Throw down a picnic blanket in a park near you and watch bitter Britain go to war with itself (Aug.16)
Britain is becoming very bitter for some reason. Last weekend I went to the paper shop and remembered most of the things I now need for such a trip: spectacles, phone, hearing aid, tin of boiled sweets, gazetteer and a list of the papers I like to buy when I arrive. But I forgot my mask.
In the olden days, when there was Enid Blyton and local bobbies gave apple scrumpers a clip round the ear, people would have forgiven a 60-year-old for making such a mistake. But not any more. A man leapt from his 10-year-old Toyota to do some remonstrating.
"Do you not need a mask because you're on television?" he bellowed. And he hadn't finished. In fact his lecture, padded out with much profanity, was so lengthy that I never got the chance to interrupt and point out that he wasn't wearing a mask either.
We see this sort of thing all the time. David Beckham has neighbours who say he shouldn't be allowed to make a pond in his garden because "there are too many ponds round here already". They don't actually mean there are too many ponds, because that would be a ridiculous thing to say. What they mean is: "We are disgusted that this man is so much richer and better-looking than us."
Thierry Henry suffered the same fate when he wanted to build a four-storey fish tank at his house in London. Well, not exactly the same fate. No one said, "There are already too many four-storey fish tanks round here," but they did object to his aquarium because he was a good-looking footballer who earned millions by pretending to like Renaults.
Then you have J.K. Rowling, who pointed out that people who menstruate are called "women". She was given a social media machine-gunning for being stupid and naive, and can you work out why? Me neither. And what about Rachel Riley, who attacked antisemitism by making a joke about Jedward, and then had to apologise for the joke? It gets worse. Every August I put out a tweet trying to cheer up kids who got lousy A-level results by explaining that I got a C and two U grades and that I've not really suffered as a result. Until quite recently, people thought this was a kind thing to do, but not any more, because last week, most of the messages I got in return were full of bitter, mealy-mouthed vitriol.
This nastiness has now spread to the nation's parks, where open warfare is being waged between all the groups who like to use them for various different recreational activities.
I visit Holland Park in London very often and I'm always staggered at the variety of things you can do in there. Before Covid-19 came along, you could listen to live opera, or, if you are not an appalling snob, you could choose instead to play chess, or take a walk in the woods, or sit on a bench and look at the squirrels, or do exercises, or play tennis, or have a game of football.
And everyone was able to coexist perfectly. There was no exchange of gunfire between those who liked the Japanese garden and those who did not. And nor did I feel the need to summon the police because I'd been offended by a same-sex couple kissing on a bench.
Today, though, it's like the West Bank in there. Everyone is snarling at everyone else. You even have people vandalising the statue of Henry Vassall-Fox, Lord Holland, whose family had owned the land.
And it's not just Holland Park. In parks everywhere you have joggers at war with cyclists and cyclists at war with people who just want a picnic, and picnickers at war with dog-walkers and dog-walkers at war with families who've broken out the tagine and are cooking a nice merguez casserole for 500 of their closest friends.
Last week we read about a park in Essex where the licensed outdoor gym instructors are going ballistic at their unlicensed competitors, who are making their charges do exercises on a park bench that was erected in memory of Doris, who loved to sit there.
Residents, meanwhile, are "furious" because people locked out of their gyms are "hogging" flights of stairs by running up and down them. And park wardens say that some of the people using the branches of trees to do pull-ups are "pretty heavy", which means the branches may break.
Am I missing something here? We've all been told that if we lose a few pounds we stand a better chance of surviving contact with the coronavirus. So it makes sense to go to the park and spend an hour or two, perhaps in the company of other like-minded souls, doing downward dogs and picking things up and putting them down again.
I can't understand for the life of me why anyone would need a licence to do this, and nor can I understand why such an activity would bother anyone else. Watching a field full of young ladies bending over can be quite charming. Watching a field full of middle-aged men doing the same thing is often hilarious. Either way, it's not annoying. And yet somehow, in new, bitter Britain, that's what it's become.
We seem to be annoyed by absolutely everything. Vegetarians are enraged by people who eat meat. Remainers are enraged by people who voted for Brexit. Poor people are enraged when a rich neighbour applies for planning permission to plant a hedge. There's no tolerance at all. The middle ground has become as alien as Mars. And it's got to stop.
Everyone. Tories, Muslims, young people, the elderly, migrants, rockers, hip-hoppers, Jewish people, vegetablists, white people, bacon enthusiasts, speed freaks, the fat, the fit, the timid, black people, policemen, Christians, vicars and socialists. If we want to live in a happy country, we've all got to come together as one. And gang up on the cyclists.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's harvest time and I've come a cropper: The summer months were shaping up to be a time of plenty, but what the agrichemical firms giveth, the weather gods taketh away (Aug. 16)
When I was a small boy I went to a Church of England primary school in a mining village outside Doncaster, and every September we were frogmarched into the local church to thank God for the harvest. But as I sat there, staring at the altar, which was festooned with trugs full of marrows and ears of corn, I always used to think,"God had nothing to do with any of that. It was all produced by Mr Turnbull," who was the local farmer.
God definitely didn't have anything to do with it. In fact, he's done his best over the past nine months to make sure there was no harvest at all. He gave us the wettest autumn since 2000, the wettest February on record, the driest May on record and then, for good measure, the coldest July since 1988. He's fried my crops, frozen them, drowned them and then drowned them again.
