Where I Live...

If you hop on to the A40 and head west, past Whitland and up a hill, you come to a petrol station called, appropriately, Preseli View. Look north and there they are, the Preselis, tantalisingly close, but actually far away yet. There’s another 20 minutes or so driving to do before you get to the hills themselves and in the meantime they play hide and seek with you behind hedge banks and trees.

The Preselis are in the middle of the Pembrokeshire peninsula. If you imagine the British Isles as a picture of a man riding a pig, with Wales as the head of the pig, Pembrokeshire is the pig’s snout. Mostly they are lovely rounded hills, but one has huge craggy rocks – Carn Menyn or Carn Meini I think– where the delectable Colin Firth filmed the 1988 BBC film ‘Tumbledown’ about Robert Lawrence’s Falklands War experiences.

The hills have other fame too, having provided the bluestones which form the inner circle at Stonehenge. Apparently the bluestones and other stones, including the altar stone, were quarried in the Preselis and transported over 185 miles to Stonehenge in Wiltshire. But nobody has yet worked out how and a Millennium experiment to transport a relatively small bluestone on a wooden sledge to Salisbury plain ended with red faces when the stone fell off a barge into the Milford Haven waterway and sank. It now hides its shame in a quiet corner at the National Botanic Garden of Wales. Either primitive man was much cleverer than his modern equivalent or the answer lies much longer ago in glacial movements.

Our smallholding lies up a steep driveway on a ridiculously narrow, winding road between two villages – with the bright lights of Maenclochog a distant glimmer over the other side of a hill. The Welsh name means Owen’s walls or enclosure. The house is built of huge stones with tiny windows and has been added to over many years. It is tiny, the walls are three feet thick and I can’t get a mobile phone signal indoors and television pictures used to be problematic before the days of satellite TV.

We’re out here on our own, aside from a small cottage cheek by jowl with our house built by a previous owner of our place who couldn’t bear to move.
It is a beautiful, quiet spot. Everything here slopes. There are no straight lines. The drive is steep mossy concrete, the yard is a wonky slope. The fields are bounded by banks and we have our own standing stone which we like to run around three times and then wish, but I don’t think that works as I still haven’t got a brand new Land Rover Discovery!

The fields have wonderful old names: Parc yr Odyn (lime kiln field); Parc Maen Hir (field with old stone); Parc Fron Uchaf; Parc Fron Isaf; Gweirglodd (marshy place), but we have other names for them too: Thistle; Little Sloping; The Moor. When it snows we sledge down the slopes on either Parc Maen Hir or Thistle. Everyone – sheep, pony, human, dog, cat or badger – adores the Odyn field best for its south facing slopes big shady trees and fresh spring.

It gets dark here at night. Properly dark. We have no light pollution and a cool clear night is a wonderful time to look up at the stars. There is no noise either. I was brought up in the rural Midlands with the ever present hum of the M5 and the M42, but here we just have the odd baa or moo, and the occasional tractor or aeroplane.

It is a haven for wildlife with Red Kites and Buzzards overhead, in addition to the thousands of other birds, squirrels and badgers. We have orchids and whorled caraway, kingcups and, unfortunately, Japanese knotweed.

It's not as tidy as I'd like it to be, sometimes it feels a little isolated and lonely, but mostly, I feel, it is my own little patch of heaven.

Greedy farmers?

It was the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 last Wednesday and they were discussing the proposed badger cull in Wales to try and halt the spread of Bovine TB.

A listener called in to protest.

“I have compassion for all animals,” she declared. “The cull must not go ahead. Greedy farmers!”

Now I’m not going to argue here about the rights and wrongs of the badger cull. The Welsh Assembly has decided it needs to do a trial cull either here in South West Wales or on the border next to England. But what really brought me up short was the venom in the woman’s voice as she said: “Greedy farmers,” and the implication that she had compassion for animals, whereas farmers don’t.

Farmers have such bad PR don’t they? In addition to being ‘greedy’ they are ‘money grabbing’ or ‘cruel’.

