Milkcarts and Happy Cows

TofTW March 2016

Happy Cows win Prizes

By Kent Barker

We had a wonderful milkman when I lived in Greenwich in the 1980s. His name was Doug Mullins, known to all as Dougie, and he followed his father into the trade, eventually replacing their old red and white handcart with one of those new-fangled electric milk floats.

I was thinking of Dougie just the other day and reflecting on how rare doorstep milk deliveries have become.  When he died in 1991 there was no one to take over his round.  But even as late as 1995 doorstep deliveries accounted for 45% of all household purchases of milk.  Now it’s less than 3%. 

The trend has been largely driven by the big supermarkets. The average price of home-delivered milk is currently 81p a pint, against 24.8p from retailers.  The downward pressure on prices has meant that milk production is simply uneconomic on its own. The average price paid to the farmer is 21p per litre.  The average cost of production is 27p.

So when I visited our local dairy farmer I was expecting a catalogue of woes, and predictions of imminent demise.  But not a bit of it, they’re busy expanding their animals along with their product range. The Manfords have been running a dairy herd at Hinxden Farm for eighty-five years.  Now they have two.  Holsteins and Guernseys.  250 cows in milk and another 150 younger stock waiting to be put into calf. The Holsteins are the more productive, each giving an average of 9000 litres a year, while the Guernsey’s come in at around 6000 litres – though many think it’s a creamier, tastier product.

The point is that they are only losing money on about half of their production.  That half they sell to a wholesaler.  Milk taken away by tanker from any dairy farm will be mixed with produce from a number of other herds. It may sit around for several days before it gets to the supermarket shelf.  And prior to that it will have been homogenised. A process where the fat droplets are broken down under pressure so the cream doesn’t separate.  But some worry that smaller fat molecules bypass the digestive system and instead are absorbed into the bloodstream.

The remainder of the Manfords’ milk has a rather different story.  It is simply pasteurised – heat treated - and then bottled immediately.  It leaves the farm within 24 hours and is delivered to local shops, schools and homes straight away.  The Channel Island brand comes from the Guernsey’s alone. Then there are three types of cream, two cheeses and a clutch of different yoghurts.  It’s quite labour intensive with 14 employees including drivers for the four vans that do the milk rounds.  And, naturally, it’s a bit more expensive, averaging 68p a pint delivered.  But Dee Manford, who’s married to one of the three Hinxden Dairy partners, says that people are becoming increasingly aware of what they are eating and are prepared to pay a premium for better, fresher products. “We have happy cows.  And if they’re happy and well fed and well cared for, they produce better milk”.

Now you may think this is bunkum.  How can you tell a happy cow from an unhappy one?  Well, all I can say is that, walking round the farm, it’s hard to avoid the impression that they are pretty content.  It’s too wet for them to be turned out to pasture so they’re still in roomy cattle sheds or wandering freely around the yard munching silage.  And they keep coming up to nuzzle or lick your hand.  There’s a nursery where the young calves are raised with nanny caring for both black and white or tan-brown wards.

Dee would say the results speak for themselves.  At the International Dairy Festival in Cheshire, their Guernsey Whole Milk won first prize and their Holstein Whole milk took second.  Then at the recent ‘Taste of Kent’ awards their Channel Islands (Guernsey) cream won the Dairy section.

So the point of this story is that it’s really rather nice to be able to report something positive in farming and to see a small business buck the trend and find a niche that enables them not just to survive but grow. The herd started with 5 cows on 35 acres. Now they’re expanding beyond 400 cattle, with more than 700 acres available.  Nationally we have a million fewer dairy cows than we did 20 years ago – a 27% reduction.

Mind you it’s hard work. At Hinxden they milk at 4.00 am and 3.00 pm 365 days a year.  Dee says she sometimes finishes calving around 1.00 am, just in time to greet the early shift arriving to prepare the milking parlour.  Such discomforts are quite clearly compensated by the huge pride in their achievement – and in the quality of their product.

ends

Alice Down the Pot-hole

T of TW March 2016

Alice in Wonderland World of Pot-holed Roads

By Kent Barker

The answer that came back over and over again was simply “there is no money for it”.  It didn’t much matter what the question was.  The response was the same.  We’re sitting over coffee in the newly refurbished Village Shop and Café - four members of my parish council’s Highways Committee and three people from Kent County Council’s Roads and Travel Department, two whom are officers and the third a senior elected member.

Now the appalling state of the highways around here is of considerable interest to many.  In fact ‘interest’ is hardly the right word.  Even ‘incandescent fury’ might not be strong enough.  Few can remember when any road was fully re-surfaced.  Patched yes, but actually planning off the top tarmac and relaying a whole new surface? Well it simply doesn’t happen any more.  Hasn’t done so for years.  And each winter the pot-holes get bigger, and after enough people have broken wheels or springs and have inundated the council with complaints, then a team may come along with some lose ‘blackstuff’ on the back of a lorry and chuck it in the hole and flatten it in a desultory sort of way.  Sure it evens things out for a bit.  But then the telephone people or the water people turn up and dig a trench and don’t fill it in properly, or a succession of those huge ‘Chelsea tractor’ 4x4s churn it up, or the frost gets to it and, before you know it, you are not just back where you started, but worse off even than that. And just don’t get me started on what it’s like for cyclists on the national bicycle ‘route’ that runs through the parish.  We used to have a joke when we were doing our cycling proficiency at school, someone showing off would say ‘look no hands’ and someone else would reply: ‘look no teeth’.  Well on our designated cycle routes the pot-holes are so big that it would be more a question of “look no bike … or rider”.

