earlier the manchester mystics won the inaugural women's bbl cup, with a 71—60 victory against nottingham wildcats. that is all from sportsday. coming next, meet the author. how much do we still live in tune with the rhythm of the seasons, and why does that matter? in his much admired novels, tim pears has consistently worked to explore our relationship with the land, the old habits, an inherited feeling for how nature works, and maybe to try to rediscover an understanding that could be slipping away. it's one of the themes of his new book, the horseman. set in the west country before the first world war, telling the story of an unlikely and almost forbidden relationship, and the coming loss of innocence. welcome. one of the most powerful elements of the horseman is the sense of the force of nature, the cycles of the seasons and so on, and it's obvious that that's not a device. have you always been conscious of that closeness to the way, frankly, the earth works? i have, yes, definitely. the horseman is set in the west country, and that's where i grew up, i am a country boy. but i left there... like many people, i grew up in a small village. it wasn't for me when i was there, it wasn't where the world was. the world was in the big cities, it was in london, it was in europe. you had to leave home to find it? i had to leave home to find it, it is an old story. and, having left home and begun to think about it some years later and beginning to write about it and use it as a place that i wanted to set stories in, i couldn't then go back except in the imagination. but what you've been able to do, i think, is to recover a feeling for the land that has disappeared for most people. and it's inescapable. because you are writing the first of a trilogy that will take us into the first world war, that it is in part about the disappearance of a way of life and an understanding of country ways. is that what you feel? well, ifeel that, but i also feel something else. all the time that i was researching the book, and for the research i read a lot of memoirs by old men written in the ‘60s and ‘70s looking back to their edwardian childhood, and i felt two things very strongly. on the one hand, a kind of nostalgia for what as you say had been lost, this closeness to the rhythm of the seasons, notjust to nature but also to the animals that they worked with. the relationship between the ploughmen, the carters, and the horses they worked with, which was something that is very much the stuff of the book, and i found very interesting. fascinating to read about their working lives, and then to write about. and i felt that. but on the other hand, equally strongly, i felt a relief that we don't live like that, because they worked so hard, jim. you can see a bit of that in the story as it develops, but what bubbles up the whole time is your feeling for the power of the sensibility of knowing that this season will be followed by that, the harvest will be followed by this, the animals are doing this, the animals will now do that. just watching the landscape change. and in your mature years, you still feel that, do you? i think i feel it more strongly than ever. and i will tell you a funny thing, just personally, which is that i grew up with a father who was very much an intellectual, he was a priest and his study was a book—lined room where, after i left school at 16, i immersed myself in the canon of russian literature that he had on his walls, and i went on from there. and my mother was not at all bookish, cultural, and although she is very much from an upper—middle—class background, she basically, i realised, is a peasant in terms of being very close to the seasons, and is immersed in the daily round of nature and animals and so on, and it is very recently i realised with a kind of obvious revelation that i am both my parents‘ child, and that i am the intellectual, but i am also the peasant. it is interesting how long it takes for the penny to drop that everyone is the child of their parents, isn't it? it is extraordinary that you go back to your childhood, to your learning experience, but also to the palpable feeling for the countryside that you so much wanted to get away from. well, i will tell you, interesting in writing this book, jim, was that as i began to realise what i wanted to write about, these two young people who both have a shared love of horses in a different way, the boy, the son of the carter, a horse whisperer in the making, and this girl who is the daughter of the aristocrat who owns the estate. i realised that it would only work if i could write about horses. well, my experience in childhood was that i had a mother who was very keen on horses, and two sisters who had a pony each, and i thought these were just terrifying beasts whose main aim in life was to lure young boys and kick them if possible, and i kept well away. and probably i could count on the fingers of both my hands the number of times i actually fed or groomed or rode those ponies. so you had to do the research? no. the thing was that when i came to write the book, that very limited experience... all came back. it all came up, and there it was. and maybe that's how it is. you could hear the horses, you could smell them ? yes, exactly. it's the first of a trilogy. this one is set in 1911 before those last warm summers after which the world fell apart for so many people. it is going to take us right through the war, is it? one of the things that i had to bear in mind when i was writing it was that these people had no idea what was coming. of course, some people did. the first dreadnoughts had been built. people in the admiralty knew something was coming, some kind of conflict. but they didn't quite know. they didn't quite know. what it was going to be like. no. these people would have had no idea, and i had to keep reminding myself writing it that i mustn't give them this shadow of the war. it wasn't over them. it's only with hindsight that we see it. that was very important. but you're right, it is the first part of a trilogy, and it is going to carry on. to go back finally to where we began, the sense of loss, notjust in terms of the coming war, which we know about but they didn't, but the sense of loss in the dulling of our senses to something in the seasons, the chapter headings are the months here, the year rolls round. is that something that you think many people are now, against the trend, trying to recover? that more people are aware of what has been lost? yes, i'm sure you're right, i'm sure you're right. but can i just say one thing that i came across in the memoirs of these old men who worked with horses... of course, as we know, over a million horses were taken to the great war and lost there, and then after the war, the tractor came along, and quite quickly, horses disappeared. farmers, being unsentimental people, took those horses to the abattoir. and these men who went from working with these horses to working on tractors, they lost that relationship. they lost the hard work, but they were kind of in mourning, and this is something that i was very touched by coming across in these memoirs. these men who were grieving for this lost relationship. tim pears, author of the horseman, thank you very much. thank you,jim. good evening. i hope you've had a nice weekend. it has been dreary out there today. rain across many parts of the uk and a lot of cloud. we will keep the theme going in the next few days. some of it is thick enough to give some trips and drops of rain. no great amounts out there at the moment. as we go into the night, some of the rain will start to pick up. scotland, parts of east wales and england as well. fog patches in east anglia and the south—east. it is chilly. milder further west. we starts tomorrow with temperatures well above freezing. the catches there will be afair bit freezing. the catches there will be a fair bit of rain around, particularly for the southern and the midlands. a touch of frost across kent. a frost free start to the day. mostly drive for northern ireland and most of scotland as well, away from east areas. hopefully some of us will see some brightness. the best of that in part of east anglia and the south—east. still this damp weather through central areas. that will tend to ease away. some dry spells in the afternoon. some brightness for northern ireland and scotland. some of the best temperatures here. chilly down towards the south—east, despite the sunshine. it could be a frosty start here on tuesday. the best of the sunshine in the south—east. further west, best of the sunshine in the south—east. furtherwest, cloud and dampness. that is the pattern through the early part of this week. across these more north—western areas, quite a lot of cloud. it will be mild for the time of the year. temperatures in two double figures. further south and east, it will be chillier. particularly across the east anglia and the south—east. clear skies, some sunshine. the price you pay for that is that although we see 5 degrees by day, overnight we could see some sharp frost. the extent that frost not certain. hard frost in the south east. that's as nothing compared with the severe cold spreading down south west europe, even into parts of spain and portugal. temperatures quite widely below freezing all day long. a charmed life back home. all the latest can be found on the website. this is bbc news. the headlines at 8pm: labour accuses the chancellor of threatening a trade war with europe, if access to the single market is denied after brexit. doctors voice concern over the number of cancer patients having their operations cancelled because of the pressures on the nhs. have cancer inside you, you want to get rid of it and that is devastating to get the news. as donald trump prepares for his inauguration ceremony, a leading figure in the civil rights movement says he will be boycotting the event. also in the next hour: more than 70 nations meet for a major international conference aimed at kick—starting peace talks between israel and the palestinians. delegates at the summit in paris restate their commitment to a two—state solution and warn against unilateral actions. and the travel show goes underground as it explores russia's hidden military history in vladivostok.