A Shepherd's lunch

I picked up this dirty old book by W.H.Hudson (dirty and old in the sense of being stained and rather decrepit) the other day and had to have it. This is the 7th edition, published in 1924, fourteen years after he wrote it. I quote:

William Henry Hudson was born in Argentina in 1841. He was the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife, United States settlers of English and Irish origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. He had a special love of Patagonia.

Hudson settled in England during 1874, taking up residence in London. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888–1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s. It was set on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. He was a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 

My interest stems from the fact that David Saunders (1726-1796), my 5x great-grandfather, was also a shepherd on Salisbury Plain. In fact he was dubbed 'The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain' by Hannah More, a friend of William Wilberforce, in a religious tract she published in 1795. 

This book is full of everyday stories of ordinary folk, of the slaughter of countless foxes and rabbits and other innocent beasts disliked by landowners and their gamekeepers. It also tells the tale of a poor dog, which being locked accidentally in a church which was only used once a quarter, survived by licking the water from the damp walls!

The superimposition of a box of cuppa soup tells the tale of another little everyday tragedy of ordinary folk. I've become quite addicted to Ainsley Harriott's Hot and Sour Soup, but when I took the box out of the cupboard before lunch today, found that by mistake I'd picked up his Mulligatawny soup instead! This story will no doubt find its way into my next book, 'A Gardener's Life', and amuse some reader in 2120!

Now to do something useful!