very quick, easy, fun read and it's astonishing to find out that she had absolutely no formal education and very little informal education other than what she was interested in and picked up on her own.