So we invited the people with responsibility for our roads at KCC to come and see for themselves just how bad it was.  We hired a mini-bus and took them on a tour, but it didn’t begin very propitiously.  As our vehicle was weaving around the holes and bucking over the sunken camber like a demented bronco, the main man from the County Council could be heard to say “It’s much worse round where I live.” 

Anyway, having demonstrated as best we could the deplorable situation and demanded “something must be done”, the County Councillor began his mantra of “there is no money for it”. The roads in the county had not been properly maintained for years, and it was estimated that it would require £230 million to bring Kent’s highways up to ’standard’.  So it’s simply not going to be done because “there’s no money for it”.  County Hall tells him to fill in pot-holes, ignore minor roads and concentrate on the main roads. 

Isn’t that, we asked, a bit unfair on areas like ours where there are loads of minor and almost no major roads? Ah well, he explained, it’s all down to central government funding.  Basically the Shire counties have been ‘screwed’ by central government. Whitehall recently changed the rules and now we get money depending on how well we maintain our ‘assets’.  Main roads are classed as assets, minor ones are not. Put simply, the more you maintain your assets the more money you get to maintain them. We stand to lose £13 million if we don’t keep them up to scratch.

Sorry, did we hear right? If the roads are well maintained, you get more money to maintain them, which you don’t really need because they are well maintained. BUT, if they are poorly maintained because you can’t afford the maintenance, you LOOSE the money you really need to carry out that maintenance.  Yep, that makes a lot of sense.  And who determines if they are well maintained or not.  Ah, that will be the Country Council itself.  It ‘self-judges’ its own performance, and then is judged on the self-judging!

By now the collective heads of the parish councillors are spinning.  Perhaps we’ve fallen down one of our own potholes and emerged, Alice like, in some un-wonderland where big is small and less is more. 

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing.”

On that basis, substituting road repair for tea, we should really be quite pleased.  We can hardly be any worse off than we are.

ends.

Republican or Monarchist

TofTW Feb 2016

The Royal Conundrum

By Kent Barker

The invitation, when it arrived, posed something of a dilemma.

Of course I’m delighted to see our new batch of Housing Association homes completed and ready for occupation.  It’s been several years since we found the land for them. A village trust administered by the Parish Council owned a field that had been let out for grazing.  In an ideal world it would have remained for agriculture, but affordable housing is urgently needed and we felt the proposal for three homes and a couple of flats was a reasonable one.  Not all the nearby residents agreed and there was a stormy public meeting at which several vented their spleen.

Anyway, here we are with the houses built and just some landscaping to do before the grand opening ceremony.  I’m not quite sure why there needs to be a grand opening ceremony but the Housing Association wants one, and so sent out invitations to village worthies and to me as a parish councillor.  As a local politician – albeit on the very bottom rung of the administrative ladder – I feel it’s good to attend these sort of gatherings whenever possible, so I was about accept when I noticed who was to be the guest of honour. It was the Housing Association’s patron, the Princess Royal, or as I remember her, Princess Anne.

A quick check shows that the first Princess Royal in Britain was Maria, daughter of Charles I and his French wife Henrietta Maria, who wanted to import the Gallic custom of calling their eldest daughter ‘Madame Royale’.  Though perhaps they felt that title suffered in translation and sounded, to English ears, a tad too close to the keeper of a bawdy house. Though I suppose the monarchical title might have provided some fig-leaf of respectability.

Anyway, I fear we are diverting down dangerous by-ways here.  The point is, or was, whether I should attend a function at which a member of the royal family was to be present.

Let me make it clear, I have nothing against any of them personally. It’s the institution I have a problem with.  Put me on the rack (and expressing such views in times gone by might well have resulted in me being put on a rack) I would probably admit pretty quickly that I was, at heart, a republican. Actually, coming to think about it, I’d admit to almost anything in the face of even the most gentle torture.  Personally I just can’t see the point of submitting to the pain.  So beware, any friends or relatives, if I’m carted off to the torture chamber, head for the hills because I am most unlikely to keep your secrets.

But back to the question of whether, in the 21^st century, it’s in any way acceptable for a head of state to hold the post solely because they happen to have been born into the aristocracy?  We in Britain pride ourselves on being a bastion of democracy. We characterise the Westminster model as the “mother of parliaments”. We look round the world and lecture others on the need for free elections and decry one-party states or dictatorships. And yet … our upper chamber in parliament is wholly UN-elected, likewise our constitutional head of state. 

Now, if we ignore a few peccadillos of her children or grandchildren, I’ll own that the current Queen has done a pretty decent job.  And it’s not a job I’d take on for all her money.  But on one level it’s her wealth that is part of the problem.  How can you persuade Google or Starbucks, or even the bloke next door, to pay their taxes if your head of state only does so on a voluntary basis, and sometimes not at all when it comes to inheritance tax? Ok, I know all the arguments about the value of the Monarchy to our tourist income but surely there’s a principle at stake here isn’t there?