I think the ills of today’s over-intensified food production systems were started by supermarkets, not farmers, and that was the mood of the talk last Tuesday night where the audience, of course, was stuffed full of farmers. I live in a rural area on a farm, surrounded by farms. I see no evidence of ‘factory farming’ around here. These are grassy hills and support extensive rather than intensive farming. Factory farming is a disease of the supermarket supplier, yes, and really refers to poultry and pigs, but the vast majority of farms are just trying to eke out a living in the face of a downturn in prices, and severe upturn in costs, all the while pilloried for being a farmer in the first place.

Supermarkets tell farmers what to produce and when. They agree contracts, arrange delivery dates and all too often reject the produce for some spurious reason. (Read ‘Tescopoly’ by Andrew Simms for more information on this, or ‘Shopped’ by Joanna Blythman.)

Some complain that farmers do not speak up when other jobs and industries are threatened, but quite probably the opinions of farmers were not considered important enough to report in the press. After all only 3% of people work in agriculture in this country now and farmers are only quoted about farming, not what they think about miners or car workers losing their jobs.

It is awful when huge factories close down and steel workers, miners and car workers lose their jobs, but hopefully that is all they lose, and armies of advisers move into the area to assist them in finding new jobs. But they usually will have a home to go to when they are handed their P45s. When farmers lose their jobs they lose their homes too.

I live on a very small farm. It’s only 22 acres, but it is a business and it occasionally makes a profit when lamb prices are good. Right through the middle is a bridleway, as there are footpaths and rights of way on many other farms throughout the country. Imagine if I hopped onto a horse and clip clopped through the Dagenham Ford plant, perhaps telling the workers on the way that they were not doing their jobs properly? Yet people think it is their absolute right to do that with farms.

So what should farmers do to earn the respect of the people of Britain? I think it is something quite difficult for them to do when the media only reports the bad news (animals found dead or dying on a Northern Ireland farm, for example). There was that awful story about horses and ponies found in terrible conditions near Amersham. If we follow the tradition of tarring farmers all with the same brush, is it now safe to assume that all horse owners are cruel and heartless and leave their equines to starve to death?

What about the good news? What about the farmer who gets up at the crack of dawn, 365 days a year, looks after his much loved cows, milks them twice a day and produces the best quality milk in the world and does this happily for a wage that is below the poverty line? And don’t anybody tell me about the farmer’s brand new Land Rover, because I haven’t seen one of those around here for a while now – except driven by a tourist or by someone who has moved here from Kent and now lives in a (former) farmhouse.

It is not a level playing field out there for farmers. They are competing in a global market where countries, such as the US, pay huge subsidies to support their own agricultural industry to ensure a continuity of food supply. And subsidies are another area I’m not prepared to argue about here, but if American farmers get subsidies, why is it so terrible that British farmers get them too? And why is it so bad to be compensated when, through no fault of your own, except that you happened to take stock to a certain market on a certain day, your livestock get Foot and Mouth and have to be destroyed? Economies of scale mean that some farms have grown very big indeed, so of course will have large numbers of stock worth a lot of money. So why is it so distasteful for a farmer to be paid a compensation cheque of nearly a million pounds when his stock was worth more than that any way?

But received wisdom has it that farmers are greedy. The woman on the radio said so. It must be true.

Food for Thought

I had the enormous privilege last night of listening to Monty Don speaking on the importance of local food.

Monty was guest speaker at a meeting of the West Wales Soil Association in Ciliau Aeron, near Lampeter, hosted by Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, who farms locally.

Patrick warned the audience about the impending oil crisis – Peak Oil – where oil production will peak, then decline. He suggested that rising oil prices would force the economy towards a tipping point which means that they way we live now, with our dependence on oil, cannot continue, particularly the way we produce and buy food. He then introduced the guest speaker describing Monty, who now has a farm on the Black Mountain, as a vital bridge between gardening and farming.

The meeting was packed, of course, with everyone from enthusiastic amateur gardeners and smallholders to the leading lights of the organic industry, including Rachel Rowlands, founder of the hugely successful Rachel’s Dairy.

