I continue to feel seriously aggrieved that my favourite comic novel is set in Darkest Sussex rather than Deepest Norfolk, especially at this time of year when hapless lambs at thought of mint sauce bleat and ducks are conscious of the coming peas.

There’s also a handy ration of sap-rising in and around the best sort of hedges to brighten longer days and short forms of futility rites since time immoral. Even innocent little Bambi had to blush when told how creatures great and small become all “twitterpated” in springtime.

The endearing book to which I refer is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, first published in1932 and still helping to keep real rural life in perspective, both for natives who think they  know all about it and an ever-growing contingent of fresh pastoral converts who move in with experience to spare.

It’s packed with colourful characters  but newcomers to Norfolk and graduates of Mummerzet House Finishing College for Aspiring Rustic Actors ought not to perceive such as the genuine article. This rollicking novel stands high on the list of literary juice-extractors.

It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden, accounts of country life so popular at that time by writers such as Mary Webb, DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. For some, it even points the finger of serious fun at the hallowed Brontë sisters. Living out in the steamy sticks or across the moody moors has been a fashionable subject way beyond urban estate agent windows.

Flora Poste, the volume’s heroine with literary aspirations of her own, decides on the death of her parents to visit distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional Sussex village of Howling.

The inhabitants, Aunt Ada Doom, who saw “something nasty in the woodshed”, the Starkadders and their extended family of workers, all feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong done to her father.

Speech of the characters is a tantalising send-up of rural dialects, in particular Sussex and West  Country, liberally sprinkled with fake but authentic-sounding local vocabulary.

“Mollocking” is undefined but invariably results in pregnancy of a local maid. “Sukebind” is a weed whose flowering in spring symbolises the quickening of urges in man and beast. For the more practical-minded. “clettering” is a method for washing dishes which involves scraping them with dry twig or clettering stick.

Sounds like work in progress for Rambling Syd Rumpo’s debut on Round the Horne. He could well have spent a fortnight or two at Cold Comfort Farm before polishing his artefacts, sorting out his “moolies” from his “nadgers” and then regaling the nation with The Terrible Tale of the Somerset Nog and  The Sussex Whirdling Song.

Trouble with making up such appealing words is how different folk in advertising, tourism and drama departments consider them fair game for anything adding “authentic” colour to certain projects and productions. There are well-meaning types who think “whirdling” is a genuine Sussex custom.

In fact, it is not unknown or untried in Norfolk and Suffolk, especially when there’s a vowel in the month or after an outstanding crop of local rhubarb. One of the Singing Postman’s unpublished songs is believed to refer to “whirdling” as a once-popular recreation after dark in Stiffkey.

Another charming feature of Cold Comfort Farm is memorable names for the animals. Cows looked after  by 90-year-old Adam Lambsbreath are Aimless, Feckless, Gracious and Pointless.

The bull is called Big Business.

Now, if this epic had been staged in Norfolk, probably under the banner of Mad Mawkin Farm, those cows would have answered to Botty (self-important), Clinker (above average), Duzzy (rather silly) and Paigle (cowslip). I’m torn between Bruff (hearty spirits) and Mucher (something of good quality, for the bull.

Stella Gibbons surprised many readers by setting her ground-breaking novel in the future a little after 1946 and featured various technological developments she thought might have been invented by then, such as TV phones and air taxis.

She also referred to future social and demographic changes, like degradation of Mayfair into a slum district. No mention, though, of Adam Lambsbreath investing in a Chelsea Tractor and setting up a twinning arrangement between Howling and Burnham Market.

Cold Comfort Farm is ideal reading for those who may nurse doubts about our agricultural future  or strength of  the new sap-rising season . Just a matter of finding parts of Norfolk and Suffolk where hedges haven’t been ripped out to foil the sukebind.