A Road England

Motorways have changed Britain, and not just by concreting over large portions of it. For instance, they allow yogurt to travel more miles than a comedian turned traveller can rack up filming an entire series of taking a quirky journey while taking a sideways look at the locals, they allow for family bickering to take place in a controlled enclosed environment for many hours and, of course, they provide an opportunity for the driver to look into the people-pods passing left and right and make judgements about the travellers within, based on how many windows are blacked out with holiday gear and children packed into the back of the family saloon, how loved-up the couple making their way to a mini-break look, or how that mini-break went based on how far away the passenger and driver are attempting to get away from one another while remaining in the same car on the journey home.

They also provide the opportunity to eat an entire packet of wine gums in one go and spend the next two hours wondering if its possible to sweat sugar. They have given rise to the motorway service station, somewhere to pee and eat warm sandwiches in the car park while wondering if the crab paste smells funny or if it’s just the diesel fumes making you a bit queasy. They do have their charms, such as service stations and the occasional decent view, but set against this you have a seemingly endless ribbon of tarmac, only decorated with the occasional tyre debris where stimulation is rare, if you are lucky you can play games such as ‘what the hell language is that on the back of that truck’ or ‘having been sat in a roadwork filter system for an hour, how angry am I that the roadworks appear to be unoccupied?’.

In-car distractions have developed. As well as radio, tape and CD, there are in-car DVD players, the only things more stimulated than drive-time DJs are lab monkeys with electrodes inserted into their thalamus and of course those knights of the road, the long haul truckers, have sex with prozzers in laybys to relieve the monotony. Sometimes they even close the curtains in the cab first.

Motorways have changed Britain. Before motorways we had main roads, now known as A roads. A-road Britain is a slower, more picturesque and, I think, kinder place that M-Way Britain. Motorways may be a great way to get from A to Z quickly, but the M can often stand for ‘misery’ and, what’s more, there’s a lot to be said for visiting B to Y on the way from A to Z.

Driving to Blenheim Palace I kept seeing signs to Evesham, very near my next destination, Malvern, and somewhere it takes another hour to reach by M-Way. I was rather wondering if the M40 takes a bloody huge loop out of the way, possibly there’s some sort of geographical rift allowing more or less instant access from London to the Cotswolds. Thinking that a fold in spacetime sounded more exciting than the M40, I decided to take the A road route.

And so, I rediscovered A road Britain. This is the way to travel, armed only with an AA book of the road from 1957 and a sense of adventure, one travels at a more human pace than one does on the motorway, and is not shut off from the world by culverts and landscaping. Instead, one passes through towns and villages, under the arms of sheltering trees. One follows road signs and tractors, not the instructions of the sat nav.

There is a lot to see. Oddly, although the journey is probably longer, it feels shorter. There’s a lot to do too, with time to study ones surrounding, you can play ‘name that road kill’. Seeing more flat fox than shredded lorry tyre adds to the rustic appeal of the journey.

And it has to be said, travelling through the Cotswolds is a pleasant way to spend the day. One makes one’s way through villages where each is progressively prettier than the last. Just when you thought that the last village, with its Cotswold stone houses, lovely pub, charming shops and good looking population was just the most charming place ever, you happen along the next village and realise that the one five miles back was, by comparison, a right shithole. All of the villages seemed to be thriving and I wanted to stop at book shops, knick-knacks shops and charming pubs.

One of the villages we went through was Chipping Norton and so, naturally, I was relishing the opportunity of bonneting one of the ‘set’ and doing the world a favour.

But, I pressed on because I was on a mission. The summer had ripened fruit to perfection and in the Vale of Evesham one fruit reigns supreme at this time of the year; the plum. I was looking for a roadside stall selling not so much PYO as PBL (Picked By Lithuanians). I didn’t see a stall but did spot a farm shop and screeched to a shuddering halt as I pulled in (apologies to the no-doubt surprised driver behind me and may I also take a moment to congratulate him on his lightening reactions. Congratulations too to the staff of the farm shop who were unruffled by my hasty entry to their car park, safe to say they have probably never seen a car come to a halt that quickly without it deploying a parachute out the rear).

