Country Life

If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure why I started reading Country Life magazine.  Probably, it was in the hugely mistaken belief, which is the driver behind any story about celebrity, that through reading about a subject, one could become part of that world.  This is not a new phenomenon and is why so much Young Adult fiction has a dash of the fantasy, many teenagers spend a lot of time wishing that they were somewhere or someone else, the irony is of course that eventually they get their wish, they turn into an adult, someone else entirely, although one would hope they never lose their taste for Haribo.

Country Life magazine is, at first glance, the publication most associated with waiting rooms, the exception being the waiting room at Dignatas, in which the sole reading material available is the ‘Daily Main’, after reading which some visitors have been heard to exclaim ‘Fucking Hurry Up’ at the door marked ‘Exit’.

Anyone taking a cursory glance at the cover, advertising, contents and overall glossiness of the publication might think that this is the magazine for Torfs.

It is.  But it’s so much more.

With the exception of the ‘Evening Star’ (the sister paper to the ‘Morning Star’ and yet not remotely associated with the inexplicably more popular ‘Daily Star’, the ‘Evening Star’ being the sort of newspaper that would be published by the hard left if they had knocked off after publishing the morning edition, celebrated as traditional journalists do, then brought out an edition where they really wrote what they thought and where every editorial began ‘Right…’) Country Life is the most militant publication not actually produced in the front room of a self styled ‘activist’ who wears a combination of corduroy and cheesecloth and churns out their publication on one of those hand cranked printers the sole purpose of which was to give millions of schoolchildren an introduction to purple ink and solvent abuse.

Think I’m joking?

Here’s how militant Country Life is.  It abhors littering.  And bad behaviour.  And ill manners.  And unnecessary noise.  It hates pollution.  It is an advocate of the preservation of environment.  It is the champion of the agricultural sector that we rely upon to, you know, eat.

Moreover, it champions the preservation of our heritage.  This takes many forms.  The most obvious is that it tends towards Stately Home Porn but, and this is the saving grace, it knows where to draw the line.  Published every week apart from at Christmas where one imagines the entire staff are off first killing and then cooking their Christmas dinner or at least causing a scene at Waitrose, the magazine often spreads a feature over two issues, occasionally this will be a feature on a Stately Home with words about architecture and history, and images (‘figs’, never photos) of the grand hall, the long drive, the privy, and so on.  Occasionally, if it is not term time and the younger daughter of the house is back from a Scottish university where she doesn’t have to pay fees (how do you think these people hold on to their wealth) there will be a picture of a young woman in a ballgown, cuddling spaniels.  Otherwise, images of the owners remain mysteriously absent.  That’s because usually they might be confused with the gargoyles festooning the East Wing.

I started buying Country Life magazine when I noticed that it featured articles of interest to me, such as farming, food production and the future of our environment.  The property pages I skipped past and the section on antiques and the art market were not really for me, I couldn’t afford a £12,000,000 estate in Scotland or an oil painting of the same place at the same price.

I started subscribing to Country Life because it had something important to report every week, or something interesting to say about gargoyles, or because it featured an estate for sale that looks like an oil painting, and there’s always the lottery.

It’s also something of a counterpoint to the rest of the media (apart from ‘the Field’ magazine).

And, of course, there’s always the young lady gracing the frontispiece, like a posh Page Three.

Our industrial heritage

Think of industry, and what do you think of?  It probably depends upon your age, your education and your nationality.  And possibly your politics.

Those lucky enough to have studied the industrial revolution to the level requiring a day trip to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum will not only have learned about steam engines and the incline plane, but also, if their school trip was anything like mine, learned the point at which warm fish-paste sandwiches cause the ice-cream container you use as a sandwich box to pop!, the number of Skips that you can dissolve on your tongue at any one time and that the energy given off by a coach-load of Skip-crazed adolescents in close confinement could, if used for good, power a small city for months, but will also know that long before apps were invented, children were playing games that tested their skills and reflexes.  Games like ‘dodge the spinning Jenny’ and ‘untangle the loom’.

This is big industry.  The industrial revolution put paid to cottage industry, which was a stupid idea that involved skilled craftsmen turning out bespoke products for individuals.  In the twenty first century we laugh at such an idea, unless you can afford it, in which case you pay two grand for a chair that’s really comfy, and even if we can’t we watch television programmes about those that can.

Cake.  Suit.  Furniture.  Just three things that are better made by a craftsman to your requirements than in a factory to the design of a committee.

Industry means production lines.  It used to be, back in the days when History was in black and white, that production lines were men with facial hair making cars that looked like prams with steam engines attached to them.  Then came the seventies, when black and white bypassed sepia altogether and moved on to shades of brown, mostly nylon overalls, and mostly worn by men standing in car parks voting not to make cars.  Fast forward a few years and the production lines still feature cars, but the brown clad workers have now been replaced by yellow-armed robots.  Bolted to the floor in case of an uprising, or strike.

