Tunnels of Change?

Courier Countryside Column for 20^th December

Celebrating the speed of change

Why is it that, as a nation, we are so resistant to change?

I was reflecting on the question as we were zipping under the Channel from Kent to the Pas-de-Calais in order to do some Christmas shopping and stock up the wine cellar.

It’s so easy.  A short drive to Folkestone.  A wait of just a few minutes before putting the car on the train. A journey just long enough to write a shopping list, and before we knew it we were having lunch in one of the many restaurants in Calais.  It’s only been open 20 years, but it seems almost impossible to recall when the Tunnel wasn’t there.

But do you remember the fuss and opposition to the building of it?  Arguments ranging from national security to desecration of the English countryside were deployed.  Long parliamentary speeches were unleashed. Newspapers were bombarded with letters. And that was in 1802 when it was first mooted!  Very little had changed by 1986 when the British and French governments finally approved it.  I remember numerous stories propagated by the naysayers before its eventual opening in 1994.  Of course I was sympathetic to those few people whose homes would be affected by the construction.  And, yes, the concrete hideosity of the Folkestone terminal, where before had been green fields, was to be lamented.  But millions of people annually benefit from the service. And it brings millions of euros into rural Kent.  Increasingly I hear French spoken in our village as Gallic tourists sample our cuisine and beverages and stay in our B&Bs.  Sure, some might have come on the ferries, but the speed and ease of the tunnel has undoubtedly attracted many more visitors.

I also appreciate the convenience of boarding the Eurostar in Ashford and arriving in Paris just 1 hour and 52 minutes later.  And from Paris the TGV high-speed network rushes you throughout the country. In England it stretches only from the coast to St Pancras.  And that was hard enough to get built. But now it’s there I really don’t feel we’ve lost anything.  In fact I like watching the trains snaking through my county and leaving the M2 traffic standing.

So when asked if I’m in favour of HS2 to the Midlands and the North, I say ‘bring it on’.  In 20 years we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

A tractor that’s hard to Afford

Courier Countryside column for 13 December

A tractor that’s hard to Afford

We’ve had our tractor stolen.  One day it was in the Community Orchard waiting to move the last of the season’s apple crop, the next day it wasn’t. It’s strange.  You do a double-take and wonder if, perhaps, you’d forgotten that you’d put it somewhere else.  But my memory isn’t that bad. Then you think another committee member must have shifted it.  But only the chairman has a key and one phone call quickly established he hadn’t touched it.  So you have to conclude it’s gone.

The police officer who came to my house to take the details wasn’t particularly surprised.  Old ones like that are very desirable, he told me. They usually get shipped out to Eastern Europe.  They’re cheap to run, easy to maintain and extremely simple to pinch.

The insurance loss adjuster said exactly the same thing. They fill a container with them and ship them out. Makes economic sense, especially if they didn’t pay anything for the item in the first place!

None of which is of much comfort.  Though the insurance man did agree to pay out the full sum.  Trouble is replacing it for that amount will prove extremely difficult as we got rather a good deal when we bought it.  And we’re certainly not going to get back the money we’ve spent on it.  Like replacing the clutch. Or overhauling the brakes.  Or buying it a brand new £100 battery the week before it went.  Which is doubly galling because the thieves wouldn’t have been able to start it if we hadn’t just renewed it.

This year we had a bumper harvest and this old – 1966 – Ford 4000 proved essential to lift the great cubie bags of apples off the ground and onto the extraordinary assortment of car trailers we were using.  So although I’d never used a front loader (the big hydraulic arms that reach out over the front of the tractor, usually with a bucket or spikes on the end) I quickly discovered we couldn’t do without one.  Trouble is now we may have to.  It looks as if we can replace the tractor itself for the money we have, but getting a front loader as well looks out of our price range.

So if you come across an ancient battered blue tractor with freshly painted front arms and roll bar, registration JPN 46D, please let the police know.

