Cut off in my pr...

Countryside Column for 10 October

Hedge cutting cuts all communication

Regular readers of this column know I am ever calm in the face of adversity.  Seldom do I sound off over life’s little irritations. Equanimity is my watchword.  But this really is just too much to bear.

Deep in the country we struggle to achieve a level of communications that townsfolk take for granted.  There is, for instance, effectively no mobile signal where I live.  On any network. So I have a thing called a Femtocell.  This routes my mobile phone through my Broadband and provides a reasonable level of service as long as you are in the same room as the device. And as long as you have working Broadband.

I am about a mile and a half from the telephone exchange.  Old copper phone cables carry my Broadband down the lane on telegraph poles.  When it works it’s vaguely OK. But it often doesn’t work and it takes an inordinate time to fix.

Take last week when a farmer sliced through the phone cable with a hedge cutter – taking out the service to all in the valley.  Suddenly I have no phone, no internet, and virtually no mobile coverage. Eventually I find a spot in the garden where I can call the service provider. Sorry, says the recorded message, there’s a fault at the exchange.  Our engineers should have it restored within 96 hours. But that’s possibly four days incommunicado!

Two days pass.  Still no service. But an engineer’s van appears up the road. The nice man explains the problems of having to rejoin a hundred tiny severed cables.  But, ominously, says there’s no jobsheet for my address so the service wont be restored even when the cable’s reconnected. I have to report the fault. But I can’t report the fault as I have no phone and no mobile service.  I can use a public phonebox.  A What?! Oh, yes, one of those red things we used to have in the village.

Eventually I find a spot in the garden where the mobile works for long enough to complete the 20 minute wait (at 14p a minute) to get through to report the fault.  The nice lady with the Indian accent tells me it could take another 96 hours for the phone-line to be fixed!!!  And in the meantime I might experience some reduction in my broadband speed.  “Reduction,” I scream down the iPhone: “What *±@£$%^&* broadband?!!”

Not mush-room inside

Countryside column for 3^rd October

Autumn foraging can cut food bills

A friend of mine rather surprised the dinner table by discussing squirrels. Well, not just squirrels per se, but eating them.  And not just how to eat them, but the fact that the last one he’d tried had been rather tough.

As I dare say we were revelling in some really riveting subject such as the Great British Bakeoff at the time, his interjection went almost unnoticed. I think I may have made some comment such as “what do you expect if you choose to chomph on little Squirrel Nutkin?” or I might have paraphrased Malcolm Bradbury’s novel and said, sotto voce, “eating squirrels is wrong”.

It’s a difficult one isn’t it? You don’t want to offend him. Just because I don’t fancy squirrel, there really is not a great deal of reason why he shouldn’t consider it a delicacy. The Romans apparently just loved a roast dormouse – though I’d have thought there would be more fur than meat on the little critters. In some parts locusts are highly prized though I doubt if I’ll acquire the taste.

What I didn’t ask my dinner table companion was where he’d got his squirrel from. Catching one could be quite tricky.  Certainly Myrtle – who’s rather better adapted for the purpose – can only chase them to the foot of a tree and stand there barking while they make good their escape. 

Perhaps it was roadkill. This seems to me to be a particularly gruesome way of sourcing your protein. I know butchers are expensive but, even so, making do with the leavings of crows and other scavengers does strike me as a bit desperate. And gutting and cleaning the corpse would put me off food for the rest of the day.

Foraging, though, seems to be the new middle-class activity. This time of year no self-respecting cook round here would actually BUY apples or blackberries.  And one narrow lane I know borders a garden with a prolific vine. Picking grapes that overhang the footpath is one thing, but some people’s long-arm tactics of hooking bunches from deep inside the owner’s land seems a bit cheeky.

Personally I’ve stopped collecting wild mushrooms since that really bad tummy-ache of a couple of years back, but many friends still do. Often, though, they end up on the compost once photos have failed to distinguish them from the really poisonous varieties. Oh dear, back to the supermarket.