So by now you should be asking: ‘is he going to put his principles before the chance of hobnobbing with the Princess?’  Well as I said it’s a dilemma. I’ve met Princess Anne before, when I was a junior reporter in local radio in the North East at a Riding for the Disabled charity event.  I’ve even met the Queen.  Well, when I say met, she passed by me in a reception line at a gala theatrical first night to which, as a teenager, I’d gone with my father.  I had no idea she’d be there and recall being embarrassed I’d failed to polish my shoes.  I doubt she noticed.

Eventually I decided to accept the invite on your behalf.  I’ll be your eyes and ears and tell you all about it in a future column. You may call it a cop-out. I justify it as journalism! 

ends

Pettifogging Restrictions

TofTW Feb 2016

Pettifogging Restrictions open Museum of Medicine

By Kent Barker

I stumbled across a most extraordinary collection the other day.

It started while rifling through some folders of old press cuttings about my village.  I have sort of volunteered to produce a monthly page from these archives for our Benenden Magazine.  What, I wondered, was going on a hundred years ago?  For one thing they were in the middle of the “Great War”.  Well, that’s how it was known at the time and, indeed, up until the late 1930s when the prospect of another ‘great’ war was looming.  But the use of the adjective is instructive because it seems it didn’t just refer to the scale of the conflict, but also to its moral righteousness.  To quote historian Seán Lang: “The Allies believed they were fighting against an evil militarism that had taken hold in Germany. 'Great War' carried echoes of Armageddon, the biblical Great Battle of Good and Evil to be fought at the end of Time.” Well, whatever.  But there’s little doubt that it had a massive effect on the lives of the people round here. Quite apart from those who were killed or wounded, many locals, usually women, were volunteering for the VAD - Voluntary Aid Detachment - a branch of the Red Cross providing nursing services at field hospitals here and abroad.

Anyway,  the press cutting was a letter to the editor of the local paper.  Well, when I say letter, it was really more of a rant about another letter writer: “His remarks … savour of a mean pettifogging and dog-in-the-manger spirit … simply exposing deplorable ignorance … must have forgotten and forsaken his patriotism.” 

And what were the two correspondents so exercised about – it was DORA. No, not some local lass they were competing over, but the Defence of the Realm Act, passed in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war, containing some extraordinary provisions. These included cutting pub-opening hours, watering down beer and prohibiting the buying of rounds. Other precautions might seem more prudent, such as outlawing talk of naval or military matters in public places, the use of invisible ink when writing abroad, or buying binoculars. But by far the most contentious, it seems, was the restriction preventing any bright light from being seen outside. This was clearly the forerunner of the blackout in WW2.

It would appear that the first letter writer was complaining about light being emitted from the Benenden Sanatorium – a TB hospital to the north of our village which had been commandeered for troops returning from the front with consumption.  Sadly we don’t know exactly what he said, but ‘A Patient’ at the hospital was severely unimpressed: “Anyone who may visit the sanatorium after dark will only see the place plunged in perennial darkness but for a glimmer of light here and there in the cubicles of bed-ridden patients…” he responds. “If even the modicum of light which the Defence of the Real Act permits be denied to the institution, a patient having a sudden hemorrhage will be unattended with perhaps fatal result … to attempt to deny those who have gone out, and fought, and contracted a serious disease, the little privilege the lighting regulations permit, he must have forsaken his patriotism.”

            So I called the Sanatorium, now known as The Benenden Hospital, and asked if they had any photographs from a hundred years ago.  Yes, came the reply, albums full of them.  Come along to the museum and have a look.  A Museum? Here in our midst? How exciting.  Actually I anticipated just a few dog-eared pictures and a couple of bits of redundant equipment - so what a delight when the door was unlocked and I was ushered in.  Three large rooms were filled with imaginatively mounted displays charting the progress of not just the Sanatorium itself, but the history of medicine throughout the past century.  It really was a little gem.  Sadly the curator behind the project had retired and moved away so they are now looking for a new archivist.  In the meantime no one quite knows what anything is or where it’s kept. I did manage to find a photograph of the staff at the Sanatorium during WW1 - Matrons with starched white uniforms and medical staff in dark suits and Eaton collars.  But behind them stood three rows of young men more informally attired.  Could these have been ambulant soldier-patients in civvies? Could one even have been our epistolarian?

            I imagined him fulminating at the other privations caused by DORA.  What!!! Beer watered down? Pubs closing early, and the good people of Benenden prohibited from buying a round? Even for returning servicemen.  And it’s for this we’ve served King and Country and survived Armageddon. It’s those politico chappies up in London who display the real mean, pettifogging and dog-in-the-manger spirit!

ends

A singularly Cerebral Man

 T of TW Feb 2016

Passing of a Singularly Cerebral Architect     

By Kent Barker

Whenever he came back to England, Geoff would always be sure to visit our house, driven down to the country by his long-suffering wife June.  Actually I don’t think she was that long-suffering, it’s just that she often complained he’d never learned to drive and so, throughout their 65 years marriage, and the raising of four children, she’d been the family chauffeur. Mind you I very much doubt if she would ever have dared get into a car with Geoff at the wheel.  His cerebral mind would never have stooped to such mundane things as gear changes or traffic lights or, indeed, other road users.

