Mark Cocker is completing his 1,000th diary for the Guardian's country diary, the world's oldest column in an English-language newspaper. The milestone follows his first diary in the autumn of 1987, when he sat in a field near Norwich and watched a jay burying acorns for the winter.
A Landmark Column
In his next diary, Cocker will reflect on changing birdlife around Flint Clough in the Peak District, where he first marvelled at rare birds aged 12. As a boy, he found cuckoo, golden plover, ring ouzel and twite, a once-common bird now virtually extinct in England.
On a recent visit, he saw raptors he would have only dreamed of as a boy: "a whole slew of buzzards, two peregrines, two marsh harriers – the first I've ever seen in Derbyshire – and several red kites".
The Craft of the Diary
The Guardian country diary began in 1904 with dispatches from Thomas Coward, a retired textile bleacher from Cheshire. Today, about 30 diarists contribute from Cornwall to the Cairngorms, including farmers, scientists, conservationists, a vicar, a thatcher and a forager.
Cocker, who works as a warden at Holkham national nature reserve and studied English at university, says it took him 10 years to master the craft of the diary – a compelling story about rural life in just 360 words. "You need quite a long apprenticeship to get it right because it's so short," he said. "It's like a haiku. You've got to awaken the subject from its dormancy and get straight into the theme."
His collection, The Nature of Seeing, published this month, includes recent diaries and new essays. Cocker points to literary greats such as Margaret Atwood and Vladimir Nabokov who also had a passion for wildlife.
A Growing Legacy
Before writing, Cocker worked as a refuse collector, a road sweeper and a potato picker. His big break came after a conservationist friend wrote to the Guardian to complain about inconsequential diaries about cricket matches. "She said: 'The Guardian needs to get its boots and hat and coat on, and get out into the wild,'" Cocker remembered.
Cocker wrote early columns on chiffchaffs, silver-studded blue butterflies and sparrowhawks, before becoming a regular when the Lakeland diarist Enid Wilson fell ill. Between them, Wilson and Cocker have covered a span of 76 years.
After Phil Gates retired recently following nearly 40 years on the diary, Cocker is now the longest-serving diarist. Country diary editor Paul Fleckney said: "Mark is a gift to the diary. What you get from him is hyper-detailed knowledge with one eye on the bigger picture, and all written with such persuasion."
Cocker is convinced that, for all its modesty, the country diary's time has come. "Meaning has been poured on to the diary because it is a repository now for a sense of the impending crisis which assails all life," he said. "The diary's become a valuable philosophical place for big ideas to be shared."
