Notes from the new frontier

I have never been to the village of Miserden, in Gloucestershire, but I am in no doubt that it must be hell on Earth. Miserden this week won the prize for having the slowest broadband speed in rural Britain – a mere 1.3 Mbps.I observe the plight of tech-poor Miserden from the smugness of my super-fast fibre-connected home in St Mabyn. It is probably not surprising that when my metropolitan friends discuss rural life, the hit-and-miss nature of 21st century technology is usually high on the list of topics for debate.

 

For me, the nature of my profession means that the cost of functional communications technology is well worth the alternative of a daily 60-mile round trip commute. How times have changed from the days when I used to make reverse-charge calls from the village phone box, dictating stories to copy-takers in London. Carrying out even the most basic research required a trip to a town or city.

It is strange that some developers in Cornwall are still building brand new houses, with only super-slow broadband, in blatant defiance of a European Union directive. I know of one new estate in Truro where residents are lucky to get 0.5 Mbps. I would strongly advise prospective new buyers to take nothing on trust, and investigate their likely broadband speed before purchase.

In 2014 the EU Council made it a requirement for all new-build properties to share certain infrastructure, such as the pipework needed for gas, electricity, water – and high-speed fibre cables. The directive says: “Member states must adopt national provisions to comply with the new directive by 1 January 2016, and they must apply the new measures from 1 July 2016.”

Europe has set a target of 30 Mbps for all by 2020 and it’s been putting its money (well, our money) where its mouth is by backing the Superfast Cornwall programme to connect a total of 8,600 properties by September.

It is hard to understand why housing developers are dragging their heels over complying with the EU rules, other than the cynical observation that doing the job properly would cut into their profits.

It is even more difficult to understand why Cornwall Council, as the local planning authority, allowed them to get away with it: the council would not approve plans for a housing estate which had no electricity or water, so why allow developers to build hundreds of homes huge distances from the nearest fibre-ready cabinet, without a requirement to install the necessary infrastructure?

The question will become even more urgent in the months and years ahead, as more and more homes are built in rural parts of Cornwall.

Counting my chickens

It’s official – spring arrives next week. The Met Office tells me that March 1 is the key date on which spring starts. The weather forecasters say it will last until June. Yeah, right.

The snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils have already had their own ideas. But the event which really tells me if the year is making any progress is when the hens start laying eggs. 

Like all of my pseudo-agricultural pursuits, this is a strictly not-for-profit venture. If I tried to calculate the cost of time spent letting the birds out of their shed every morning, shutting them back in at night, along with the daily feeding, watering and cleaning out the poultry manure every week, then I’m sure I run at a substantial loss.

But the eggs are their own reward. They tend to come in all shapes and sizes, and thanks to the recent addition of a couple of Light Sussex hens I now get large brown eggs alongside the slightly smaller pale blue ones from my rare-breed Cream Legbars.

During the winter months, when I try to buy “free range” eggs from supermarkets, I am invariably disappointed that the yolks are not particularly yellow. The eggs seem very bland and I end up pouring on loads of salt just to get any taste at all. And this is despite the “free range” label on the box. 

It’s probably not widely known that the “free range” label is one of the more controversial ways of selling eggs. It is quite possible to buy “free range” eggs which have come from a farm at which thousands of birds will have been kept in a huge hangar, with “access” to an outdoor run.

Nearly half of all eggs produced in the UK are “free range” – which means that the hens enjoy unlimited daytime “access” to least four square metres of vegetation per bird. At night, free range hens are housed in barns furnished with bedding and perches, with nine hens allowed per square metre of inside space. There is no limit on flock size.

Poultry farming is a relatively recent invention, hardly existing before the war. Indeed, during the war many people would supply their own need for eggs by keeping their own hens, no matter how modest their garden.

But since the 1950s, the farming industry has bred two distinct types of chicken – laying hens for eggs and broiler chickens for meat. Many laying hens have their beaks removed to prevent feather-pecking and bullying. The average lifespan of a commercial broiler chicken is just 39 days.

My Cream Legbars are not as prolific as many other breeds – which is possibly why they are thought of as “rare” – but each bird still gives me about 100 eggs per year. I currently have eight chickens, which is more than enough for me. I started with just two.

