Where haywains once stood stand Volvos BMWs and ‘off-road vehicles’ which have never been off a road
Where haywains once stood stand Volvos, BMWs and ‘off-road vehicles’ which have never been off a road. The pubs that do remain sell more Campari than rough cider.Musing once about the name ‘ploughman’s lunch’, Jeffrey Bernard observed that the only ploughman he knew lunched off three Mars Bars and four bottles of brown ale. To judge from our local, the traditional meal of the agricultural classes is quiche and Californian chardonnay.Sometimes class war flares up. When there’s a row about building a factory, a housing estate, a bypass, you can’t help noticing that it is the New Countrymen who lead the opposition.
The few remaining natives are usually in favour.It requires more eloquence than Jonathan and Bel Dimbleby (or I) possess to convert them to the Preservation of Rural England, if that means yokels preserved in picturesque simplicity like Indians on a reservation.My own simplicity is patently phoney. As a journalist, I depend (parasitically, perhaps) on what is left of a great industrial society. I take no more part in agricultureor country sports than growing vegetables desultorily in the garden and equally desultory trout-fishing. What is more, although we are a hundred miles from London, living near a mainline station means that we can get home after going to the theatre in the West End. We could almost be in Metroland.But there it is and here we are, bogus as we may be. And after all, the countryside could be more artificial still. An element of the Luddite left wants slipyards and coal mines kept going like Marie Antoinette’s model dairy.
As with De Valera’s attempt to recreate a simple Gaelic peasant society in Ireland, this is not ignoble or unattractive It just isn’t going to happen. Nor can Olde England and its village life be brought back.Those of us who have returned to take possession of the country where once our rude forebears tilled the fields may be mocked We may even smile at ourselves Should we really be ashamed?Alan Watkins is on holiday.. I AM not very reliable at the moment in the matter of vomiting. I am liable to disgorge my lunch at the slightest provocation – the smell of garlic, the thought of curry, standing on Tube trains – or at least, to retch noisily, which is almost more embarrassing because it makes me sound like the Beast of Bodmin.