Monty began with an anecdote about his recent travels around the world filming for his TV series ‘Around the World in 80 Gardens’ when he managed to collect the wrong suitcase and, when the suitcase was opened, instead of his suits it contained an array of pink saris and beaded cashmere jumpers. He was four days down the Amazon with only the suit he was wearing.

“That’s how I feel now,” he told his audience. “And I’m still looking for a tea picker wearing a suit.”

He described how his trip to the Organiponicos in Cuba had so inspired him. These areas of horticulture within cities produce an incredibly high standard of fresh food for the inhabitants. It was, he said, an example of how people in the cities can produce their own local food and a model, perhaps, for our own future in this country.

Monty continued that theme describing how small producers in Cuba, the Amazon, Mexico and India used traditional, organic, techniques to provide food for their own needs.

He warned that the UK’s fondness for cheap food meant that we paid for it in other ways, with our health, for example, and said that in this country people have forgotten how important and special food is. Families no longer prepare meals from scratch and then eat them together around a table. He spoke about a gardener he had met in Italy where, despite no shared language, they shared a total enjoyment in the quality of the fruit and vegetables he was growing.

“In the UK farmers are regarded as producing ingredients for the food industry,” Monty said. “We have lost our pride in the food that we produce and farmers are not respected as they should be.”

He also spoke about his project to introduce drug addicts to farming, documented in the TV series and book ‘Growing Out of Trouble’. This project is ongoing, with some failures, but mostly success and Monty said he had been astonished at how the addicts did not know how to eat.

“They would take their food and go and eat it by themselves,” he said, turning into a corner behind him to demonstrate. “When they had food they were effectively turning their backs on everyone else when they ate it. They did not know how to sit around a table and share food with others. One told me that she had never sat down to a family meal and when I asked them to lay the table for a meal they had no idea what I was talking about. They had never done that and they did not know anyone who had either.”

He said the project had its most successful times when they all sat down around the table together and shared food. The participants even began to bring in their own food, such as cakes, to share with everyone else. That was something, Monty explained, that was an important part of their rehabilitation, as was getting up at 5am to pick produce to sell with pride at the Ludlow Food Festival.

It was a wide ranging and inspirational talk in which at one point he even dared to tell the assembled organic farmers that organic was not the most important thing, local was prime and that they should beware of remaining in a situation – a ghetto almost – where they talked with each other, but did not invite other parts of society into the discussion. There were a few intakes of breath, but also murmurs of recognition and agreement.

The talk fired up members of the audience who then took part in a question and answer session with Monty and Patrick. Could the UK, or the world, feed itself under these terms, one wanted to know. Others wondered about how the Soil Association could label air freighted foods as organic. Education was discussed, not just of children, but also of adults who had lost their connection with food and the land. Supermarkets bore the brunt of the blame for the loss of a connection with what we eat and how it is grown. But, as Monty pointed out, as the oil prices increase, the cost of food distribution will go up too, so supermarket food prices will rise, making local food more competitive.

After enjoying Patrick’s delicious chocolate brownies and coffee and the meeting formed into small groups, each discussing and issue that had been raised by the talk. Issues raised included that Farmers Markets should be held more often, farms should twin with cities, more co-operation was needed between growers, particularly micro-producers who currently find it difficult to get their excess produce on sale and those new to food production should be offered more help. Allotments and their increasing popularity was another point raised with Patrick Holden and it was suggested that the Soil Association, which already does so much for farmers and gardeners, should find some way of including them. The meeting broke up reluctantly and everyone went home with plenty to talk and think about.

It was a fascinating evening and it was a privilege to have been able to listen to Monty and Patrick’s views on how we are to feed ourselves as a nation in the future. But it was frightening too; we cannot continue wasting food and the planet’s resources with the profligacy that we have become accustomed too. We must take more responsibility for feeding ourselves and not rely so heavily on supermarkets. It was certainly food for thought.

Seven things about me...

I have been tagged by Zoe to share seven things, some random, some weird, about myself.

So, here goes.

1. I'm addicted to muesli. My current obsession is Dorset Cereals' 'Berries and Cherries'.

2. I'm ashamed to say that I actually quite fancy David Cameron. *blush*

3. The last trophy I won was for a windsurfing race.

4. I used to be in the territorial army (officer cadet). I'm a pretty good shot with an SA80 rifle and can take a sub-machine gun apart and put it back together again whilst blindfolded.

