June 2009 Archives

Sorry it's been a while, we are busy harvesting daffodil bulbs (crikey, it's dry; it hasn't rained here for yonks).

There is a programme on telly tonight about pig production on More4.  I was going to watch it and write about it here but it's on at the same time as Flight of the Conchords.  Tough cheese.

I'm watching the Money Programme.  That shouty Cockney who does Masterchef is on it discussing food inflation.  He's peeling a potato as he talks (God, the Money Programme has dumbed down).

Sorry, I forgot again yesterday

I've made up for it with this REALLY high-quality photo.  I've made it quite big so that you can appreciate the high resolution detail.

How is this for embracing new media then?

I've just discovered that I can telephone into a website and create audio blog entries.

There's a crappy recording below.  I hadn't got a clue what to say (I'm on my second glass on wine too and I only have large glasses in this house) but you'll get the idea and hopefully get a bit over-excited about the possibilities that it provides.  Think blog entries from the field, a la Kate Adie.

I suspect that I'll be doing a bit more of this soon (until the next fad comes along; I'm completely over Facebook now so I've got some spare time)

I have just read yesterday's Telegraph supplement which detailed all the MP's expenses - I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Basically they've all had £23 grand.  Some of them spent it on mortgage payments, some of them spent it on Scotch eggs (respect to you, Derek Wyatt, Lab, Sittingbourne and Sheppey), some of them let their husbands spend it on blue movies and Kleenex. 

It looks as though the maximum that they could claim was £23,083 and this is what most of them have claimed.  This was clearly devised as a way of disguising a pay increase.  It's kind of irrelevant and a little prurient to worry what it was spent on.

Personally I have no problem with our representatives in Parliament earning a big wage if they are talented, capable and effective.  I wouldn't care if they earned £200k per annum if the economy was in good shape, the streets were clean, the young were educated, the sick and poor were cared for and we had a fair judicial system. 

And if they are not delivering good results, I don't care how cheap they are; they shouldn't be there.

Still it's not all bad.  The Telegraph is starting to realise that it's a newspaper again, we all get a chance to give MPs a hard time and hopefully the hoohah will scupper Margaret Beckett's chances of being the next Speaker of the House of Commons.

Our Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, only claimed £11,631.  As my friend Lindsay said,

"Yeh, she wasn't being greedy, was she?" 

SUPRISE!!  I did the ironing.

Now I'm going to decorate.  I thought I would update you on the hair front first. 

As we know, I shaved my head last week and it looks really severe and thuggish.  It really hasn't grown that much since.  The bit on the top is thin and grows really slowly, it had barely been trimmed up there since the millenium.  I used to be very protective of it.  If my barber, Graham, touched it, I would bark at him like you would address a toddler who was about to stuff their finger in an electrical socket.

Obviously none of this was at the front of my mind when I shaved it.  I had probably got confused and thought that pruning it would encourage it to bush out like a rose. 

Has anyone got any tips (we have already elimated the wig option as a bit undignified).  When we used to grow wheat I remember that a wheat plant needed a frost for "vernalisation" which encourages it to tiller out and throw lots of side shoots.  Should I stick my head in the freezer?  

I also recall running over a wheat field with a heavy set of Cambridge rolls also helped tillering.  I'm prepared to consider drastic action, would it work?  More importantly will I be disciplined for using this photo? 

It's Sunday morning, I've cut the lawns, finished my odd jobs around the house and now I am sitting in the kitchen wondering whether I should start decorating, tackle the two baskets of ironing or go into work. 

Realistically the ironing's not going to get a look in; I don't like doing laundry.  I know what you are thinking, "So why don't you become a nudist then, Matthew?"  I like your logic but I work with fast-moving machinery and we get a really chilly wind on the Fens.  Having a lot of laundry is one of the trials of being a farmer.

I ought to be decorating really or entering this week's flower orders into the sales ledger but the lure of a few hours on a John Deere 6430 is quite appealing.  I love that tractor (even if the common rail engine does clatter like a bag of spanners).

We have just about finished harvesting the delphiniums (although they should still be available in Waitrose and M&S until Tuesday) and we have chopped down most of them.  If we do this before the longest day of the year, we can trick them into throwing a second crop of flowers later in the year.  This gives us a chance to cultivate the pathways between the plants to destroy any weeds.  This would be today's job.  I did about six acres at the end of the day yesterday and found it really therapeutic.  I kept going until 7.30pm, I might have kept going if I hadn't been on babysitting duty.

Chris is also at work today to spray the last few potato fields with their blight fungicide.  This year we have gone down from 10 day spray intervals to 7 to control the A2- Blue13 strain of potato blight.  It has a much shorter incubation period and so we need to apply protection much more frequently.  This has added to our workload (and costs) but needs to be taken seriously.

Hey, I've just read through what I've written.  Working on a Saturday night and a Sunday, going on about laundry, being in love with a John Deere, being obsessed about potato blight.  Am I turning into the saddest man on earth?  Why do you read this?  Do you want to help choose paint colours as well?  I'm thinking of this one for the kitchen and this one for the dining room.  Are they a bit drab?  Will it look like a prison?  Would this one be too dark for the dining room?  And are the people who choose the names for paint colours on acid or something? 

I can read your mind.

I know that what you need more than anything today is a picture of a sad looking dog with a George Washington wig on its tiny head.

Happy to oblige

If this was a twee blog, I would probably have put a caption like "George Woofington."  This isn't one of those blogs.  I'm being ironic and post modern here, OK?

I'm not sure why I did it.  Probably it's a credit crunch thing.  Probably it was was because it felt urgent at the time.  Probably it was a reaction to just having been charged £80 to have my bicycle serviced.  Probably it was a sign that I've finally taken leave of my senses.

