Vegetable Plot Battleground

So here I am on the train to Southampton, journeying to pick up the Agéd Parents (fresh from the Isle of Man) and bear them home for a week's holiday. It's a year since I've seen them, and it'll be interesting to see how long it takes us all to start bickering.

Wow, but there are some blank-eyed shambling morons in Poole. Whoops, getting distracted.

I'm hoping that this parental visit will be a chance for everyone to recharge their batteries; morning cups of coffee with a home-made bun, gentle walks, perhaps a little light shopping. But it wasn't always like this. I remember the few holidays my Dad took with the rest of us as whirlwind endurance marathons. How many attractions can we fit in? How far can we walk in search of a better restaurant, and will any of the ones we passed still be open by the time we return, stumbling, through the gathering darkness? As I think back on it I realize that my Dad was always doing; he found it hard to relax and just be.

And what's worse, I think I've inherited it from him. Perhaps it's some sort of meme.

Yet for all that, there are never enough hours in the day for me. I rise without too much trouble (although getting started in the morning is a tadge harder) but I resent bedtime. It marks drawing a line under the huge list of things I had intended to do that day but didn't manage because of my one great sin; getting sidetracked.

Sometimes this is unavoidable, but some of the time it's the closet perfectionist in me making himself known (I've been known to spend an entire day cleaning and reorganising the kitchen cupboards. I'm not proud of it). But most of the time it's just hopping from one thing to another like a butterfly with a bad case of the squitters.

The internet is the worst place for me. Given my job it's inevitable that I spend a fair bit of time on there, seeking opinions and information, but every second I'm being jostled by such interesting trivia that I can't help but get sucked in by some of it. I mean, did you know that They Might Be Giants' Birdhouse In Your Soul is a song about a night light in the bathroom? There you are, see, you just learned something that might save your life one day. An axe-wielding madman could barge into your house just as you sit down to your cornflakes and shriek 'No-one gets out of here until I know; who is the Blue Canary in the outlet by the light switch, and why is he watching me?'

Aha! And there it is; the moment that turns this train journey into something special. Our train has been idling along at slightly less than walking pace (British trains often do this, I'm not sure why) for a while now, and I've been watching a seemingly endless row of gardens pass by; regular slot after slot of ornamental pap in various states of order. Plastic ponds and plastic sandpits, stands of pampas grass and flowering shrubs, and always the bulk of that precious space is given over to useless, monotonous grass. And then suddenly, standing out like a jewel in the suburban monotone, a working garden; rich earth, broad beans in flower, a compost bin with a squash plant poking out of the top, strawberries almost ready to announce the summer. You can stuff your forsythia up your bottoms, suburbia. Give me the battleground of the vegetable plot any day.

Blue Bottoms (Regs part 3)

So; The sloppy drafting of regulations can lead to playing a game called 'unintended consequences'. But for truly idiotic results you need another ingredient.

For better or for worse the UK is part of the European Union, which means we have to have a whole second raft of MPs for the European Parliament (known as MEPs), on salaries which make the boys in the domestic parliament in Westminster look like paupers. It also allows our Prime Minster to attend no end of summits and eat staggeringly expensive lunches. I had a look at some figures released through official channels recently, and the cost of one lunch for one person would feed my family of four, on our normal diet, for a little over ten days.

But I'm getting off the point, quelle surprise. Whatever benefits politicians believe the EU brings to Britain, the people of our country hate it because it seems to exist solely to strangle us in red tape. Every year brings a ragbag of new rules, each more proscriptive, more involved, and in some cases more downright daft than the ones they replace. For instance, did you know we had (until recently) a maximum allowable curvature on bananas offered for sale? True. We have to be protected from bananas which are too bendy at all costs.*

But what really chaps my ass is that the UK is more seriously affected by these regulations than almost any other EU member, and here's why. If the EU passes a regulation, everyone nods wisely and goes home. In sensible countries like France and Italy, they already have a filing cabinet filled to bursting (actually a whole roomful of them) with unactioned regulations – so this one gets shoved to the back of the bottom drawer, to be dealt with after lunch; which is to say, not now. France (for example) regularly gets fined by the EU for noncompliance with various exciting bits of paper. So what? Say the French. It's still cheaper than trying to implement it all. Bof!

In the UK, on the other hand, the MEPs hand the new regs over to Mr Pewty with his pencil moustache. Mr Pewty turns the new regulation into no less than twenty-seven minor amendments to existing regulations, plus three new ones. He lives for moments like these, and before long the amended rules and regulations are couriered out to a small army of sub-Pewtys, and by dawn the next day they're out on the roads visiting farms, armed with their clipboards, ready to make everyone's lives that little bit greyer. Anyone who refuses to comply will be dealt with by the courts, because there's a whole tribe of Pewtys who are employed, on the taxpayers' dollar, to prosecute miscreants for such heinous crimes as displaying prices in pounds and ounces, selling unpasteurised stilton, or feeding vegetable peelings to their chickens.

