Welsh Notebook
'November is the month when you either get on top of your garden or you get behind for the whole year', said the Radio Gardener, so With one third of the month gone and no digging achieved it is now clear what my garden will look like for the next twelve months. The passage of the seasons, so vividly marked in the countryside, brings us at this time of year the copper-wire and rooflead strippers, who flock out in great numbers from the towns to be about their lucrative work. They continue until the winter gales when their natural successors, the indoor burglars, take over. In the spring the baby lambs come and with them the baby lamb skinners; they do it in the field just outside the house. And then the summer, Which in the national park is sure to bring the families of amateur rally drivers and the school children — or 'kids' — who study practical ecology and take whole birds' nests back from the patchy hedgerows and practise their shooting on the cats. And so on to autumn and the fruit scrumpers (kids again, aren't they wonderful!) and finally back to the dear old copper-wire strippers.
Last year there was the additional excitement of the pony lovers, who starved a perfectly healthy pony to death in the nextdoor barn and provided a terrific feast for the local rats. (The rats go for the eyes first by the way, then on to the muzzle.) Fortunately another gardening correspondent has in response to requests, printed a list of Plants which are rabbit-proof and therefore suitable for cemeteries. He recommends lavender, sage, rosemary and mint, so the animal graveyard beyond the orchard is going to be transformed. And there is further encouragement from the best wine merchant in town who is also a former fairground boxing champion. He says that the soil around here is notoriously light and never needs November digging; he suggests treading it in.
Nothing, it seems, will stop the arrival of devolution, not even the experience of the nightmare years since the last Tory government's great cock-up. The simple rule for devolution is that the increase in local government power always exceeds the decrease in central government power; therefore devolved government equals more government and less responsive government. The substitution of Welsh and Scottish national assemblies for either county or district government will mean that power 'evolves' away from the local community, just as it did when the many small district councils were replaced by fewer but larger ones. As an example, our neighbouring market town of 15,000 people which had a mayor and council for hundreds of years, now has absolutely no control over the least of its own affairs, and has to send representatives to a 'district' council that occupies half the county. This is called devolution, and has led to a sense of frustration at the inability to influence administrative decisions; precisely the opposite effect to the one supposedly intended.
The power workers' strike has been a complete failure in this part of Monmouthshire since it has completely failed to extinguish the two-mile chain of yellow lights which have been placed at the foot of the hills on the far side of the river.
'When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead.' Betjeman's vision is coming true, and now driving across England at night the way is splashed with lakes of this vomit as one passes from Lower Cheeping to Pobbleheath. Only the high wire is lacking, and the machine-gun posts to repel the rabid foxes advancing on us across the Common Market.
Another consequence of the Common Market has been the revival of rumour on the grand scale in rural areas. Since, as far as farmers are concerned, the effective seat of government has now left the British Isles, news reaches the outlying regions rather in the way it used to before the invention of the railway. Among dairy farmers the rumour is circulating that all milk will have to be pasteurised by 1980. No doubt there will be reassuring government denials, but rumour is frequently more trustworthy in these matters than government information 'officers'. For most people unpasteurised farm milk disappeared long ago but in some areas, particularly in Yorkshire (or whatever it is called nowadays), farm milk is the popular choice; and given the choice it is hard to imagine anyone with a sense of taste preferring any other. Since the national brucellosis scheme is now nearing completion, and the danger of catching TB from unpasteurised milk is thereby overcome, this is obviously just the moment for the Ministry to insist that all milk be pasteurised. In order to deal with reactionary preference Dr Summei skill has announced (another rumour) that farm milk is `unfit for human consumption'. Next on the list will be homogenised pasteurised milk, to• replace mere pasteurised milk, and then on to UHT homogenised pasteurised milk. Finally yellow UHT homogenised pasteurised milk, to go with the yellow lights; yum, yum.
There is something about Africa which seems to corrupt both East and West, and this holds true even in South Africa, the least 'African' country on the continent.
Having supported apartheid through trade for years the West, led by America, is now adopting a posture of moral disapproval by implementing a meaningless arms ban against a country which manufactures its own arms. At the same time the sanctimonious duo of Jimmy Carter and Andy Young join the Russians in pouring arms into both Somalia and Ethiopia, and so inflame a conflict which would otherwise be limited to muskets, spears and homemade bombs. Thousands of people will be killed or horribly wounded by this US-Soviet intervention who would otherwise have remained unharmed spectators of a tribal war. And the military attaches of these two powers, and of Britain, France, Germany and the other arms exporters. make careful comparisons of Ethiopian planes against Somali tanks and then send enthusiastic reports to our. Queen's Award-winning export salesmen. The real prize of course is not the arms contract but the development contract which will be awarded later. Among the latest American recruits to the anti-apartheid movement is David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank which last week announced 'a new code of ethics' banning loans that benefited apartheid. It was Rockefeller interest which held up grain shipments to India in the 1960s until the Indians had purchased a mountain of Rockefeller's soil-destroying inorganic fertiliser. It is American-led development programmes which have brought the West African Sahel to its second food crisis in four years.
Patrick Marn ham
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