There’s also something reassuring about the sound of a cockerel early in the morning. I’m lucky that none of my neighbours (so far) has complained.

Badgers

Once, entirely by accident, I caught a badger. We’d been having problems with foxes, and the badger had wandered into the live trap up in the orchard, no doubt attracted by the cat food used for bait.

I’d never seen one really close up before, and was surprised how mangy, smelly and fierce it was. Not a bit like Wind In The Willows. The children, then very young, thought it was a bit frightening and I think it rather put them off some of their squeaky soft toys.

I did know that badgers were by no means vegetarian, and this one – given half a chance – would have given me a nasty bite. Using a long stick, I carefully lifted the cage door and the badger bolted for freedom.

People tend to think that badgers are rare, probably because they are nocturnal and we rarely see any during daytime. In fact, as a result of being protected by the 1973 Badgers Act and the even tougher 1992 Protection of Badgers Act, they have never been more numerous: probably around 250,000 nationwide. Road-kill is, unfortunately, one way of estimating the badger population – the more dead ones you see, the more there are likely to be.

And just to be clear about what I know about badgers: badgers most definitely carry TB. While most are perfectly healthy, about a quarter carry the disease. This is a fact. Another fact is that many of Cornwall’s dairy farms are effectively shut down because of government trading restrictions which apply to bovine tuberculosis.  

So having made it quite clear that I am not remotely sentimental about badgers, let me explain why I am very strongly opposed to the idea of culling them as part of Defra’s attempts to control TB in cattle.

The first reason is that while badgers can break into stores and contaminate feed, and through their faeces and urine they might also contaminate pasture, they are not the only wild animal that carries TB. So do deer. 

So can foxes, hedgehogs, pigs, sheep, horses, dogs, cats, rats and many others.
There are more than a million feral cats in Britain, and 7.5 million domestic pets. Alpacas, now increasingly marginalised as an “agricultural” animal and no longer welcome at many rural shows, are far more prone to TB than badgers.  

It therefore seems quite illogical to get so worked up about badgers, unless we are also prepared to cull feral cats – which outnumber them by 4 to 1.

The biggest single vector for transmitting TB to cattle is other cattle. Arguments have long raged over whether it is better to keep the cows indoors, away from wildlife and possibly contaminated fields – but then run the alternative risk that they simply spread the disease amongst themselves.

Dairy tankers, driving through the mud as they go from farm to farm, are also capable of spreading TB.

There has been so much publicly-funded science thrown at badger studies over the past 20 years that now there really is little that we don’t know. If you shoot 4 badgers, you will most likely kill 3 healthy ones. That makes it easier for diseased badgers to take over the healthy badger setts. Culling can easily make the disease even worse.

This week’s news that the badger cull is coming to Cornwall will keep me busy on other pages in this newspaper, so it can’t be all bad. But although they might celebrate today, it is actually not good news for our dairy farmers and I doubt it will make any difference to the TB problem. And it is of course even worse news for the badgers.

The pub

One of the first things that every journo learns is that “dog bites man” is not a story. “Man bites dog” is much more interesting.

Similarly, “village pub not for sale” would these days probably get more readers than a headline which said the opposite.  

I write this, with considerable sadness, because my village pub is once again for sale. I have been drinking at the St Mabyn Inn for 36 years and have lost count of the number of landlords that have come and gone. My poor memory is not actually a direct result of drinking in the pub for 36 years, because I don’t drink there every day. But the number of ex-landlords in that time is easily in double figures.

The plight of rural pubs has been under discussion ever since the drink-driving laws were introduced in 1966. In recent years, the nation’s price-sensitive drinking habits have also been much influenced by cheap supermarket booze.

News that the St Mabyn Inn was once again on the market, with a price tag of nearly £1million, provoked a genuine outpouring of distress from friends in the village. The owners, who have been behind the bar for about three years, had invested handsomely in bringing the pub straight from the 19th century to the 21st.

The introduction of the indoor toilets almost provoked a spontaneous street party, complete with bunting. The new restaurant was also hugely popular, serving food that had not only been cooked to order, but had actually been cooked. Wherever possible, ingredients were sourced locally from a multitude of agricultural interests. The word “improvement” is simply inadequate.