The Hungry Crocodile

Courier Countryside column for 6 December

The Hungry Crocodile

            Passing through our village during term-time you can’t help but notice the lines of primary school pupils marching around the green and across the main road.  At first it appears a charming reminder of a local education tradition stretching back centuries.

            But in fact it disguises fundamental problems with the village school.  It’s desperately overcrowded and in urgent need of renewal. The main building, possibly adequate when built 400 years ago, is today bursting at the seams.  The school office is housed in a corridor. Year One is accommodated in a roof space – freezing in winter, baking in summer, and so low in parts that adults cannot stand upright. 

The reception class is in another building altogether, several hundred metres away.  But that’s shared with the school dining facilities. So the picturesque crocodile lines of children are in fact walking, come rain or shine, to have lunch; at the desks of the reception class; which is evicted outside for the duration; come rain or shine. Currently there are two sittings but that will increase to three next year when all infants get free school meals. So lunch will start at 11.30 and finish sometime after 1.45.  At which point the reception class will be allowed back to resume studies.

            Science lessons are conducted in the cricket pavilion; PE and drama in the village hall; assembly in the Church.  Sure, they’re all reasonably close, but overall about one fifth of total learning time is spent walking between locations. 

Around the turn of the century Ofsted condemned the accommodation as totally inadequate and KCC put plans in hand for a brand new building. Earlier this year – after, it’s true, much disagreement over location – planning permission was granted for a superb new school.

But last week our county councillor informed us there would be no money to build it. The £31 million available for education projects had been allocated to other schools with “more urgent needs”.  We were flabbergasted, upset and, frankly, pretty angry. 

Now, to add insult to injury, they’re actually proposing to reduce the current budget! No longer will schools receive funds for accommodation beyond the main premises. If your building is so old and decrepit it can’t house your children – too bad.

And this is a Conservative Education Authority under a Conservative led government. I hate to think how those of a different political hue are faring in the current climate.

The tail that wags the law

Countryside column  29 November

The tail that wags the law

Watching Myrtle’s tail wagging nineteen to the dozen as she runs round the fields, I’m always saddened to think of dogs who’ve been docked.  It seems so cruel to deprive them of this natural method of expression.  And the law agrees with me.

The Animal Welfare Act 2006 banned all tail docking for cosmetic reasons.  However there remains an exemption for working dogs, including gun dogs.  I was discussing this with a neighbour and fellow dog lover just the other day.   Unlike me she’s into shooting and has trained her Lab to pick up dying birds.  And she’s adamant that not only is docking desirable for working dogs but it can be cruel NOT to dock.  When you’ve seen as many tails mangled on brambles or gorse as I have, she argued, you’d change your mind.  Hmm. Possibly.

Amazingly there’s a pressure group, the Council of Docked Breeds, opposing the legislation.  Their website claims there could be 16,000 tail injuries a year. This is based on a 2010 survey of 52 vets who reported 281 injuries. (Though if those 52 vets were largely in rural or hunting areas, the extrapolation would be pretty meaningless.)

Anyway, let’s accept that SOME working dogs do injure their tails and so the docking exemptions may not be wholly unreasonable.  Which leads us to the safeguards.

The law insists docking must take place within 5 days of birth. The owner must certify the dog is likely to work and a Vet must have seen specific written evidence that the dog is genuinely likely to work. 

So how on earth can breeders be advertising docked puppies for sale in my local classified ads?  They couldn’t possibly have known whether the dog is likely to work or not. And it’s wholly fanciful to suggest they wouldn’t sell a puppy if they knew it wasn’t going work – assuming they even asked.

The RSPCA agrees. If there is no proof, then it’s an offence under the Act a spokesman told me.

Papers advertising dogs for sale often carry warnings about puppy farms. Surely they should refuse to carry classifieds for docked dogs.

So buyer beware. If you see a docked puppy advertised for sale, it can’t logically have been done legally, whatever the seller says. And Vets beware too.  If the puppy is subsequently offered for sale on the open market you will have connived at an unnecessary, cruel and illegal practice.