The Wayside Farm Shop was something of a find. There was a selection of fruit and veg by the door (and yes, plums), but out the back was, basically, a delicatessen. It sold Teme Valley Brewery beer (rather lovely, they do a beer called ‘This’, a beer called ‘That’ and a beer called ‘Wotever next’. Seeing these bad boys lined up, one has to purchase the set. Verdict: oh yes! They also had cider on tap, bring your own bottle. Actually don’t bother with the bottle, they recommend that you bring along your empty plastic milk container and fill that up, as it holds more. Classy. There were cheeses, breads, cakes and, best of all, meringues the size of dinner plates hanging from the ceiling. One of these, a punnet of strawberries and a large pot of cream meant desert was sorted. Went in for a dozen plums, did sixty quid. Farms shops. Not threatening Lidl for market domination any time soon.

Travelling the motorway one arrives quickly but somewhat frazzled and smelling of stress and wine gums. Taking the A road, I arrived relaxed and happy with a box of (bloody expensive) fresh veg in the back of the car, not to mention the beer, which I’m drinking while I write this. Overall, there’s something to be said for taking the road less travelled.

Smallholdings and small magazines

Yesterday at the newsagents, I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two magazines devoted to smallholdings. One called ‘Smallholder’ and the other ‘Smallholdings’. What staggers me is not that there is a magazine for smallholders, there’s a magazines for just about everything these days, as the existence of ‘backscratcher collector’ proves; but that two magazines could have such different editorial approaches to the same subject that it could support two magazines. What in the world could one offer that the other could not? Surely there’s only so much you can write about getting mud out from underneath your fingernails and sticking your hand up a pig’s arse for fun and profit.

I love the idea that the second magazine might have been started after the editorial team had a massive falling out about creosote and the two publications are as polarised in their opinions as The Daily Mail and any real newspaper. Either that or one of the magazines has been started up by some hip young gunslinger who thinks wants to sweep away the old fuddy-duddy conventions of smallholding and is not afraid to use the term ‘boutique farming’ in front of others.

I love that there is no profession so obscure, no hobby so odd that it can’t support its own little magazine, be it the full glossy or a fanzine produced in a basement in Solihull titled something like ‘Swafega Collector (incorporating ‘Laiths and Laithmen’)’.

Food for thought

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20101118/BUSINESS/11180324/Farm-slices-up-squash-but-not-the-profits

This is the sort of story that gives you a warm glow. Not just because it's a good story about seasonal good food, consumed either at a communal table with family and friends during a special meal, or alone in front of the tee vee, or just as a vegetable offset to a mainly meat treat or even, if you're in a hurry, blitzed in a blender to constitute a soup to cut out all that tedious chewing. No, it's because it corrects a misconception and you finish the article knowing the world is a little bit better than you thought it was when you started.

Thanks to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought that isolated farms in upstate New York were used exclusively for strange rituals, inbreeding and the odd genetic experiment gone horribly wrong (which I guess is more inbreeding). Not so, it would appear that innovation lurks in the woods and fields, as well as vegetables.

Or maybe it's just me. I've always had a problem with excessive food packaging. I can't see why you need the skills of a safecracker to get into a bag of spuds. And as for vegetables presented in cardboard trays with plastic lids, what the hell is going on there? Unless the avocado in question is gold plated, it's just not justified.

Most fruit and vegetable come in their own packaging, which you scrape off anyway, then boil the contents to buggery to make sure you remove any pesky vitamins. This packaging nonsense is the fault of supermarkets who all think that their customers are elderly spinsters that must be protected at all costs from a vegetable that is even slightly misshapen - because nature likes a laugh and misshapen vegetables always, but always, look like willies. Even the sprouts.

So the packaging protects the precious product. I think the World Gone Mad moment was when a supermarket sold slices of apple sealed in a plastic bag. Possibly this was designed for children who were not to be trusted to slice up fruit themselves and who were too stupid to work out that apples do not need to be sliced for consumption, they can be chewed, gnawed, bitten and chomped. An apple is the perfect fruit for eating on the go, it is perfectly sized to fit in one hand and it even comes in it's own edible wrapper. Putting it in a bag is not an improvement.

Which led me to believe that placing vegetables in plastic bags was a bad thing.

