A gentle plea ....

Courier Countryside Column for 24.1.14

Read all about it?

I went to check on sales of my smuggling book in Cranbrook recently, only to find the shop stocking it had closed down.  I called the bookshop in Rye to see if they needed more copies.  The phone was dead.  Every week another independent bookseller closes its doors.  There are now fewer than a thousand across the country.

A fellow author was decrying the death of local bookshops.  “There’s nothing like browsing”, he said.  “It’s an experience you just can’t get on Amazon.  And bookshops provide a focal point in rural areas, especially for children”.

A friend from Wadhurst told me the bookshop there only survives because staff work for nothing.  It seemed like an interesting model.  After all it works for charity shops. But when I phoned Barnetts the proprietor told me it wasn’t quite true.  “We did have a couple of volunteers in the past who were terrific”, he said.  “They were incredibly motivated because they were there for the joy of the job.  However now all our staff are paid, albeit on minimum wage”.

The economics, though, are daunting.  A hardback he gets from the wholesaler for £14.00 he retails for £18.99.  But the same book can be bought off Amazon for £9.00!  Once he even ordered a book from the online seller for a customer who offered him a small mark-up.  But even with a lot of local goodwill it’s not a model that’s sustainable.

Which makes it particularly hard for authors who have published their works themselves.  They’ve always relied on neighbourhood bookshops which, in turn, found that books on local topics by people living nearby sold relatively well.

My writer friend came up with an idea to persuade half a dozen local scribes to get together to market their books at special open days in local pubs or hotels.  If each author put in a couple of hours on the till it wouldn’t be too onerous. 

But my fear is that, without considerable publicity, no one would come.  I well remember doing a book signing at the Oxfam bookshop in Tunbridge Wells a year or so back.  The manager bought a copy out of sympathy, but I think that was my only sale in four hours.  And I’d dressed up in full smuggler costume too!

So a gentle plea; support your local bookshop and be kind to your local authors. They’re endangered species. 

Needling the Royals?

Courier Countryside Column for 17 January 2014

FIR AULD LANG SYNE?

One of the saddest sights at the start of the year is discarded Christmas trees.

In towns they pile up on street corners or in parks awaiting removal. In rural areas they are left out with the rubbish.

Without being overly sentimental, the tree that was lovingly bought, painstakingly decorated, and served as a centerpiece for the celebrations, nestling presents for excited children, is now chucked out with hardly a second thought. (Except, perhaps for the inconvenience of needles showering the carpet as the corpse is eased out of the door.)

What offends me is that that we’ve condemned these attractive trees to die just for a few short weeks of visual pleasure. Yes, I KNOW they probably wouldn’t have been grown in the first place unless there was the seasonal demand. And it all provides employment for nurserymen and wholesalers and retailers. But trees are meant to be outside. Why on earth do we want to cut them down in their prime and bring them indoors?

Apparently it’s all the fault of Prince Albert. In 1841, he brought a fir tree from Germany, decorated it in Windsor Castle and had illustrations of the Royal Family posing by it published in newspapers.

The original­ - and marginally more sensible - tradition was to decorate a tree growing outside in order to entice the tree spirits back to provide new growth in the spring.

So how did we get from that to today’s practice of condemning the tree to death by cutting it off at the stem and bringing it into the living room?

I suppose that’s my main gripe. ‘When I were a lad’, Christmas trees came with roots. I remember my dad replanting ours on Twelfth Night. The next year we’d troop down to the bottom of the garden and ceremoniously dig it up again. But commercial growers, realising the economic advantage of flogging us a new one at exorbitant prices each year, started to cut the roots too small to replant, or boiling them to death, before eventually selling them without roots at all.

A couple of weeks after Christmas I saw a woman taking a small tree out of her car. I jokingly suggested she’d got her seasons mixed up. “Oh, no”, she said. “I’m taking it to the allotment to replant.” So it can still be done. Next winter let’s try not to slaughter the innocents!

Wet, wet,wet.

Courier Countryside Column for 10 January 2014

The Floods that are Welcome to Some.

Just the other day I was thinking how beautiful our countryside is looking at the moment.  The sun, low in the sky even at midday, throws unusual shadows and provides luminosity unique to the time of year.  The leafless trees afford views and vistas through their skeleton branches entirely hidden the rest of the seasons, while themselves offering dramatic shapes silhouetted against the landscape.

It’s wonderful to see so many people out enjoying it. On one of our regular local walks along part of the High Weald Landscape Trail Myrtle and I often encounter no-one else at all.  But last Sunday there must have been 30 or 40 other walkers and assorted dogs doing the circuit.

However then the weather changes and, instead of joyful sunshine, there are looming clouds and sheeting rain to sting the eyes.

Trees are brought to life by high winds which force them to dance to their whistling tune and wave their high limbs in involuntary spasms. Sometimes an old boy cannot take the pace and falls to the ground uprooted.

