On TV the other day I saw a pretty young reporter interviewing a farmer in the middle of a field. She was wearing a hard hat, a high Vis jacket and safety boots. I imagine that the producer of the programme had kitted her out to meet the current obsession with ‘elf and safety. ‘Her regalia reminded me that every outside-broadcast nowadays seems to feature a politician or celebrity in full safety gear. What, I wonder is it that produces such sartorial behaviour in people who are more familiar with Armani jeans from Harrods, than they are with corduroys from Countrywide in Ledbury?
Maybe they just want us to think they really belong in the world of agriculture or manufacturing or construction. Maybe they have a guilty feeling that their own lives are not as productive as they should be, and so wear safety clothing now and again to persuade us (and kid themselves) that they are in touch with ‘plebeian‘ life.
Talking of plebeian life; our pasture grass has been a bit late getting going this year, thus delaying the moment when the back-end of a ewe looks like a peat bog in a drizzle. This hiatus has given my friend Martin time to help to dag our sheep. Early dagging will reduce the need for Clikzin the chemical used to prevent fly-strike and, of course, a couple of kilos of dung dangling down its bum can also make the task of shearing a ewe a messy job.
Dagging is very much an agricultural activity, and so you won’t find Armani jeans in the sheep shed. What I have seen however, is an entrepreneurial Welsh firm which is aptly named Sheep Poo. Its main activity is turning sheep poo into paper which it then sells at £14.99 for 50 sheets of 90gsm. As this is 36 times dearer than ordinary 90gsm copier paper, I surmise that the paper must be used as till receipts by Harrods for the buyers of their Armani clothing. Incidentally, this same enterprising Welsh emporium of ovine rear-end products also retails a Christmas line of reindeer-poo paper and amazingly, wait for it …., sheep-poo air freshener!
Talking about paper brings to mind that recently I renewed my fishing licence and the road fund for the Shogun. I conducted both these exercises on-line which is cheaper, in that I did not have to drive (and pay to park) into Newent. In fact, a good deal of our interaction with ‘the authorities’ is now done via the computer: we send them money and they in return send us a bit of paper giving us permission ‘to continue to live our lives.’
Except sometimes they don’t even send us a piece of paper but make us print it out ourselves using ink that is more expensive than a sheet of sheep poo paper? Just think: if Westminster still had the power to create Acts of Parliament, and they were then printed on sheep poo paper the cost would exceed one of the current methods which uses sheepskin parchment made by the last remaining UK manufacturer of vellum: William Cowley of Newport Pagnell.
Talking about a last remaining manufacturer, it amazes me that Britain still makes anything. As regards manufacturing we have become a nation of a few foreign owned, mass producers of automotive, pharmaceutical and chemical products, but do have a huge number of small niche and craft producers.
The family owned mid-sized manufacturer has pretty well disappeared. The same has happened to agriculture where there are a few big boys and lots of little guys. This latter group includes local farms who are finding life difficult due in part to the buying policies of the supermarkets, but also to the system of sharing out the UK’s £3.9 billion farm subsidies. Eighty percent of this goes to a few big boys and the rest to 181,000 small farms. Despite this however, the Welsh farm Sheep Poo show that the entrepreneurial spirit amongst rural folk is still alive. The enterprising farmer who sells chicken droppings as Rooster Pellets through garden centres is another example.
Probably the best known entrepreneur from this area is Sir Richard Whittington from Pauntley. He went to London c1370 to make his fortune, but his spirit lives on in the dozens of small local businesses who make products for sale around the county and even abroad.
Living, as we do, in such beautiful rural landscapes there are dozens of options for creating and branding local products. Readers may come up with their own sparkling ideas but when you have made your fortune I hope that, like Sir Richard, you will help to keep alive your parish church. I attend Pauntley, and so every week I remember Dick and his cat, and am grateful that he helped to preserve for me, a place of tranquillity, peace and meditation.
We started this month’s article with a pair of Armani jeans and ended with the Parish church, and it this is combination which reminds me of the notice outside a church in Springfield Missouri which reads:
The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind.
They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
View from the Pew 