Geoff’s association with the place I now live began immediately after the war when my father invited him home to meet his parents.  The two had been war buddies in a decidedly eccentric theatrical troupe known as the ‘’Balmorals’.  This was the army’s answer to ENSA which, after D-Day, toured newly liberated France, Belgium and finally Germany with shows for the front-line soldiers mounted in barns and derelict theaters.

Geoff had been recruited rather late into this band of brothers as a scenery painter – somewhat less glamorous, if decidedly safer, than his role as a war artist during the Normandy beach landings.  Anyway he and my father began a friendship which lasted half a century and brought our two families into close, if irregular proximity.

After the war Geoff qualified as an architect, married June, and went off to to America, first to Harvard and then to Chicago where he was employed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, pioneers of the modern "glass box" skyscraper. Returning to England in 1954 this experience proved bankable and he was commissioned to design a modernistic headquarters for the fabric firm Sanderson. 

On one of his last visits to London Geoff could be found in the courtyard garden of this Berners Street listed building, recently remodeled as a swanky boutique hotel.  With flowing silver locks and full beard he held court reminiscing about the emerging pop-art movement in post-war Britain. He’d been part of the Independent Group of artists and designers who had staged a seminal exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956, questioning the tenets of traditional and modern art.

Before long he and June and the four children departed for the States again.  Geoff had a job teaching architecture at the University of New Mexico, but it was really just a cover for the major project he’d embarked on. He’d already met Charles and Ray Eames in London, and been transfixed by their iconoclastic approach to modern architecture.  Geoff had written about them and their extraordinary Santa Monica house in the Architectural Review.  Now he decided nothing less than a full book about their designs and philosophy would do.  And thus began perhaps the longest gestation of any work of non-fiction known to mankind.

Part of the problem was that New Mexico was rather too far from Southern California for the non-driving Geoff to visit and interview his subjects.  Even moving the family to San Louis Obispo on the Pacific Coast didn’t help much. As professor of Architecture at Cal Poly there were lectures to prepare and faculty parties to attend, and local wine to be drunk. And the deeper Geoff got into his research the more difficulty he seemed to have explaining it.  Certainly on my visits to him in California, or his to me in Kent, I found myself struggling to grapple with his concept of the Eames’ “duelist strategy of treating structure and decoration … as two ideas in disagreement with each other… becoming a paradigm for a controlled dichotomy”.

But Geoffery was clearly lapping it up and soon gave up teaching to devote himself full time to his magnus opus.  June later complained that he never worked again nor contributed any income to the family funds.  This was not entirely true because, along with her and their two sons, Geoff started designing a series of upmarket houses in the Santa Barbra area that became known as the Holroyd Houses.  Well, it is possible that June did the bulk of the draftsmanship while Geoff theoreticized or conceptualized on Hispanic/Mediterranean  architectural style, but at least he still contributed something.

Recently the local Santa Barbra museum honored him with an exhibition recreating his 1956 ‘This Was Tomorrow’ exhibit known as ‘Group 12’ and then, last year, he suddenly announced that after almost exactly fifty years his book on the Eameses was finished.  It was not a good career move. He died at the end of last month aged 92.

Geoff had a singular physical characteristic.  Cut onions never made him cry.  I’ll always remember him madly chopping away in my kitchen whenever he visited.  It’s a very great sadness he won’t do so again.

ends

Verging on the Hazardous

 T of TW Feb 2016

Row over Responsibility for Rutted Lanes

By Kent Barker

I got my ear bent by a local farmer the other day.  “That letter you published in the village magazine – bit unfair.  It’s not our fault.  Anyway we were here first.”

After pointing out that I’m not responsible for what the magazine publishes, I tried to disentangle what had so irked him.  The letter was, I thought, relatively mild and quite well argued.  It expressed concern about farm vehicles damaging verges and drains along the narrow lanes that proliferate round here. “These vehicles are getting larger in some cases they are as wide as the whole lane making passing virtually impossible.  This is having a detrimental effect on the sides of the lanes … causing deep trenches.”

It’s certainly true that, in the extraordinarily wet weather we’ve had this winter, verges have been badly chewed up.  Part of the problem is that there are no official lay-bys or passing places, so if you meet another vehicle you have little option but to pull over onto the side and pray that you won’t get get stuck in the mud.  Otherwise it’s a long reverse, possibly up hill and round a bend or two.

So you can see the point. Harassed home owners, trying to make the station on time for their daily commute, or scurrying late for the school run, do perhaps have a legitimate gripe about large slow-moving tractors and trailers clogging up ‘their’ lanes.

But, as the farmer pointed out, there is another perspective. How did the lanes come to exist in the first place?  Round here in the Weald they generally started as drovers’ routes. Anglo-Saxon settlers imported ‘transhumance’ - the seasonal herding of stock from one area to another. As their stock was mainly pigs, they created swine pastures in woodland clearings – known as ‘dens’ - hence Benenden and Rolvenden etc.  By Norman times surrounding woods had been enclosed by manorial lords or ‘assarted’ – cleared, and the countryside we’d recognise today began to be created. But the tracks remained, linking the dens, some of which turned into settlements while others became outlying farms. And it remained thus for a thousand years.  But then, less than a century ago, the internal combustion engine changed it all.  Suddenly it was practical for people with no links to faming to live in isolated rural homes.  And along with their cars came macadamized road surfaces.

