Country life
It's all change
Leanda de Lisle
Someone was complaining to me about Paul Johnson the other day. He didn't trust anyone who was left-wing one decade and right-wing the next. My eyes were glazing over when it suddenly struck me that it would be marvellous to spend the next ten years contradicting what I had said in the last. A columnist with new opinions is like a model with a new hair style — you are suddenly fresh and exciting again.
The first opinion I'll change is the one that opposes a ban on fox-hunting. The season is now over and I thank God for it. It means I won't have my husband disap- pearing every Saturday and not coming shopping. I won't have to cook him enor- mous meals at 6 o'clock in the evening because he hasn't had lunch. I won't have him telling me he is too exhausted to carry out this or that boring task because he's `been hunting' (which is so much more onerous than work). A ban on fox-hunting would improve my life no end. I'd have my husband back and I might even have some foxes eating my rabbits. At the moment most of them go to the big village a mile down the road to eat out of rubbish bins. I need to build great big dens all over the garden, so that the foxes would have to elbow aside several warrens worth of bunnies before they reached anyone's left-over Tandoori chick- en. Unfortunately, planting foxes is against MFHA (Master of Fox Hounds Associa- tion) rules and Peter won't have it. But we'll see what the future holds.
I'm sure I could get hunting banned on the grounds that it's cruel to those of us who don't get it. I'm also warming up to becoming a fanatical Green. Two things have contributed to this: a recent walk in our walled garden and a preview tape of this Sunday's Money Programme on BBC 2. The walk in the walled garden should have engendered only pleasant thoughts. It's full of pretty daffodils and primroses. But our deeply Green gardener was upset. The Soil Association has told her that her tomatoes aren't organic since she grows them in pots — filled with organic compost from the garden — and not in the ground.
If our gardener was a farmer, she'd have been aware long ago that they are a little barking at the Soil Association, but no mat- ter. I think their rules should be even stricter and more arbitrary than they are now — and all British producers should stick to them. As the Money Programme points out, we are currently importing the vast majority of our organic produce. This is a very environmentally unfriendly thing to do, but is unlikely to change since varia- tions in organic standards and levels of government support have put us at a disad- vantage even in our own market place. (Not that Johnny foreigner is doing that well either. According to the Money Pro- gramme, Denmark, which has a mere 4 per cent more organic land than we have, has seen organic prices collapse, just as they did in Austria.) No, the future is clear and it's a brighter, weirder Green than we have yet seen. We must convince the public that Euro food is dangerous because it isn't produced to our own exacting standards (which we should make as eccentric as possible. Nobody does eccentric better than we do). Furthermore, nothing that crosses water should be seen in our kitchens as it would be against our Feng-Shui (this could be extended to garages to save Rover). Farmers would then be able to charge what they liked and will be loved by everyone (save the handful of people with any sense, who can be safely ignored).
The junior agriculture minister Elliot Morley tells the Money Programme that farmers need to be market driven. But every week we see his market drive good farmers to bankruptcy. It's time farmers came to drive the market and I became the great Green guru of the 21st century. It would be unlikely to endear me to Mr Morley, who would clearly like to see every farmhouse in the country turned into an urban professional's second home, but,' at the very least, we'll have our irrational hatred of fox-hunting in common.
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