The wind that rocked the community

Countryside Column 22 November

The wind that rocked the community.

On the bottom of our Parish Council planning agenda for the past several months has been notice of an appeal against refusal to allow a wind turbine on land just outside the village.

The original application, considered before I became a member, was for a single 18-metre Gaia turbine that can produce around 11kW of electricity. It’s about twice the height of a two-storey house, has a double blade and is mounted on a tubular frame.

The idea was not popular among local residents, who quickly got up a sizeable petition, arguing it would have a detrimental impact on an area of outstanding natural beauty, the setting of listed buildings, tourism, amenity and wildlife habitat.

Interestingly, the then Parish Council remained neutral on the application. And I’ve been wondering how I’d have voted. On the one hand I strongly believe we should be doing everything possible to reduce our reliance on burning fossil fuels with the concomitant carbon dioxide ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. I remain fearful of nuclear power and unconvinced we have the solution to radioactive waste. So that leaves renewables - largely sun, wind, water and biomass. But the truth is they produce relatively little heat or power for the investment or, in the case of wind, for the impact on the landscape.

The view from Rye towards Dungeness over the Romney Marsh is now littered with wind turbines. Some may find them beautiful; others awful, but none can deny they have significantly altered the topography.

Individual units in your paddock or back garden though? I recently wrote about the number of windmills he had around here. Now we love them. Yet they’re significantly more obtrusive that the Gaia. Could we not learn to love wind turbines? Or solar panels? I know of at least one local farmer considering covering acres of pasture land with solar units. Sheep may safely graze beneath and around them, but they will change our perception, and the colour, of the landscape. But then I suppose so did oilseed rape when it was first introduced.

One suggestion would be for every household in the land to move towards self- sufficiency. Financial incentives or discounts on other fuels could help every one of us install solar panels, or photovoltaic cells, or biomass boilers, or heat pumps.  Or even small wind turbines. Though I anticipate the latter might garner a flurry of objections from neighbours!

Hidden Enterprise

Countryside Column for 15 November 2013

Hidden Enterprise

I never cease to be amazed by the scope of rural industry – small units tucked away in obscure corners of the countryside.

A year or two back I needed some oak for a new kitchen work surface.  I searched around online and in local papers and came across a firm pleasingly named Plankee in Westfield.  I drove down to collect the wood from a small industrial estate and, after loading it on the car, spotted an old mate sitting outside another workshop on a break.  Turned out he was with a vintage aircraft restoration firm in the next unit. He showed me the wooden fuselage of a 1917 de Havilland DH.9 - a very early (and apparently somewhat unreliable) WW1 British bomber that they were recreating.

Really, who’d have thought you could find a firm deep in the Sussex countryside that stocked parts for 100 year-old Sopwith Camels?

Then in a tiny workshop rather nearer to me, a friend builds the most extraordinary chopper motorbikes.  At first I thought that taking apart a perfectly serviceable Harley and reconstructing it on an extended and lowered fame with long forks and acres of chrome, was tantamount to sacrilege. But when you see the results you realise they are real works of art.  Often he’ll scour junk yards for parts he can reuse: a 2CV headlight here, a tractor seat there, and incorporate then into his creations.

Travelling to visit my dentist the other day, (there are only two NHS practices left in the entire area and mine is about 15 miles away) I came across an outdoor clothing manufacturer.  Well, actually the clothing is mainly manufactured in Bogotá, Colombia, but the company’s headquarters are distributed across various buildings in this East Sussex village.  From small beginnings in the 1980s, the firm is now internationally renowned for its premium products.

A recent survey identified nearly a hundred small businesses operating in our parish alone.  But it also found many believe the biggest factor preventing their expansion is poor broadband speed.  Modern business just cannot function without a fast internet connection.  And, by and large, that means replacing the old copper cables with fibre optic.  It doesn’t have to be the whole way to the consumer, but upgrading needs to spread from the exchange to intermediate boxes.  In rural parts, despite frequent promises from government and county council, there’s little sign of that happening.