So perhaps our letter writer should accept that the lanes she is so concerned about are only there because of farming. As, in all likelihood, is her house.  And the only reason the rural countryside, which presumably drew her there in the first place, remains as it does is because of farming.  And farming is a business.  Which has always needed to transport goods.  Other business may be able to re-locate to specially designed industrial parks near main roads.  Farmers can’t.  If you have a dairy farm down a narrow lane, you have – at the very minimum - to get cattle feed in and milk out, along that lane.

But surely our correspondent has a point about the size of modern farm vehicles?  Well yes and no.  A modern tractor trailer can be up to almost 25 tonnes.  A trailer behind an old fashioned grey Fergie or Fordson Major was likely to be about 3.5 tonnes.  So to transport 24 tonnes of silage you could have one trip by the modern rig, or seven by the old one.  That’s seven extra journeys, probably at considerably lower speeds, clogging up your lanes. 

Even seven journeys by a lighter vehicle would cause less damage to the road than one much heavier one, wouldn’t they?   Not necessarily.  Modern agricultural vehicles are fitted with those huge balloon tyres which spread the weight over a greater surface.  Farmers use them because they don’t crush or compact the soil in their fields as much as standard tyres.  So it’s possible that they cause less damage to verges than earlier tractors and that the ‘deep trenches’ are not from farm vehicles, but cars - or delivery vans which have dramatically increased in the Amazon/eBay/Ocardo era of home shopping.

Farmers themselves complain of the domestication of the lanes.  One homeowner has a wide verge between his boundary hedge and the road which he kindly mows, even though it doesn’t belong to him.  However, to prevent incursion from vehicles, he’s put in a line of posts along the kerb.  It means it can’t be used as a passing place and even makes it difficult for tractors to turn at the junction there. 

Perhaps the lesson is that all should recognise the lanes have to be shared by residents, and farmers and businesses alike.  And that depredations need to be reported to, and repaired by, the county council.  But getting any action from them is another story!

ends.

A Man of Zen-like Calm in the Mirror

T of TW Feb 2016

Quality of Mercy Strained in my Village

By Kent Barker

Oh, the joy of being on the parish council! 

I’d take a small wager that’s not a phrase you’re likely to hear too often. But it does have its moments. Such as when the result of the complaint against me came through recently. 

Now, when I look in the mirror, I see a man of Zen-like calm; patience that would impress a saint, and the reasonableness of a philosopher. Extraordinarily, though, in my more than three score years, I’ve come to realise that’s not how everyone else sees me. ‘Impetuous’ is a description I’ve heard used, along with ‘rash’, ‘imprudent’ and even ‘precipitous’.

Some might say it’s a problem of opening the mouth before engaging the brain. I say it’s not hesitating to speak as I find. Anyway, the results have, on occasion, been that others are offended by my straight talking.

An example occurred a few months back at a planning committee meeting which I chair. The proposal before us—for an anaerobic digester—was from a farmer and fellow councillor.  While maintaining an open mind about the individual proposal, in general my view was that AD plants are good things. They take farmyard waste and some specially grown crops and store them in an airless chamber while bacteria get to work. Within days, the process produces heat and biogas (methane and CO2) which is used to make electricity or, in bigger plants, refined to become biomethane—a renewable natural gas.  The by-product is digestate—an excellent, inert and odourless fertiliser.

It’s an almost magical process that saves burning fossil fuels; reduces greenhouse gases, and helps combat climate change. But a surprising number of people around my village oppose it. Vigorously. So vigorously in fact that they set up a protest group and sent out an anonymous leaflet.

Now I greatly dislike anonymity. I believe that if you want to publish a view you should be prepared to put your name to it. But I dislike anonymous leaflets even more if they contain gross inaccuracies, or criticise (or even libel) named individuals. And I particularly dislike them if they are put through the doors of fellow planning committee members on the eve of a decision.

So I said so. In no uncertain terms. From the chair at the start of the planning meeting. In fact I described “hiding behind a cloak of anonymity” as the “last refuge of a scoundrel”, and said the leaflet in question was “a reprehensible attempt to exert improper influence on the democratic process”.

Well, come on! That’s not SO unreasonable is it? A trifle intemperate, yes, but not utterly outrageous surely? But the author of the leaflet seemed to think it was. He identified himself and made a formal complaint to the relevant authority accusing me of attempting to “discredit, intimidate and bully” those opposed to the planning application.

Well, I won’t weary you with the details of drafting my defence or the long wait for adjudication but, when it came, it found pretty comprehensively in my favour. First, there had to be some identifiable person to bully or intimidate and, since the leaflet was anonymous, that couldn’t be the case. (Oh wise judge!). Secondly, the delivery of literature to the committee did not follow the correct procedure and WAS an attempt to influence them. (Noble judge!).

However, Portia-like, the finding did criticise me for use of the word “scoundrel” and a threat to report matters to the police as being “inadvisable and likely to inflame the situation”. With hindsight, I entirely accept that and, at the next meeting, I apologised to the full parish council.  But should I also apologise to the complainant? Had the finding gone against me, I would certainly have done so—and probably had to consider my position as chair of the committee.  But perhaps he might apologise to me for bringing the unfounded complaint in the first place? The thing is that ours is a small village and we were likely to bump into each other sooner or later. Which is exactly what happened a few Saturdays later at our club tennis session. He arrived after me and studiously avoided my gaze.  But then we were paired against each other in a doubles match and so had, at least, to acknowledge each other’s existence—even if only to shout the score.