Obviously I regret it now.

I've shaved my bloomin' head off.

It's pretty low to cut your own hair.  That's almost as bad as things can get isn't it really?

I've been very busy (not that I would go on about it) and not had time for a haircut.  I was looking shaggy like the tramp.  On Sunday I decided to have a little trim around the edges and I just kept going.  Something took hold of me.  I became possessed by the spirit of someone who used to drive a flail mower for the highways authority or something.

It started to go wrong when tried to shave the back of my neck.  I went a bit too high.  Wedge haircuts just aren't fashionble anymore.

The only thought that occured to me at the time was to take a breed with the clippers right across my head.  I thought it was set for grade 3.  It was WAY shorter than that as it turned out.  It was my Britney Spears moment

Then the clippers ran out of charge.  I had got an inverted mohican going on.  I was supposed to be going out for dinner in 15 minutes.  I had to fetch an extension lead from the garage and run it into the bathroom so that I could finish mowing.

I would look a right hard man at the moment if it wasn't for the fact that I look close to tears the whole time.  Everyone who has seen me since has greeted me open-mouthed and with the same comment  "CHRIST, Matthew"

I've cleared my diary for the next two months.

Hey, sorry.  I got all occupied last week and forgot to put up a picture of a dog in a wig. 

Here it is - I don't want you thinking that I've actually got a life.

Brace yourself for a 14% drop in meat sales, then.

According to this article in the Guardian, Paul "Macca" McCartney (I don't know if you can remember him but he was a guitarist in a band called Wings) is launching a campaign to encourage people to give up meat one day a week.

Hmmmmmm.  As you know, normally l would get up very early in the morning to be first in the queue to disagree with anything that Sir Macca says.  Strangely this time I'm not as strongly against him as you might expect me to be. 

It isn't necessary or healthy to eat LOADS of meat - it should be regarded as the most indulgent component in a balanced diet (like the delicious fillet steak that I had at Jules and Penny's on Friday.  Yum, thanks for that). 

I am sure that once the Meatles have got their campaign underway, I will be annoyed by something about it.  They will probably say something like "livestock is bad for the planet" when in reality the planet would be better served if the more marginal soil types were in pasture and grazed as they used to be.  

The moderation of this campaign is clever.  It is much more appealing and less easily dismissed than the naive and sentimental sermonising that you would usually expect to hear from one of the elder statesmen of stadium politics.  It could be quite an effective thin wedge and this is potentially very bad news for high-quality mixed farmers in the UK. 

The problem is that a campaign like this is likely to strike a chord with the sort of middle-class folks who buy higher-quality meat.  The kind of people who eat cheap and intensively-farmed protein from the freezer cabinets (the sort of people who wear a tracksuit even when they are not doing sport) are likely to be unmoved by the argument.  Their meat is normally the cheap and yucky imported stuff, I don't see these sales being dented by the campaign.

I'm not sure which way my thumbs are going on this one yet, Sir Macca.

(Nice white trainers by the way, Macca.  Did Stella design that outfit for you?)  

I didn't stay up for the European election results last night.

It seems as though the real gains have been for the fringe parties.  Although there is a lot of talk about the seats won by UKIP and the BNP (and I too feel about queasy about the second one gaining such prominence), it looks as though the Green party has had an especially good result.  This hasn't been picked up on by the media.

As you would expect, the Greens have gained the most seats in the wealthiest member states.  I'm not sure if they have enough seats or are co-ordinated enough to exert considerable influence or not.  I hope so.  Although they can be a annoyingly anti-science, I like the fact that they exist as a option for voters who are too disillusioned to plump for the main parties but too honourable not to vote at all.

I love democracy.  At the last local elections, our local town councils was over-whelmingly dominated by the Boston Bypass Independents who stood on the single issue of sorting out the gridlocked town.  This sort of thing restores your faith in the whole crumby business (although we are still waiting for our bypass). 

While I'm adamant that everyone should go to vote, even if it's only to wipe their bum on the ballot paper, it doesn't make any difference here.  Our constituency is one of the safest Tory seats in the country.  We have a good constituency MP but, after he made some homophobic jokes in an after dinner speech that I was at, I am pretty much decided to vote Lib Dem or Green at the next general election (I couldn't vote Labour after the Iraq war). 

It would only be a theatrical act of annoyance and about as useful as waving my fist at the moon but you have to play along, don't you?.

Ahhhhh (takes a deep and delicious breath of the morning air), isn't it a great feeling to wake up on a Monday morning and not be Gordon Brown.

Anyway.  If you fancy a laugh to start the week then go have a listen to today's edition of Farming Today on Radio 4 (I can't put a hyperlink in because my laptop is refusing to cut and paste things - I think I've locked the right button somehow.  Anyone?)

They are featuring people who have started new farming businesses at the moment.  Today it was a couple who have a smallholding raising animals who used to be in police force.  When the husband describes their unsucessful attempts to round up the cattle to send it to market it sounds just like he's giving evidence in court.

It's of the 'We approached the defendants from the entrance to the field but when they saw us they turned and headed in the opposite direction' variety

Well worth a listen.

...he found that it had been struck by not one but TWO pancake..

That is an extract from my column for next week's Farmers Weekly magazine.  The tone is daft, obviously, I'm on some sort of delphinium harvesting high.  You will have to get the magazine next Friday to read it all.

It is always written a week in advance.  Isabel, my editor, marks it with her red pen.  Here is her score and report for this particular effort.

The sunshine has made us busy for the last week but I don't ever recall enjoying my job more.  I know that fate will be rub its hands and smile malevolently when it reads that.  It's almost like putting in a formal request for a calamity like a mechanical breakdown, a hurricane or a broken limb.

It's quite an unexpected bonus to feel like this...