5. I once whipped my older sister with a riding crop when we were teenagers. She was being an absolute cow and I was armed... (Sorry Jax!)

6. I slammed a door during a teenage row with my Dad. All the glass fell out. For about 30 seconds it was absoloutely glorious, then the sh*t hit the fan!

7. The best thing in life is kissing my beautiful daughters' sleeping faces goodnight.

I'm now supposed to tag up to seven others, but it's difficult to keep up with who has been tagged and who hasn't, so if you'd like to volunteer, please do so now!

A tile tale

How long does it take two people, a man and a woman who are married, to buy twelve boxes of ceramic tiles for a bathroom floor?

Three months.

Okay, so that isn't the world's funniest joke, but we finally have our bathroom floor tiles after so much tearing of hair.

The story of the new bathroom began last September. We bought the new suite, Brian put down the cork tiles, did all the plumbing and it looked as if completion date was nigh.

Then we had a leak. Not one of Brian's joints, but on a proper plumber's joints. Hot water. VERY hot water. It melted the cork tiles. We decided they were a bad idea.

Which is why, in December, Brian went into a tile shop and brought home three samples. We liked one of them, it looked nice in the bathroom, so we decided to buy it. Brian took the samples back.

That is the point at which he should have bought 12 boxes of tiles, but he didn't, because Christmas with all its incumbent expenses was nigh, as was January with the promise of sales.

So, in January, we visited Focus. We found the tiles and we disagreed. They were £5.99 per pack in the sale. But I didn't like them. I wanted nice, warm charcoal grey slate effect tiles. Bri said they were too dark and instead plumped for tiles the colour of sun-bleached, dead camel bones on the Sahara.

"We have a black dog," I reminded him, envisaging chasing said dog and his four muddy paws around daily with a mop. Surely the tiles should match the dog?

Impasse. We both sulked. For three months.

So yesterday we headed to the first of our three nearest Focus stores. Focus in Cardigan didn't have my favourites, or Brian's. But they did have a third choice, a possible compromise.

"Let's see what they've got in Haverfordwest," suggested Bri, thinking fondly of breakfast at Vincent's on the way.

It was the same story in the Haverfordwest Focus too.

"Let's go to B&Q," we suggested. In Carmarthen.

"Yuk," I said looking at tiles supposedly made to look like slate, but in fact looking and feeling like concrete. One benefit, we supposed, was that they eliminated the need to pumice one's hard skin.

"They give me the nadgers," said Brian.

So we went to Focus. The third Focus of the day, in the third county of the day. We decided to buy the compromise tile, of which there were hundreds.

"How much?" we asked the handle-bar mustachioed man who was in charge of the tiles.

Miraculously the Carmarthenshire tiles were twice the price of those in Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire.

"Something doesn't want us to buy these tiles," Bri said. We left.

On the way out of the estate, tile-less and despondent, I spotted a tile shop.

"Why don't we go there?" I asked.

"That's where I got the samples from last year," he said.

They had 14 boxes left of our original choice. We bought 12 of them.

So how long does it take a husband and wife to buy bathroom floor tiles?

Three months, three counties, hundreds of miles and many 'discussions' in the tile aisles. Then we bought the first ones we saw.

Time to GALMI...

I have spent the last few days fixing things, being stoical and ‘thinking outside the box’.

So a few things have gone wrong. The dishwasher finally curled up its toes, but we had been expecting it. We had already spent £60 call out fee, plus £20-odd soldering to its beleaguered circuit board and said that next time it ailed; we would pull the plug on it. So it tried to catch fire, and now we’ve pulled the plug. One day we might buy a new one.

Then the washing machine followed its cousin’s example. We had a few days of very excitable spinning, then it stopped mid-cycle. Never mind, we have a contract out on that machine which means we GALMI (Get A Little Man In) if something goes wrong. Last time it was the drum, and we were given a shiny new one. The old one is still a feature in the garden, although it did have a starring role on bonfire night when I filled it with wood and lit it. So I took two loads of washing, school uniform-coloured, to the launderette in Narberth, which is always a convivial thing to do and only lasts half an hour to forty minutes as the machines there are impressively quick.