Actually, I think it passed off reasonably amicably. I doubt if either is likely to invite the other to a birthday party, but I feel honour is squared.

Or I did until another anonymous leaflet was circulated with yet more falsehoods about the digester. I can have no idea whether it’s from the same source. But I think I’d better be a bit more temperate in any public statements I make about it!

ends.

Caravaning in Calais

Times of TW February 2016

Gallic Dreams of Boats and Caravans

By Kent Barker

If anything my mate Mike is even more of a hoarder than I am.  But where it’s my house I fill with superfluous possessions, he fills his garden.  To such an extent that there are times when it almost resembles Steptoe and Son’s yard, albeit in the depths of the country rather than Shepherd’s Bush.

It’s not that the junk isn’t picturesque.  In a vaguely post-modern way it could be considered an evolving work of art.  Because - and this is the thing – where I only import stuff into my abode he, from time to time, exports it too.  Thus, one day, the old Morris Minor, that sat rusting under a tree for decades, disappeared.  Trampolines and handcarts, and a myriad of instruments of a vaguely agricultural variety are there one year and gone the next.

Mike is a member of the tennis club and our Ukelele band (both activities conduced with – it occurred to me the other day - a stringed instrument) and a co-conspirator in running the bar at our little music festival. So he knew exactly where to locate a number of beer barrels in my field when he found he suddenly needed some.

Why, I hope you are about to ask, did he unexpectedly need them?  Well, for his boat, of course. Mike has salt in his blood. He grew up around the estuaries and inlets of Bosham and Chichester and now, landlocked in Kent, he  pines for open water. There is generally at least one dinghy and/or canoe among the garden attractions awaiting restoration or disposal.  And I seem to recall a session in the pub when, after a few beers, we fell to discussing the idea of taking a boat through France, down to the Mediterranean and then up the Canal Du Midi.  Visions of long languid days pottering along Gallic waterways, pausing only for a riverine repast or to take on another case of wine – or both - helped pass the long winter evening pleasantly enough.

I pretty much forgot about the conversation, but not Mike.  A week or so later he announced that he’d been round to my place to collect the beer barrels. For what, I enquired, did he need a dozen aluminum kegs?  To support the boat in the back garden, he replied as if everyone might be expected to have such a requirement.  It appeared that, walking along the beach near a childhood haunt, he’d come across this ancient clinker-built cabin cruiser and, dreaming of France, parted with good money for it.  The fact that it was totally unseaworthy was of no consequence – Mike is a carpenter so relished the idea of restoration …. once he‘d got it home … a mere 70 or 80 miles .... without a trailer.  But our friend Simon – for whom no project is too ludicrous – had an ancient car trailer and was inveigled into driving to Chichester, loading the boat onto it and returning to Kent.  No matter that the craft was about twice the length of the trailer and probably three times over its legal weight.

How they got this massive craft off the trailer and onto the beer barrels I’ll never know.  But there it’s sat, in pride of place, in Mike’s junk yard (sorry – garden) for the best part of three years, completely untouched, let alone restored.

In the meantime he acquired a caravan.  I think the idea was that he would cut the top off and use the base as foundation for a shepherd’s hut.  Why he wanted a shepherd’s hut I’m not sure, but they are quite desirable, though not generally if mounted on caravan bases.

So this vehicle joined the pile of projects in the yard, happily rotting away until a friend’s son, Phil, put out a call for a caravan to take down to Calais for the refugees in the ‘jungle’. Here was a win-win situation. Mike could get rid of it and do some good.  But how to get the rusting hulk out of the garden?  Send for Simon and his Range Rover. He looked it over and opined that it was unlikely to make it to the end of the road without falling apart, let alone to the Dover ferry.  But Phil was undaunted and Simon towed it gingerly from its resting place to Phil’s dad’s house, where the green algae was sluiced off and much of the mold removed from the interior.  Then a man from the charity Caravans for Calais turned up, put two heavy duty ratchet straps around it to keep body and chassis together and, without further ado, drove it off to France.  Where, presumably, it’s now housing some deserving refugee family.  Meanwhile we in the pub await, with baited breath, news of the next addition to Mike’s yard.

ends

TE Lawrence - the familly connection

TofTW January 2016

           

The Lawrence of Arabia Dilemma

By Kent Barker

An extraordinary package arrived in my letter box the other day.  It was from my cousin in London.  Now Adam is a big, jolly fellow.  Well, jolly enough when not talking about his work.  He’s an archive film researcher for a major TV channel.  It’s an important job.  When a reporter needs some historical footage – say shots of World War 1 campaigns in the Middle East - then they call on Adam.  And his skill is knowing exactly where, in the massive vaults, the material is and then getting it into the cutting room in no time flat.

            The trouble is that corporatization left Adam and his fellow picture librarians with less and less scope for individual flair.  And so whenever he comes down to the country to visit, he moans about how awful and soulless the new structure is.

            Each year he’d turn up for the little festival we hold in my field and I’d offer him a bed in the house, but he always preferred to sleep in his car.  We’d rendezvous round the bar and talk about our cousins and the family history he was compiling.