Now only the hardiest dog walker is to be found out and about. But Myrtle seems oblivious to the weather and insists on her daily constitutional come what may.  So I, wax-coated, wellied, and hatted, venture forth.  After the initial shock of change from fireside warmth to damp chill, the elements themselves become the fun and the challenge.

Even at this time of year, if we pass a pond or stream, my hound will beg for a swim, proffering a stick and imploring me to throw it so she can paddle out for retrieval. Anthropomorphically, I worry about her catching a chill, but then consider that she is already so wet and bedraggled by the rain that a little more water will surely not harm her. I also calculate it might, with benefit, wash off some of the mud coating her fur.

As we squelch along paths, we watch rivers rise and burst their banks, turning low-lying fields into sheets of water. The same effect that makes homeowners so fearful generally pleases farmers. Floodplain and water meadows have long been prized. The waters bring nutrients to the soil, naturally making it more fertile. The Environment Agency even runs a partnership to monitor and manage floodplains. You can understand, though, that few of those inundated in Yalding will be joining.

I dreamed of Amimal freedom

Courier Countryside Column  3 January 2014

The Dream that Changed the Countryside Forever

I had a dream over Christmas.  Perhaps I snoozed off after a surfeit of port and pudding, but in my mind I was sure that in 2014 it all changed. For I had glimpsed a time-line stretching back to the Gladiators of ancient Rome killing lions for sport in the Coliseum. I watched bears being driven mad by dogs in Shakespeare’s London.  I saw other canines tearing each other to pieces as men wagered on the outcome.  I heard the sound of cockpits as gamecocks attacked each other with lethal spurs. I watched generations of scarlet clad huntsmen and women tallyho-ing across the countryside as hounds ripped apart foxes and children were smeared with the blood.  I saw skies full of pheasants falling to earth as lead pellets tore holes in their flesh.  I saw marksmen with rifles waiting in the darkness to put bullets between the eyes of stripy-faced badgers.

But then, in my dream, the scales fell from all our eyes.  As the New Year dawned, one by one we awoke to the realisation that we do not have the right to kill another species for sport, or fun, or in the name of a ‘cull’.  We had all come to understand these creatures were sentient and felt fear and pain and had moral rights too.  We saw that as history had progressed we had outlawed bear-baiting and cock-fighting because we rightly realised they were cruel.  We came to find it morally reprehensible to slaughter magnificent elephants for the ivory of their tusks. Or to shoot tigers for the sheer ‘sport’ of it until there was none left on the planet.

It wasn’t such a giant leap for us to extend the ban to badgers and pheasants and rabbits.  And even those in the Countryside Alliance celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Hunting Act by agreeing that hounding a wild animal to death with a pack of dogs provided no more enjoyable entertainment than a good ride out on a crisp winter’s day following the scent of a drag or trail.

And it all had an unexpected consequence. The RSPCA and its new radical chief executive became irrelevant. Eventually it lost its royal charter.  And just before I awoke I saw Her Majesty bestow it instead on another charity, which was known thenceforth as The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to  Children. A Happy New Year.

Where are all the new homes to go?

Courier Countryside Column  27^th December

With Housing Developments, Small  is beautiful

Everywhere you go people are talking about housing. Or rather the lack of it. And  here in the countryside we have a particular problem.

National statistics show we need a quarter of a million new homes a year just to meet the projected number of new households. Last year we started fewer than half that number.

In Kent we should be building some 10,000 houses a year to meet requirements. In our borough, Tunbridge Wells, that translates to about 500 new-builds. In my ward it’s around 30. 

Which doesn’t seem too bad.  Except that it means 30 new houses built EVERY year for the next 13 years. Nearly 400 brand new houses by 2026.  And the question, of course, is where on earth are they going to go?

All this provides the context in which we, on Parish Councils’ planning committees, watch applications for new homes going through the process.  To start with there are extraordinarily few of them.  But those that do come forward meet a double obstacle: the Borough planning authority and the power of the big developers for whom economies of scale (aka profits) mean favouring mass projects.

I know planners are constrained by national rules and regulations but at times I feel they instinctively reject rather than seek to support small projects. A while back we passed a proposal for a barn conversion.  It would have improved a dilapidated and unlovely structure and provided a new home on the edge of an existing hamlet.  The planning department turned it down as it would be “within the countryside” and “contrary to the spatial strategy” of the Borough. 

The trouble is that most new dwellings are immediately ruled out because the whole parish is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  But then so is Hawkhurst where plans to build 120 homes on entirely greenfield land are being appealed by the developer.  The Parish Council there believes that they could easily accommodate plenty of new-builds largely on brownfield land if they were dotted about the village.  No one wants an entire valley turned into a new housing estate.  Except the developers.  Who have considerable lobbying power.

So, we need new homes.  We prefer small-scale brownfield developments. But they are often – or even usually – turned down.  Instead we’re likely to end up with more fields concreted over. Which we don’t want. There’s something badly wrong with the system.