Busting for a service

Countryside Column for 26 September

Cut the Surveys not the buses!

Are you one of the 22%?

Or, put another way, the one in five people round here that doesn’t have access to a car?

If you are, you may well have noticed that bus services are under threat as councils seek deeper and deeper cuts.

In East Sussex they are planning to slash 75% of their spending on buses.

This would include severe reductions in the frequency of services and abolishing altogether the Sunday route from Tunbridge Wells to Hastings and, more relevant to my family, Hawkhurst to Hastings.  This they justify by saying: “Many people have a choice of transport options - including car, motorbike/moped, taxi or train as well as more active modes such as cycling and walking.”

That may be true.  MANY people might. But as discussed the one in five carless don’t, and I hardly think walking or taking a taxi over those distances is much of an option.

But then as as the Council says: “Almost 100,000 residents of East Sussex live in villages or more rural areas, and almost 60,000 of these currently have no access by bus to a key centre at off peak times.”

So that’s OK then!  But they follow this up with the utterly astounding conclusion that:  “It could not reasonably be said that there was a strong ‘need’ for a bus service in these villages and hamlets”.  So, a service doesn’t exist and you conclude that there is no strong need for it!  Quite extraordinary.

Anyway, surely we should be promoting public transport and dissuading cars from clogging up the roads and polluting the atmosphere?  And if that means publically financing it from taxes, so be it.

But actually a large part of my concern is reserved for the last page of East Sussex County Council’s consultation survey.  Having asked me for my views on the cuts they then seek a raft of personal details. For example:  “Do you identify as a transgender or trans person?  Are you: “Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Other?”   Sorry, but what possible relevance could this have to my views on bus services?  And it gets worse: “Have you been pregnant in the past year? (No, actually.)  Are you married or in a civil partnership? Are you Bi/Bisexual? (is there a difference?) Gay woman/Lesbian?

Come on. This is utterly intrusive and utterly irrelevant. Slash the questionnaires and restore our bus services.

Cynically deprived of my vote?

Countryside Column for 19 September

Electoral Reform Means Democratic Deficit

It’s absolutely ludicrous. In the words of the late Victor Meldrew, I DON’T BELIEVE IT!

(Speaking of whom, not long ago I was giving a talk to the Women’s Institute in the Hampshire village of Shawford  and was directed to turn right “just after the pub where Richard Wilson was run over”. Good heavens, I exclaimed, I had no idea he was dead. Such a lovely actor.  No, not the actor, the secretary replied, his character Victor Meldrew!  A month or so later I was sitting opposite Richard Wilson in a Soho production office and was just about to pluck up courage to regale him with the story when a runner came and whisked him away.)

Anyway I am sure that both Mr Wilson and Mr Meldrew would be equally incandescent about this latest pettifogging bureaucratic idiocy. I take my right to vote seriously. I may seldom get the government or council I want, but the process is vitally important. So I always update my entry on the electoral register right away. Thus, when the form arrived last week, I lost no time in doing it online. Only to get a letter back from the Electoral Services Office at TWBC telling me to provide documentary evidence to prove my identity.

Well, really! I’ve been on the register at this address for 20 years or more. I pay council tax on the house at this address. My election as a parish councillor is based on my identity at this address. What more could they possibly need?  The answer, apparently, is one document from table 1, plus two documents from table 2 or, alternatively, four documents from table 4. (Table 2 incidentally includes a firearms licence or a police bail sheet – giving rise to all sorts of fantasy scenarios.)

Look, OK, the Electoral Registration and Administration Act (2013) brought in the changes and I’m as opposed to electoral fraud as anyone. But surely we should be making it EASIER for people to register not harder. And, if they are putting these sort of barriers in the way of someone as settled as me, I dread to think how difficult it will be for people with a less conventional lifestyle.

This needs an urgent rethink, Mr Cameron. Oh, but wait a moment, could it be that your party might actually benefit if fewer such people can vote? Or is that just too cynical?