I remember how, as a young man, early on a Friday evening, I would watch as the pub filled up with young women, plastered in war paint, before they would head off to Bodmin to do battle in the White Hart – leaving the local men to their beer. The arrival of the police, shortly after closing time, signalled the start of the lock-in and the drinking would continue.

The transformation from spit-and-sawdust dive to elegant place-worth-a-visit had been handled with a degree of sensitivity which is not always seen in rural areas. Previous incumbents had been known to ban their own darts teams in their bids to attract the more up-market customer – only to discover that once the summer school holidays were over, the pub was empty until the following Easter. The recent redevelopment had somehow managed to remain loyal to those locals who still liked to perch at a corner of the bar, Thursday – Monday, play darts, and occasionally walk round the pool table with a big stick.

The pub today is almost certainly the biggest single employer in the parish. Its success has not been without problems – such as a car park too small for the vastly increased number of customers. But now the owners are moving on to pastures new and one of the most important parts of village life again faces an uncertain future.

Gene genie

One of the disadvantages of having a Y-chromosome is the tendency to make lists of things which need fixing (a pair of X-chromosomes would of course allow me simply to wait for someone else to fix things.)

Having struggled with this condition for six decades, I have belatedly come to the conclusion that I don’t actually have enough time to fix everything. And this gives me cause to consider the future of my 1948 Allen scythe.

Along with my 1955 Royal Enfield motorbike, the scythe has seen better days. Both have flat tyres, their fuel pipes are cracked, the Amal carburettors clogged with dirt – and the Champion spark plugs have not been warm for at least 10 years. Kept under a leaky corrugated roof and somewhat exposed to the elements, both machines have rusted.

While I confess to being something of a hoarder, the reasons why both machines occupy space in my life include (a) I have the physical space and (b) they are things of beauty, representative of superb engineering triumphs, and moments of time which are special to me. I simply cannot bring myself to throw them away.

The Allen scythe, in particular, occupies a place in the history of rural Britain which deserves a much louder celebration than that which it has so far enjoyed. Manufactured in Oxford from 1935 to 1973, its three-foot wide scissor blades have munched through blackthorn, brambles and stinging nettles on smallholdings all over the world.

The scythe is powered by a Villiers engine which starts only when you wind a rope round the magneto and tug hard. The clutch is a simply a piece of wire which, when released gently, breathes life into the unforgiving teeth on the razor-sharp blades.

I wonder if there are any Health and Safety Executive statistics for the number of limbs lost to the Allen scythe over the years. The worst thing that ever happened to me was to get soaked in the sap from a large patch of giant hogweed, on a hot, sunny day, blissfully unaware that photosynthesis of that toxic juice produced severe chemical burns. It was 25 years ago, and I still bear the scars.

All of which brings me back to the question of my genetically-driven need to fix things. Although I am no expert, I probably could repair my Allen scythe and – given enough time – remove the rust and restore the paintwork. Would I ever use it? Almost certainly not. I am as easily seduced by 21st century technology as the next man (it’s that Y-chromosome again.)

But there is so much more to my Allen scythe than chopping blackthorn and clearing weeds. It defines a chapter of post-war rural Britain which also defines me. So the scythe will definitely be staying, and so will my ambition to one day repair it.

Perhaps one day, my “to do” lists will also end up in a museum. Or engraved, in tiny letters, on my tomb. One day.

Welcome to Royston Vasey

A tough decision to make last weekend – whether to join village friends at the local cider farm for the annual Wassail, or stay in and watch the latest Mad Max movie.

Wassailing is the traditional Mid-winter booze-up much beloved of rural communities, even if no-one can really remember what it’s all about. The undisputed facts are that it involves a bit of dressing up, a “blessing” of the apple trees and the drinking of much cider.  

Some Wassails involve Morris Dancing, some involve singing, some involve pouring cider onto the roots of a newly-planted tree, and many involve raising money for local charities – but all of them involve drinking.

I hear that they are very big on Wassailing in Bodmin. The Cornish Guardian seldom misses an opportunity to report on the mid-January activities of the Bodmin Wassailers, who dress in Victorian clothing and tell anyone who will listen that they are celebrating a tradition started by the town clerk in 1624.