This is the missing ingredient in the game of unintended consequences. You have to have a slavish devotion to rules and regulations, coupled with a dogmatic and inflexible attitude. Never having had a popular revolution, the British excel in this regard; the Pewtys are, in their own way, like the medieval reeves setting out to impose the will of their feudal masters. Somewhere in the heart of the Brits, there still lies the conviction that whatever we are, we are because our betters allow us to be so. We know our place - and incidentally so do our MPs, who have used their own regulations to keep their heads firmly in the feeding trough all the time they've been beating us with the big rulebook.

So where am I going with all of this? I guess I'm calling for a long overdue British revolution. Not the storming-the-Bastille type of affair (that just wouldn't be cricket), but I think it's time to let our representatives know we want out of all the red tape. Perhaps that's a matter for the ballot box; perhaps it's a matter for gentle civil disobedience.

Or perhaps it's time to paint our bottoms blue and bloody well emigrate.



*This was touted as making packaging less likely to damage the bananas, but was widely accepted as a way of legislating against Caribbean bananas which tend to be smaller and more bendy. In these more enlightened times, however, that policy has been abandoned in favour of punitive tariffs which are a much more efficient way of putting the Caribbean banana farmers out of business.

Month of the Flea (Regs part 2)

As a title, it's not bad. (Assumes gravelly movie-trailer voice) 'Prepare yourself for pain. Prepare yourself for horror. Prepare yourself for...' (crashing chords from orchestra to set your teeth on edge) 'Month of the Flea!' But when it comes down to it, it's just a shabby attempt to move people onto more expensive forms of flea control than the scabby old flea collars you can get at the supermarket. These days we're encouraging pet owners to put a drop of unspeakable chemical nastiness directly onto the one-eighth-of-a-square-inch of our cat that she cannot lick. Dogs are easier, I'm told, since they're too busy licking their own nadgers to care what you're putting on them.

We treated our cats with this stuff for a while, and I have to say it was pretty amusing. Anything that makes a cat go 'Oh my God! He's putting something on my skin! I can feel it soaking into me! AAARGH getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!' and then shoot through the catflap hard enough to knock it off its hinges gets my vote, frankly. But then, I'm the man who once laughed himself sick after his cat accidentally sellotaped itself to a balloon. Don't ask, but it was bloody funny.

In the end we stopped using the drops because although the flea control was okay, the tick control was completely useless; being told that 'any feeding ticks you see will drop off within a few days and die' is no comfort when you then have to advise your toddlers not to eat any grey sweetcorn they might see lying around. We went back to the inexpensive collars, which the cats tolerate, and the ticks disappeared. Only I get them now, since they won't stay on the cats.

The point is, I'm waiting for the collars to disappear off the market, regulated out of existence by something called Evidence Based Medicine. On the face of it, evidence-based medicine is a very good idea. 'If you want to claim that something works,' it goes, 'you have to prove it.' Which all sounds terribly sensible to protect us from the quacks. Except that if you add the inevitable '... to the local regulatory authorities' then you begin to see where this drive might take us.

In the case of the flea collars, these have a generic insecticide in them (it's nasty stuff, but I have yet to find anything else that works) and thus can't be patented. Proving that they work, however, would require trials and the gathering of new and exhaustive safety data – two truckloads of printed information, if it were hard copy. That's a hugely expensive process for a product that can't then be patented to protect profits; no-one will do it. And so the collars, which work very well, will go. Over the last decade I've seen a hundred traditional and safe remedies go the same way, in favour of newer products which may work better, but may not. It doesn't matter, since the old ones go anyway.

So - Evidence-Based Medicine is killing older 'remedies'. That's not what it was intended to do (it was only intended to stop firms making claims that patently weren't true about their products) - but hey, what can you do? Them's the rules. More later...

Regulations Maketh the Man

Chair, ass; ass, chair. There. Now that the introductions are complete – for it's been so long that you've seen each other I thought I ought to reintroduce you – I thought I'd have a bit of a rant about regulations. This rant will take several days, I fear, so here's Part One.

We Brits are fond of regulations, it seems. Very, very fond. At least, a certain subsection of the population are. I fondly imagine that they wear pin-striped grey flannel clothing, sport pencil-thin moustaches (even the women) and have had clipboards surgically attached to their left forearms, for the sake of efficiency. I could be wrong about this but the alternative, that they might look perfectly normal and even be amongst us at this very minute is too awful to contemplate.

When the Romans ran their first ship up onto the beach at Richborough, two things happened. Firstly, a cat jumped off; and secondly, a native Celt with a little moustache wearing a grey striped kilt walked out of the forest and said 'Planning on leaving that thing there all day, are you? You'll need to speak to Bodvoc in the Permits Department.'

Actually this isn't true at all, and here's why. The Celts used no written language. The Druids (who practically ran the show) maintained that the moment you wrote something down you ceased to understand the essence of it. You could only really understand something by seeing, by doing, or by discussing it at great length and with copious amounts of alcohol. Subsequently writing anything down was forbidden, and if you were caught doing it the druids would be round in a hurry to show you at least three unexpected uses for a sickle on a dark night. For this reason the only written history we have about the Celts comes from the Romans, who were very keen to jump all over this baffling culture; not, you might say, the most reliable source. But looking back on the Celts' attitude towards written language, it seems obvious to me that the whole thing was devised as a very, and some might say terminally, effective defence against bureaucracy. And if their contention was that writing something down meant that you'd miss the point of it entirely, I can't help but look at our society and wonder if they might have been right.