            Which brings us back to the mysterious package.  Now, I knew that my maternal grandfather had been an architect and had worked with Edward Lutyens on designs for the Midland Bank.  But I was eleven when he died so didn’t know much more about him.  In fact my main memory was of one Christmas when I’d been given a Hornby train set and “Pop” as we called him got all teary-eyed over the model steam locomotive. “They don’t make them like that any more,” I remember him saying over and over again as he held it up to the light.  Later I overheard my parents discussing how drunk he’d been.  And I thought he was just admiring my new present!

            Anyway back in 1916  “Pop” aka Laurence Mussel Gotch, had joined the Royal Engineers and been posted to Cairo, where he was seconded to the Intelligence Corps in the map room of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. There he recalls coming across “a little man, sitting behind the map office door … squatting in an Arab dress, silent for 15 or 20 minutes.”  This, as you may possibly have guessed, was T.E. Lawrence. 

Jump forward to 1920.  Capt. Gotch has been demobbed and is looking for employment.  An American writer and former war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, has been packing theatres and arenas with his extraordinarily popular lecture “With Allenby in Palestine” which is credited with brining international fame to ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.  Ah, thinks Capt. Gotch, if Thomas can do it so can I.  After all I served with T.E.L., while the Lowell fellow only interviewed him.

So grandfather gets up his own lecture, complete with lantern slides, and tours the country, apparently to some acclaim.  Not for him, sadly, the Royal Opera House or Madison Square Garden, but the Victoria Hall, Kettering was reportedly packed on the evening of March 2^nd.

In the family we vaguely knew that Pop had corresponded with T.E. Lawrence while he was preparing his talks, but cousin Adam has tracked down the letters themselves along with other archive material. Copies were in the package which he sent round to members of the family.  On 1^st June 1920 T.E.L. wrote:  Dear Gotch … if you are lecturing for your own living then I’ll help you … if you can make some money for yourself out of it in these unbuttoned times … the more you make, the merrier for you.”  Later he sent a letter with a hand-drawn map detailing his famous attack on Akaba - the Turkish-held port in Jordan, which threatened British forces in Palestine.

Apart from the half dozen letters, the archive also contains 30 pages of closely typed manuscript.  It appears that grandfather copied these from papers Lawrence loaned him which seem to have been from the first draft of a book he was writing entitled ‘Revolt in the Desert’.  But Lawrence destroyed the manuscript and then later rewrote and, in 1926, published the memoirs as ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’.

Now this may not be of much matter to you and me.  But to Lawrence experts, historians and museums the copies of Lawrence’s first draft and the letters would be fascinating.  And possibly valuable, especially in the US where there could be a ready market. 

So part of Adam’s package contained a note to we fellow cousins who own them, asking if we should put them up for sale or, alternatively, give them to the Bodleian in Oxford.  My immediate instinct was to donate them.  Now I’m not so sure. After all Lawrence’s himself said: “If you can make some money for yourself … the more you make, the merrier for you”!

ends.

Dirty Dogs and Cream Carpets

T of TW Jan 2016

Muddy Molting Dog Days

By Kent Barker

My poor pooch had a pretty rotten Christmas.  Well, Christmas day anyway.  She was barred from the house we were visiting for the festive lunch.  They’d apparently just had the carpets cleaned at considerable expense and so had banned muddy paws.  However it was noticeable that this injunction didn’t extend to their own dog!  He was allowed full reign of the house while Myrtle had to slum it in the conservatory alongside everyone’s muddy boots and damp coats.

Now, I do concede that dogs, and in particular my dog, are none too good at wiping their paws before bounding across cream-coloured carpets and,  occasionally, onto sofas.  It’s not their fault.  They just don’t see the point of a paw mat.  I mean the other day Myrtle sat down in the middle of a muddy puddle in the park just before we were due to visit friends.  She didn’t need to.  There were other perfectly good and much dryer and cleaner pieces of ground nearby.  But her mind was on the tennis ball.  And when there’s a ball or stick to chase all other thoughts just evaporate from that doggy brain.  Fellow hounds will come up to her to pass the time of day or, perhaps, wish her season’s greetings.  But she just ignores them completely.  But without a ball in her mouth or the prospect of one about to be thrown, she’ll be as sociable as the next dog, and dutifully allow all manner of canines to sniff round her nether regions and even accord them the same courtesy.  

I’ve long thought this method of greeting total strangers a bit … well, strange. Just imagine if it was comme il faut for we humans!  No, it really doesn’t bear thinking about too closely.  A handshake is generally OK – though you do sometimes wonder if the greeter is as assiduous at washing their hands as they should be.  And I’m all for a double-cheek kiss of an attractive member of the opposite sex but even that can get complicated.  Particularly in France.  There the triple kiss has become de rigeur particularly for close friends.  But how close?  And which cheek to start with?  I’m forever getting it wrong and nose-butting the person in front of me.  And should your lips actually caress the cheek in question or remain a millimeter apart?  And how well do you have to know the lady to give her a hug at the same time?  It’s all very difficult. 