Coming right up to date, industry involves a person in a production line, this time dressed in white, making an iPhone.

For me, industry looks like a workshop.  Alexi Sayle rightly said that “Anyone who uses the word workshop outside of light engineering is a twat”.  He is, of course, right.  I don’t care how ‘hard’ ‘work’ your ‘theatre’ is, unless you are operating a lathe, then you are not ‘workshopping’ your ‘bold’ all-male dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank, you are faffing around in a room over a pub.

Workshops are where things get done.  I am sure NASA needed all those big buildings and an assembly line to get the Space Shuttle flying, but if it had been made by a small company based on Solihull employing seven blokes who smelled of Swarfega and fried eggs from Monday to Thurdsay and Swarfega and beer on Friday, the USA would still have a space programme, and they would have made a Space Shuttle Bi-Plane by now.

Practical engineering is, or was, the heart and soul of this country.  I think nothing epitomises the seriousness of the British quite like the ability to take a problem, any problem, and find a solution that involves punching and twisting metal.

I love small engineering companies.  The ones that make bolts, but the best bolts in the world.  The best bolts in the world can be the bolts that hold together your baby’s cot, or your bookcases, or your birdtable.

Or they can be extremis bolts.  Bolts that go on helicopter winches designed to dangle over stormy seas, bolts that attach weapons to RAF jets, that attach aid to parachutes being slung out of the back of RAF jets.

My view of British industry?

British industry doesn’t wear a face mask and a CSI white overall and work in a clean room.  It wears an overall that probably bears a Swarfega stain or two, and makes products that may be ‘simple’ but which never, ever, ever, let you down.

Heritage app

English Heritage have an app.  This is hardly a surprise.  Many organisations have apps, and not just organisations but companies and while it is quite understandable that large stores have apps that let you, for instance, find your nearest branch of Woolies or whatever, surely it’s about time that somebody invented an app to locate places that want to be KFC, but aren’t quite as classy.  Indeed apps are becoming so commonplace that it can’t be long before every shop everywhere has an app, not just to let you locate where the only branch of that store is, but guide you to the products within that store.

So, stuck in Chipping Camden and looking for porn and pie?  Fire up your Chipping Camden News app, locate Chipping Camden News, situated between the bookies and the bank, top shelf for gentleman’s literature and back of the shop for the Ginster’s and the microwave.  Job done.

And why stop at shops?  Surely people should have their own app, and not just celebrities, but everyone.  An app for the bloke in the street could mesh together their mobile, their facebook status and their twitter feed so you could see where they were, what they were doing and what they thought about it, all the time.  Colin Fanshaw App: Location: Chipping Camden, Newsagents, feeling horny and hungry, is there an app for that?  Luckily for Colin, yes, yes there is.

The English Heritage app has a feature where you can see where you are in Britain (a great feature at any time, especially if you use ‘pubfinder’ a lot) and suggest days out.  Some of them are substantial, for instance a visit to a stately home, with a car park, a gift shop and everything.  Others are more…surprising, shall we say.  They are still sites that are owned and operated by English Heritage but some of them, at least from the photographs and descriptions, look indistinguishable from, for instance, a field.

Take flint mines.  Now, you might think that a bloody big hole in the ground with a barrier up around it to prevent unwanted plunging is merely an interesting geographical feature.  But you’d be missing three things. 

Firstly, a couple of thousand years ago, primitive man (heavy of brow and with a beard, like that bloke in the Joy of Sex illustrations but actually wearing a loincloth) took a deer antler down a hole and started chipping flint out of the wall.  Of course, once he had chipped enough flint, he could tie the flint to the antler and use that to chip flint.  And as soon as he put the fire in his beard out, primitive man discovered a) chipping flint creates sparks and b) health and safety regulations, which lead directly to the invention of the goggle.

It also meant that he could wander over to the next village and beat the shit out of those backwards morons still using just antlers as weapons.  And so the stone age and the arms race was born.

Secondly, you’d be missing the laminated sign telling you all this, but with added fact and a lot less speculation.  However, I concede that there would probably a fat bloke in a cagoule blocking your view of the sign.

Finally, you’d be missing the car park.  The car park serves two purposes, the first being somewhere to leave your vehicle (or more likely to have a cheese sandwich and cup of tea in your vehicle while waiting for the rain to stop), the second as a community amenity or, as the Daily Mail calls it, a ‘dogging blackspot’.

It’s amazing just how many sites English Heritage have, including one which is a barn.  That’s right, a barn.  Oh, it’s Elizabethan and everything, but I have to take issue with any ‘day out’ that involves me stepping over a pile of horseshit to buy a fridge magnet from the gift shop.

Of course what’s really required is an integrated app that locates various interrelated services, so that one can increase one’s knowledge of British history, then eat some fried chicken before finishing the day with a decent pint and that particular heritage snack – the pork scratching.