Anyway, back to the cat. The reason I mention the cat is that my pharmacy employers tell me that May is the official Month of the Flea.

I mean, really. More later.

You Know Who Your Friends Are When...

Shock of the Day

Baby carrots. Fresh from the garden, you've got to love them. But bought frozen they have a peculiar texture and lack of sweetness about them. Ever wondered why?

On the face of it, a frozen baby carrot looks like just that. But unless you buy them fresh with a visible 'shoulder' on them, the likelihood is that they're actually carved out of a full-sized market-reject carrot using an industrial peeler, a process invented in the late 1980's by Mike Yurosek, a Californian farmer. There's nothing wrong with them apart from the fact that they're not baby carrots. They're big carrots cut small, and sometimes have the end dipped in green dye to make it look as if there was once some growth there. Call me naive, but that came as a bit of a surprise to me.

So folks, if you want real baby carrots with a startling crunch and a superb flavour then you've got two choices: buy specially-grown varieties like Amsterdam Forcing or Thumbelina, with the tops still visible; or grow your own.

Well, that's my manky old storage carrots dealt with. Now, I wonder what I can make out of this soggy old parsnip? Answer; parsnip bread. More anon.

Greener Than Thou

I seem to have spent more time down the bottom of the garden setting up sheet mulch than anything else this week, but more of that anon. We also had two trainers for the Transition Network to stay for the weekend, and it was something of a relief to find that they weren't Greener Than Thous - they watched a DVD and ate meat and took a drive to the seaside just like anyone else. In fact, in good light they'd pass for normal people.

The 'Greener Than Thou' mentality pisses me off. These people have been about for ages, and sometimes aren't especially green when it comes down to it - but they're usually very fond of brand names.

"Oh, dah-ling," they say. "Are you still using those ghastly cloth nappies? They're so Age of Carbon... these days Nigel and I use Venezuelan jute disposables from EcoSnob dot com; when they're soiled you just put a little starter bran into them, and pop them straight into the Bokashi Bucket. You do have a Bokashi Bucket, don't you? So much nicer than that nasty old compost heap of yours..."

You may chortle, but being Greener Than Thou is something I have to be on my guard about because the family Hedge seems to be a bit further on as regards food than anyone else I've spoken to - with the notable exception of Mr Green & Pleasant, a friend of ours who makes us look very Age of Carbon indeed. But in a good way, or at least not in a calculated snobby way. No, Mr G&P just gets very cross about things.

"Olive oil?" he snorts. "Don't get me started about f****** olive oil! The problem with this country is that we all eat like we live in the Meditteranean. And Riverford? Don't make me f****** laugh. You want to ship onions in from Peru? Fine - just don't f****** pretend that you're being all green about it. Eat with the bloody seasons!"

I have a lot of time for Mr G&P, and he's given me quite a lot to think about as regards our diet. One thing is for sure; I have stared into the face of the abyss whose name is Canning, and lo! I really don't want to go there until I have to. I will be loath to give up my freezer. But I am thinking about it.

Who'd be a Pig Farmer?

As if it wasn't tough enough already, what with the public's attitude towards cheap cuts, feedstock prices, red tape, and the supermarkets perpetually using you for bum floss, now there's 'swine flu'. The name comes from the fact that the strain has some similar markers to one known to be present in pigs, but there's nothing porcine about it now. Until the media get involved, of course.

"H1N1" isn't catchy enough to scare people, you see, and that's what the press like to do because it sells copy. 'Swine flu' on the other hand, has a nasty ring to it; much better than the alternative 'Mexican flu' which has been proposed because it causes less offence to Jewish and Muslim politicos. You can really scare the pants off people with a name like 'swine flu', which is vital because thus far the virus hasn't behaved in a very scary fashion outside of Mexico. But of course, it's too early to tell.

But back to the pig farmers. Egypt unfortunately decided to use the novel flu strain as an excuse to kick off a cull - long planned - in the country's unregulated and 'disorderly' pig farms. 250,000 animals are bound for the great sausage factory in the sky in what is essentially a clearing exercise to begin a new bureaucratic system. Has there been a single case of swine flu reported in man or pig in Egypt? Er... well, no. Not as such.

The Egyptian bureaucracy's backdoor exercise has kicked off panic culls in other countries, though, including normally sensible countries like Germany. Despite the fact that there is no evidence that the porcine version of the disease can spread from pigs to people, there's a rash of Euro-bans on pork as old political enemies grab the chance to settle old scores. Belgium bans Germany; Portugal bans Spain. Russia bans America. Kazakhstan bans Sacha Baron Cohen.

So, on the grounds that pig farmers have it tough enough, I'm off to buy a piece of belly pork for Sunday - and I won't be reading any of the panicky newpapers either.