There are still some people for whom a hello kiss means on the lips rather than on the cheek. My former mother-in-law was one such.  Now, it’s bad enough having to kiss you mother-in-law at all.   But to set off to peck her on the cheek in a chaste and affirming kind of way, only to find that she’s altered the trajectory of the move and planted a kiss full on your lips, is nothing less than disconcerting and can quite spoil the mood of the occasion.  And what about your father-in-law?  No. I’m not suggesting you go up and kiss him on the lips.  Not at all.  In fact I strongly advise against it.  But should you throw your arms round him and give him a manly hug?  I’d feel it was a nice gesture, but he might be of a generation where physical contact with a member of the same sex is likely to produce a reaction somewhere between panic and repulsion.  And anyway there’s the whole Freudian resentment thing about you sleeping with his daughter, which a clinch with him might only make worse. (Though letting him see you kissing his wife on the lips might not be best advised either!)

But back to carpets.  I’ve long wondered at the habit of some country folk in installing wall-to-wall, light beige or crisp cream carpets in their living area. Mud, particularly at this time of year, is just bound to get into the house and will, invariably, end up on the carpet.  Along with dog hairs. Now, Myrtle is black. She can’t help it.  She was born that way.  My house has brick or wooden floors so I simply don’t notice if she’s molting.  But take her to my partner’s place and within minutes her light-coloured carpet is just covered in dog hair.  And, being Sisal, it’s a nightmare to get off.  We’ve tried everything: vacuuming, brushing, sticky back tape, but none appear to work.  The only vaguely effective method seems to be shuffling over the surface with rubber-soled shoes.  That rolls the hair up into clumps which can more easily be collected.  But it’s a slow and laborious business. 

I deemed it prudent to bring over a large rug to cover the centre of her living-room for Christmas.  It won’t stop Myrtle molting, but it might disguise the results.

ends

Hopping along Abandond Tracks

T of TW Jan 2016

The Very Model of an Abandoned Railway

By Kent Barker

I was introduced, a while back, to a marvelous man who, for the sake of argument, we’ll call Simon.

He would, I guess, have been in his early-seventies. He lived in a tiny cottage down a track on the outskirts of Hawkhurst.  In its original incarnation his home would have been even smaller since it was built as two dwellings which were subsequently knocked together.  It meant there were two staircases, and the one leading to his office was extremely narrow, tortuously curvy, and with achingly low headroom.

This office was a sight to behold.  Simon is an architectural draftsman but the advent of CAD – computer aided design – had completely passed him by.  So what looked like a copy of every plan he’d ever drawn was rolled up and stored in the low-eved room.  Only a table in front of the dormer window was relatively free of old parchments – largely because it contained the plans he was currently working on, mounted on an old fashioned wooden drawing board with separate T-square. 

I’d asked Simon to draw me a couple of maps for the end papers of my book on 18^th century smuggling.  Since he refused to use either fax or scanner I had to visit him on a regular basis to monitor progress.  And a great treat it was to see an old-fashioned draftsman working just with pen and ink on tracing paper.  Though one did wonder at the efficiency of the process.  Architectural drawings on a computer would have taken a fraction of the time, and copies could be printed off or emailed, without having to drive into a nearby town to make a print from the original. But time, for Simon, seemed to be a relative concept, judging by the total lack of mod-cons in the house – including if I recall correctly an inside WC.

And so, I suppose, it should have been little surprise when, on one visit, he offered to show me the next room. If it was chilly in his office, next door was freezing.  And the sense of gloom was aided by a 40 watt overhead light bulb. But what filled the room was wondrous to behold.  It was an intricately detailed scale model of Hawkhurst railway station.  Now, before you say “I didn’t know Hawkhurst had a railway station”, well, it doesn’t. Anymore. Except in Simon’s top room.  The actual station closed in 1961 and the platform and track have been subsumed into an industrial park. Only the engine shed remains – now part of a commercial workshop.

I was reminded of Simon’s model when my son, back from uni for the seasonal break, came across a website detailing the remains of the ‘Hop Pickers line’ including Hawkhurst’s abandoned station and a completely preserved tunnel.  Alert readers may remember that Titus is an ardent explorer of disused buildings and derelict sites and a few months back I chronicled a trek he took me on to look at a former girls school, Lillesden Mansion.  So now of course we had to ‘find’ Hawkhurst station, Badger’s Oak tunnel and evidence of the abandoned line.

Oddly enough I’d already found part of it on one of the regular dog walks Myrtle and I do.  The footpath crosses a wide wooded strip between two fields which was the line of the disused railway. But I could never find traces of it where it should have bisected a road a little later.  Now the mystery was about to be resolved.

Armed with a torch, a map, and stout Wellies we abandoned the car at the side of the lane and set off through the woods.  Finally I could win the argument about maps and orienteering. Born in the digital age, Titus has never understood map-reading. What’s the point if you’ve got GPS on your phone, he demands.  Now I could show him the difference between a railway embankment and a cutting and explain why we couldn’t see the course of the line before it disappeared into the tunnel.  It’s just up ahead, slightly to the left I said.  And sure enough, as we crashed through the undergrowth there, down a steep slope, the entrance to the tunnel magically appeared exactly where I predicted. 

I have to admit it was pretty stunning.  Even after 122 years the arched brick-work is in excellent condition and still has those little passing places for maintenance crew to avoid passing trains.  It’s true the floor was extremely muddy, water dripped from the ceiling and it was desperately gloomy, but what a thing to come across in the middle of the countryside.  There are ongoing efforts to re-open parts of the Hop Pickers Line for leisure use, so the tunnel may be more widely visited in the future.

ends