So if we are going to thank anyone for the harvest in 2020, might I suggest we sink to our knees and give praise to the giant agrichemical group Monsanto, whose weed-killing glyphosate invention has enabled me to keep my head above water. And while we are at it, let's not forget Syngenta, Bayer and BASF, which make the nitrates and the pesticides. It's thanks to their efforts, not God's, that you're going to have bread on your table this year.
That said, as harvest approached, I was warned by my land agent that despite the heroic efforts of the chem-science boys, the crop yield would be poor. However, on my daily walks, emboldened by the gift of innocence, I would gaze upon my barley and my wheat and my oilseed rape and think, "Well, it all looks fine to me."
And it continued to look fine until, one day, Kaleb, my tractor driver, went out and killed all the rape with a potent cocktail of weedkillers. Apparently this is necessary. Rape has to be dead before you can harvest it. Who knew? Another thing I didn't know is that you can't harvest rape if the moisture content of the tiny seeds is greater than 9 per cent or less than 6 per cent. So if it's been raining, or not raining, or if it's been sunny, or not sunny, you have to wait. Too dry and the crop will be rejected by the buyer because it will be impossible to extract the oil. Too wet and you must spend a fortune drying it out.
There were more complications too. Earlier in the year, when my land agent asked where I was going to store all the harvested crops, I said, "In a bucket." Judging from the incredulous look on his face this was the wrong answer, so I said, tentatively, "In the bath?" This was also wrong. You need a barn — so I built one. It was huge, the kind of thing they use to make airships, but when he arrived to inspect it, he said it would be big enough only to store the rape.
This meant that before harvesting could begin I'd need to organise a fleet of trucks to take away the barley. I'd also need to rent a combine harvester and, although this is not a common problem in farming, book a film crew to cover the event for the Amazon television show I'm making.
This meant I needed an accurate weather forecast, so on the Sunday evening I sat down to watch the BBC's
Countryfile show. And in the "what's the weather got in store for the week ahead" segment, the forecaster said high pressure was on its way and we could expect clear skies, temperatures in the mid-twenties and light winds.
The next day it was cold and wet, and I was furious. To you, inaccurate weather forecasts don't matter. The worst consequence is you have to abandon the barbecue you'd planned and move inside, but to a farmer they are critical, so I have a plea to the Beeb's weather people: if you don't know — and at the moment you don't, because the transatlantic pilots on whom you rely for information are all at home learning how to make sourdough bread — admit it.
There's no shame in that. I don't know lots of things. I don't know the boiling point of steel or how to make a roux or who painted
Belshazzar's Feast, and I'm big enough to admit to these failings. You should be too.
Especially on a farming show.
The next day I called my neighbouring farmers to say I was going to have a coronary, and they all had the same piece of advice. I had to accept whatever happens, because that's farming. They also said I had to be patient, which is not possible. I can't be patient. It's not in my DNA. It's a bit like telling Nicholas Witchell he has to be a Moroccan cage fighter.
But after a while I'd calmed down to the point where my heart was beating only a million times a minute and then, contrary to what we'd been told in that morning's forecast, we got one of those grey days when it feels like God's put the whole country in a Tupperware box. So we placed a handful of rape seeds in my £500 moisture-o-meter and, after a heart-stopping pause, got the result: 7.2%. Perfection. We could begin.
Except we couldn't, because the trailer I'd bought had hydraulic brakes and my Lamborghini tractor has a system operated by air. Stopping was tricky with nothing in the back, but when I had 12 tons of crop back there, I'd be very much on the wrong side of both the law and the road. So I rented a trailer with air brakes, waited for another unforecasted weather front to pass and then everything began. Again.
And five minutes later I received the news that a whole year of properly hard graft had been a complete waste of time. The combine has a computer that can tell how big the crop is. In a good year I could expect maybe 1.5 tonnes per acre, but the initial figure said I was getting just 800kg. I'd been prepared for bad news, but not that bad. And it was about to get worse.
My job was to wait at the side of the field for a flashing light on the roof of the combine to begin twirling. This would announce that its hopper was 80% full. I'd then rush over and drive alongside the mighty harvester while a fan blew the seeds up a tube and into my trailer.
All I had to do was drive at the same speed as the combine. Simple, yes? No, actually. You need to look where you're going, so you can drive in a dead straight line, but you also need to look backwards to make sure the seeds are going into the right part of the trailer. To do it properly you need eyes on the side of your head. Basically, you need to be a pigeon, and I'm not, which is why, in the first few minutes, most of the miserable quantities that were being harvested were being immediately Onanised back into the ground.
Despite all this, we worked into the night. The next day, when the dew had evaporated and the moisture content was back in the window, we started again until, that evening, my new R101 barn was filled with a big black dune of what was 50% rape and 50% earwigs. Apparently they will be filtered out before you use the oil to make your supper. I hope so.
And then came the real heartbreak. Brexit has buggered my barley. Because no one knows what will happen to international markets after the end of the year, there's a mad scramble to sell barley to Europe before the door is closed. So not only was the yield down by 20%, thanks to God, but, thanks to the coffin-dodgers who wanted to "take back control", prices are down too.
Which is why I'm writing this in Manchester. It's been said that, to make ends meet, farmers must diversify, and I have: later on I shall be recording the first in a new series of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I think I may sit in the wrong chair and get the contestant to ask me the questions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note:
Belshazzar's Feast was painted by Rembrandt.
Here's the
Sun column: "
There’s nothing wrong with causing offence – sometimes it’s even a good thing"