Its obviously been a thin week for news - so long as you exclude election speculation which is becoming more repetitive and boring the nearer we get to the event. In any event the Easter weekend's newspapers, in an attempt, no doubt, to mark the bridge between winter and spring in the countryside, have filled many column inches and in some cases whole pages with chit chat about the growing list of rich and famous who own farms.
Time was when this sort of thing annoyed me. Why do reporters go to such fly-by-night, hobby land owners who suffer none of the financial or physical hardships of proper farmers in order to write about food production? Most of them don't have a clue about real farming when they invest some of the millions earned from pop singing or taking off most of their clothes for the camera's and yet suddenly they become, in the eyes of the press, representatives of long established rural residents with whom they have nothing in common. Furthermore most of them have the luxury of persuing outlandish systems of farming and claiming they have discovered the Holy Grail.
There, that's off my chest and I feel better.
On further reflection perhaps I am generalising and being too critical. Over time our celebrity neighbours, or some of them, do learn about the realities and a few begin to start talking sense. And like it or not, the media listens to and reports what they say. On balance then, with those that look and learn and eventually see the light, it is possible that such people might do our industry more good than harm.
But I am talking about the ones who join in with rural life and genuinely try to learn and help communities. I still can't be doing with the ones who turn up once in a blue moon in their helicopters without even giving the time of day to their less fortunate neighbours. The quicker they return to their penthouses in the City the better.