Not so, it would appear. And now I get it. Not everyone is as lucky as me, with a council that will provide you with a free compost bin for your kitchen waste, bits of chopped up garden, grass cuttings, the occasional fox corpse and of course any contraband you want to keep hidden and away from the house (fun fact trivia fans, glossy magazines featuring 'art' portraits may take a while to compost, but compost they do, so don't leave them in there for long or Miss August will have turned to mulch).

There is, it would appear, a lot of a vegetable that people don't use. There's the peel, which is disposed of, and the seeds, which are normally not eaten either. So all of this just gets thrown away, composted at best, landfill at worst. The idea that all this waste is somehow put to good news is fantastic.

Turning the peelings into animals feed and so on is great for a number of reasons. The first is that, of course, if you feed your animals on good stuff, they will taste even better by the time they fulfill their destiny, which may be to become a mascot of a sports team or state and travel the country before being retired to a life of standing in a field wondering where all the glitter cannons went, but is, let’s face it, a lot more likely to involve gravy and a slide of fries.

And let’s not gloss over the animal feed part – I long to see the advert where two cattle are tucking into a trough and one says to the other ‘Good squash today’, his friend replying ‘Not just squash…Martin Farms squash.’ Then the tag line ‘Martins Farms squash…a natural source of starch’. Read by either James Earl Jones or Christoper Walken, I’m not sure yet. This would cause people like me to instantly panic that I was not getting enough starch, hitherto something I thought was only used in laundry, and to rush out and panic buy squash.

EDIT

Once you’re done with the pith, and the peel, and the flesh has been sent off to be packaged and distributed, you’re left with the seed. Now, you’re a farmer. You have seed. What’s the obvious thing to do…that’s right, press those bad boys and extract oil from them. After the frankly disappointing discovery that you can’t run the tractor on it comes the revelation that you can, however, cook with it.

EDIT

But bottling the oil and flogging it in artisan food shops to folk who want to cook their veg in something a little more exotic than olive oil is genius. The trick to the marketing is to make it four times as expensive as the thing it is replacing and put a rustic label on it, then try not to grin yourself inside out as you start making a profit from something you used to throw away! Not only that, it ticks all the boxes of cooking because nobody knows a damn about the nutritional content! Is it healthy, like some television nutritionists bark at me to be? Is it rich and tasty, like television chefs bark at me to be? As long as I’m still taking instructions from the television it’s a case of sod it, it’s over seven bucks a bottle, it must be good, I’ll have some.

Alittlement

If you want to know about heartbreak, ask a farmer. Suicide rates are higher among farmers than among almost any other profession - which is terrible in itself, but moreso because I can think of a few other professions where the ranks really do need thinned a bit, judges on televised talent shows for starters.

There are depressingly many reasons why a farmer might top himself; solitude in an old remote farmhouse with only the howling wind for company, the easy availability of shotguns, or simply the rejection when the object of your affection never ever says ‘I love you’, indeed never says more than ‘moooo’, or ‘bahh’ or occasionally ‘cluck’.

The cultivated area of my allotment is about 15ft by 20ft and, given the amount of dashed hope, frustration and impotent rage it has generated, I can only imagine what it must be like to experience that when scaled up to farm size.

Given that all I’m trying to do is grow some fucking food, you’d think that nature would cut me some slack. But no. First pigeons ate my brussel sprouts. Then something ate my pumpkin. Now my tomato plants have all died. I’ve had success with onions but only I suspect because they have been watered so well by my tears as I knelt in the dirt and cried ‘whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!’.

The other thing it’s changed my opinion of is the animal kingdom or, as I now refer to them, pests. Pigeons? Pests. Rabbits? Pests. Swans? Pests. Minotaurs? Mythical I know but, believe me, pests. There’s only one sure way to deal with a pest and it’s not slug pellets, it’s a water-cooled, quad-barrel, belt-fed machine gun using alternate loads of rock salt, lead, holy water and silver!

So I’m giving up the allotment. To be honest it was never really my passion and I think somebody else will be able to make a better go of it. I will have to get down there in dead of night to remove my vast constructions of canes and netting, then do the walk of shame to return my key.

However…I have a cunning plan. I am finally going to sort out the top bit of the garden, hitherto a haven for slugs, snails, ivy and other minions of the army of darkness. I shall grow veg there in the style of a ‘dig for victory’ garden in WWII, possibly adding to the ambience of the affair by placing an Anderson shelter at some convenient point. That’s where I’m going to keep my pig.