Thursday, 7 March 2013
Breakfast.
I sit munching my way through breakfast with one ear cocked to the Today program. More terrible news from Syria, the latest government assault on benefit claimants, Wayne Rooney's fading career prospects and what seems like hours of "business news" (I'm sure that there never was so much time devoted to business). It all forms an aural montage of despair. This morning however a couple of unconnected items caught my attention. First was the latest food/health scare. It's a well known scientific fact that all matter can be divided into two classes, that which cures and that which causes cancer. Today it was the turn of meat. Well, processed meat to be more precise; sausages, pies, bacon, that kind of stuff. Apparently two bacon sarnis a week could do you more harm than sixty fags a day. Straight up. A panel of experts discussed all this in the studio. Eat more veg. Cut back on meat. No pies and sausages. Having separated the prime cuts what should we do with the cheap, less aspiration bits? Grind them down to a pap and feed to the poor? What do you mean, "That's what happens now"? Oh! I see. I sigh and pour another cup of coffee. The Today team move on. Her indoors issues my instructions for the day. What's this they are talking about now? A plague of deer. More experts. Apparently the country is overrun with deer and they are eating all the vegetables that we are supposed to be replacing our pies with. Should there be a national deer cull? Well I would have thought so. Perhaps we should get venison back on the menu. Packed with protein and low in saturated fat, venison combined with the veg that dead deer can't eat, would form the basis of our new austerity diet. They should have me in charge of all this stuff really. "Do you wan't another slice of toast"?
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I rent some fields to work my dogs from a farmer who cannot be fagged to grow anything or put livestock on his land because of tiresome regulations. So the deer run free. Trouble is there are not enough to keep the grass under control and the hedges are spreading rapidly. We urgently need more deer, more rabbits, because the alternative is the heavy machinery that smashes down the hedges and cuts the long grass with huge tyres that wreck the pathways. My mate shoots deer in the New Forest and sells venison to local butchers - its all well controlled - and this report from notorious East Anglia - remember the emails scandal - is worthless. Links between x and y, have no scientific validity.
Having just got back from La Belle France the first thing that strikes me about England is how much land is lying fallow and unmanaged. Areas of France I drove through had cultivated fields right up to the roadside. No bushes or hedgerows. Hillsides cultivated with vines and almond trees. However apart from the odd pack of wild boar, rookeries and stray cat there is practically no sign of wild life.The fews days I spent in a major French city I saw 5 (yep I counted 'em)wild birds. In the bar/tabac I asked where all the birds had gone. Pollution had killed them off they said, and it was a good thing because "bird shit can fuck up the paint job on your car".
So I'm in a dilemma (again); do I advocate the cultivated fields of france and good food on the table and no wild life; or the beautiful ramshackle countryside of Brittania, loads of edible wildlife and imported horsemeat in my pastie.
I've tried farming in France and to put it into the words of the Londoner I really am...it's a fucking mug's game,but then so is pushing a trolley round Tescos.
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