Sniffing Friendship

Countryside Column for 12 September

Hail fellow well met.

            Dogs are famous for it. They hardly ever see a fellow canine without proffering a personal greeting (though let’s draw a discrete veil over just how they do it).

People, however, seldom acknowledge the presence of another of their species even when passing closely in the street. (Thank heavens, you may say, if they were expected to ape the doggy way of doing it!).

            But I think it’s a pity.  I’ve just returned from a summer sojourn in a little French village in the Languedoc. There it is absolutely de rigueur to say ‘bonjour’ to any and every person you pass.  Instead of deliberately avoiding eye contact, you look up, smile and, with a slight nod of the head, give your salutation.

            The very act of doing so makes you feel good and gives the recipient a reciprocal glow. 

There are some potential pitfalls.  At around six in the evening you might be thinking that “bonsoir” would be more appropriate than ‘bonjour’.  And it might be.  Or it might not.  There really is no way of telling.  If you say good-evening, their reply will almost invariably be good-day.  If you say good-day, they will probably say good-evening.  I was given a rule of thumb that if it is the end of a working day then ‘soir’ would be appropriate.  So you go into the baker’s late on to buy a baguette and you wish him ‘bonjour’ because he’s still working.  But if you are delayed and find him just locking up the shop, then ‘bonsoir’ would be right as he’s finished work. (Though you might say it through gritted teeth because you’d be breadless for supper.)  But even this rule is not immutable.

Anyway I was put in mind of this while walking Myrtle up on the West Hill in Hastings. Dog owners happily greet each other and chat about the weather or their respective hounds. But pass someone without a dog and eye contact is avoided, making a greeting not just difficult but positively inappropriate.   In my Kentish village it’s almost the same.  You can greet someone you know, however vaguely, but not a stranger.  Walking country lanes or footpaths is better, and saying ‘hi’ seems almost always acceptable.

My recipe for a friendlier life is to drop our reserve and greet everyone warmly whenever we encounter them.  Go on.  Try it for a week and see how it feels!

I Say Allo

Countryside column for 5^th September

Goodbye Allo, Allo?

The ‘Allo, Allo’ is back. Or at least it reappeared briefly last week after a long absence.

When I first came to this village in the Languedoc, the main method of communicating local events was via an extensive public address system. Two or three times a day, the quiet would be broken by an electronic buzz and a moment’s ear-splitting feedback before the announcer lady began with the loud ‘Allo, Allo’ greeting which reverberated round the sets of speakers positioned on different buildings or lamp-posts.

            Compared with the reserve of my village at home in Kent, the French seem unperturbed by such noise. The bell on the church clock, for instance, has the habit of sounding twice. So at twelve o’clock you get a dozen chimes followed, two minutes later, by another set of twelve. The theory is that vignerons working in the surrounding fields might miss the first one or two bells but, being alerted, would start counting the second time around and so be sure to get home in time for dinner. (Though possibly this might be more useful at midday than midnight). The fact that everyone now has wristwatches and mobile phones to tell the time does not seem to have impinged on this rural tradition.

            In the neighbouring village of Coulobres, which has no shops, a van selling bread and onions announces its presence by sounding its horn loudly and repeatedly as it drives round the streets. This is annoying enough if you are walking the dog a kilometre or so away; what it must be like every day right outside your front window I shudder to imagine.

            Anyway to return to the ‘Allo, Allos’. Their efficacy has been a matter of some debate. On the one hand the sound quality of the broadcast is so poor, and the regional accent so thick, that it’s pretty nigh impossible to make out what’s being said. On the other hand if you could hear and understand the message you might, indeed, be pleased to know that the horse-meat van has just arrived in the square, or that the mayor is holding a séance that evening. (No, not that sort of séance, just a political meeting!).

Since my parish council is always seeking ways to improve communication I might suggest adopting the quaint French idea when I get home. I’m not sure I’ll get many backers though.