In Bodmin they do it “for the continuance of love and neighbourly meeting.” There is no mention of cider, specifically – perhaps in Bodmin, any booze will do. It goes without saying that the 1624 Bodmin town clerk was no Victorian, so already you can see that there is some disconnect between what people are actually doing and what they think they are doing.

It seems that you can have different kinds of Wassailing, depending on where you are. In some parts of Cornwall it might be about banqueting, in other parts it might be about calling on people and serenading them at their home, as if they hadn’t had enough of that with the Christmas carol singers the previous month. In and around St Mabyn, it’s about cider, perhaps with some historical derivation from the days when agricultural workers might receive some of their pay in alcohol.

In Padstow, of course, hardly a week goes by without some kind of festival. The Big One is ‘Obby ‘Oss, on 1st May, when the pubs stay open all day and anyone still sober by 11am is a wimp. I wonder how many of the 30,000 people who attend ‘Obby ‘Oss have any idea, or even interest, in the rural history they think they are celebrating.

It is hard to escape the thought that, in the 21st century, these traditional customs and festivals have become just another marketing opportunity. Once you start looking into the pagan origins of many of these things, you might wonder how they still survive. Cornwall’s rural primary schools are already preparing their children for Maypole Dancing, presumably unaware that this was originally a fertility ritual. The huge, erect pole around which the youngsters are skipping represents something that I dare not describe in a family newspaper.

Rural Cornwall is not the only place where we go in for such daftness – but at least we don’t have asparagus festivals, or knob throwing competitions (the “knob” is a Dorset biscuit) and nor do we incur the wrath of the Health and Safety Executive by chasing balls of cheese down a steep, grassy hill.

One thing which all of these rural festivals have in common is that they date from an era before television or internet.

I’m afraid that I embraced the latest Mid-winter festival, the “Dry January” holiday granted to my liver, and stayed in to watch Mad Max.

Wanted: a minister for mud

I was amused to read this week that there are no fewer than 30 government ministers entitled to attend Cabinet meetings – but that not one of them is responsible for mud.  

Because mud is currently the issue which dominates my every waking moment, I consider this to be a serious oversight. It’s not that I don’t care about the economy, war, pestilence or disease, it’s just that mud is pretty much the only thing which is front-and-centre of my mind at the moment. 
The country lanes in and around St Mabyn are full of it.

And my livestock responsibilities mean that most days, I have to venture out into the field at least twice – once in the morning and once in the evening. Every day I sink a little further into what was once a meadow of green grass. The physical effort required to walk 100 yards leaves me drained of energy and in poor temper. Each trip is like a major expedition, and I return to my back door exhausted, and absolutely plastered in huge quantities of the brown, damp, sticky stuff.

It is now nearly 60 years since Michael Flanders and Donald Swann wrote their Hippopotamus Song, extolling the virtues of “Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud,” and I can only conclude that they only rarely had to wade through the treacle like I do.

A newspaper report of the First World War included this memorable observation: “Hell is not fire. Hell is mud.” A regular refrain from the writings on that war describes mud as not only churned up earth, but a mixture of organic wastes, empty shells, iron scraps and rotting human flesh.

Agricultural animals in a field will do what comes naturally, and it can be hard to avoid even when you can see it. When animal waste is mixed invisibly into a brown muddy soup, a whole panoply of potentially dangerous bacteria and viruses are offered an unusually generous vector through which to invade other hosts.

Clostridium tetani, Legionella, Fowl cholera, Chlamydophila psittaci, Salmonella , Campylobacter, and even E-Coli, are just some of the pathogens which I now actively worry about as I scrub my hands before returning to the kitchen. I never used to bother much about overalls, boots and gloves. Now every venture into the field is like preparing for a full chemical and biological warfare exercise.

I suppose a time will come, eventually, when it stops raining. I find that I now care about the weather forecast with a passion I once scorned.

I remember how, as a very young journalist on the Cambridge Evening News, I reported on the 1976 drought and heatwave, when roads melted and some communities needed stand-pipes for water. I laughed until I cried at the news that the government was going to appoint a minister to make it rain.
Denis Howell had been the sports minister when England won the 1966 World Cup, so by the mid-1970s he presumably had some spare time on his hands. Three days after his appointment as minister for rain, it started raining.

So come on Downing Street. Shuffle that Cabinet. And give us a Minister for Mud.