“And anyway,” I said to B, “At least I don’t have to put the crockery in the car and cart it down to Narberth to get it washed!”

How we laughed! Then we ran out of oil and the boiler stopped. Ha ha! No hot water to wash-up in. We boiled kettles. The novelty of that has never really worn on. And how I missed my lovely hot baths.

So Saturday was spent fixing things. First of all phoning for oil. I braced myself for the hike in the price. Gobsmacked best describes it. So having organised the oil and boiled a couple of kettles for washing up I then contemplated the task of getting the four of us presentable and sweet-smelling for school/work/housework avoidance on Monday. I figured that a good marinating in chlorine might keep us clean-smelling until the boiler is started up again. So we availed ourselves of the lovely hot showers at Fishguard swimming pool. We showered on the way in and we shamelessly hogged them again on the way out, lathering away to our hearts content.

The oil arrived at the crack of dawn this morning. All 1,200 litres of it. I shut my eyes as I wrote the cheque, but I know that it was over £600. The GALMI has temporarily fixed the washing machine, but it Needs A Part, and He’ll Be Back.

Meanwhile I have moved furniture around in the hope of harnessing the power of Feng Shui. Perhaps the armchair was in the wrong position. Perhaps my wealth corner is not the best place for an airer full of drying washing. I think I might need to consult a book…

Bird brained

I don't need my alarm clock any more. These days I am blessed with a Great Spotted Woodpecker who has a drumming post not far from my bedroom window. Each morning, just after 7 am, I am woken by his vibrating rattle.

Last year he drummed much further down the row of ash trees and it was a nice little far off sound, which I always found amusing, imagining his little head tap tapping at the tree. Now, though, with his drumming post just feet away from my slumbering head, he is proving a little less popular. Later on he can be found hanging from the peanut feeder, no doubt topping up his calorie levels for another early morning assault on my ears.

Not that I really mind. I love the fact that our garden is choc-a-block with birds. When the berries were still on the hawthorn tree I once counted six blackbirds at once. All male, all squabbling over the berries. We have one blackbird which flies through the front garden at dusk at a height of about four feet from the ground, shrieking in alarm. If you walk round the corner of the house at the right (or wrong) moment, you can have a near miss with one very angry bird.

At our previous home, our neighbour used to call "Blackie, Blackie" out of her kitchen window. When we had just moved in we once called over to ask her if she had lost her cat.

"No!" she laughed. "My blackbird."

Sure enough she called, and Blackie popped out from the hedge between the two houses for the tasty morsels she had put on her birdtable. We got into the habit of feeding him and calling him too, although, since they all look the same, for all I know we spent years feeding a whole host of blackbirds, all smart enough to answer to the call for "Blackie, Blackie"!

It is always a thrill to see some of the birds who visit our birdtable. The upside-down nuthatch with their spiky streamlined beak, the twitchy wren hopping about on the wall, the squabbling tits - blue, great, coal and willow - the occasional goldfinch and all the other various sparrows, chaffinches, dunnocks and siskins. We also get pretty pairs of collared doves and jays by the half dozen. Magpies laugh from the ash tree branches above and squirrels hang gracefully upside down while their wicked, clever paws peel open the feeder to greedily grab all the nuts.

Domestically we have only one duck left now. Poor old Persil is alone. Ecover was grabbed by the fox early one morning. I think Persil must be one very scared little duck. I sympathise with him and he quacks back. Still the same, dim duck, probably wondering where all his friends have gone. The only evidence of Ecover are some alarming fox-shaped footprints scuffing up the bark and a sad puff of feathers.

Still, Persil soldiers on alone and as long as he continues to put himself to bed early (a habit he has gained after Ecover's demise) and remembers to have a lie-in in the mornings, he should last a while longer. Meanwhile plans are afoot for Fort Knox (or should that be Fort Dux?) and once built, Persil, if he has managed to avoid Mr Fox's dinner table, will get some new friends.