Country life
Snail tendency
Leanda de Lisle
Ihave started writing a novel. This fine book runs to about a page at the moment. A page that has to go in the bin. My excuse for my lack of productivity has been that it's impossible to concentrate when you are surrounded by distractions. But faced with the task of describing those distractions I find they don't amount to much. August has made a lotus-eater of me.
It's not that I do nothing, you under- stand, it's just that what I do I do very slow- ly and very badly. The laundry is full of dirty washing; the things I have managed to clean are covered in mysterious red and blue patches. The refrigerator and the larder, it is true, are full of green salad, courgettes, beans, tomatoes, white peaches and mangetout picked from the garden. But I Seem to have become rather spineless when It comes to forcing the children to eat them. As for this column. I'm aware that we have a new editor and I feel that I should pull something tremendous out of the hat. But the knowledge that, unlike Taki, I am not related to our proprietor, seems to weigh on me like a gigantic cushion. I was counting on the eclipse allowing me to file You a dramatic report about birds ceasing to sing and dogs howling, but it proved about as exciting as damp air. Neither the birds nor our dog seemed to notice the brief moment of mid-morning twilight and the children announced it was boring after fewer than 30 seconds. Even the adults were more interested in my new cowboy boots than the pinhole-sized reflec- tions cast by our pinhole cameras. Perhaps none of us has a soul, but my boots are amazing, if not quite as amazing as they might have been. I bought them in Idaho where I fell in love with a pair in red, white and blue, which would have been the per- fect thing if I were ever to be fired out of a cannon. However, in the end I was per- suaded to buy something more traditional in a pale orange brown.
The boots were frightfully expensive and are amazingly uncomfortable — which, I suppose, serves me right for being 'all boots and no cattle', as a Texan said of George Bush when he acquired a pair. But then we are soon to become a nation of people who are 'all boots and no cattle' albeit Wellington boots. I expect you've read in the papers that dairy bull calves are now selling for a penny. Things aren't much better for beef fanners, one of the more fortunate of whom I spoke to this morning.
A couple of years ago my farmer friend was poised to get rid of all his Angus cattle. Their meat is fattier than the plastic kind preferred by the majority of supermarket customers and it didn't seem worth hanging on to them — until his wife came across a tiny stall at a plough show. The stall belonged to Waitrose. They were looking for fanners to supply them with traditional Angus and Hereford beef, which my farmer friend now does. In consequence he is breaking even.
However, you can't live on breaking even. The farmer's family earn the extra • income they need to survive by doing contract work. Others, with ploughable land, are turning their farms arable. 'But that will just shift the problem,' he assured me. The people who will benefit from the agricultural depression will be those looking for a farm- house surrounded by its own land for their weekend escape from the City.
As I've written before, the cleverer chil- dren of small farmers are moving to the cities. Only those who have to stay, stay. As their fathers sell up I expect they will work in the fields for the professional classes who will be the new landowners. My novel about country life should reflect that fact. But it's August, harvest time, the end of the rural year and I'm not quite ready to face a new world or start that first page.
Petronella Wyatt returns next week It's me — can you pull your shorts up!'
Previous page
