Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny buys beef from a lady butcher with an Oscar Wilde link

‘Don’t be eating any of that chlorinated chicken imported from America!’ I’m told by an Irish pal, still vexed about Brexit. Certainly not: I always try to buy food from local shops. Here in Deal, we have an excellent butcher, Lizzy Douglas (current holder of the Young British Foodie of the Year Award in the meat section).

At Lizzy’s shop, The Black Pig, free-range chickens come from nearby Kentish farms, as does her beef, lamb and bacon. Yes, the meat is more expensive than the factory-farm produce from supermarkets (chickens are £3.40 a pound), though there are cheaper cuts of other meats available, too. She buys a whole cow practically every Wednesday and it all has to be used up.

It’s still unusual for a woman to be a butcher, but Lizzy, an energetic 45-yearold, says it’s also been an advantage. She thinks she brings something different to her trade – call it the aesthetic or artistic. And a special feel for animal welfare. ‘When I was a youngster, I was involved with Compassion in World Farming, and I’ve always been interested in animal charities.’

The trade is not in the family tradition. Lizzy’s dad is a poet and musician, Lord Gawain Douglas, of the Queensberry family (and thus a collateral descendant of Bosie, Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend). Lizzy herself plays the flute, a restful hobby in contrast to dividing up the insides of cows.

She has three daughters – will any of them become lady butchers? Probably not. ‘Too physical. Too labour-intensive!’ But Lizzy Douglas finds having such a physical job healthy and stimulating. Indeed so!

Most of us know our postcodes off by heart and even recite them obediently, using the phonetic alphabet – ‘Charlie Tango 14, six Alpha Zulu’ being my coding relationship with the Canterbury postal area.

It’s all linked in to some globalised algorithm, and we’re told that nothing can now be safely delivered without this zonal moniker. It’s also, I suspect, a means of tracking us by the Big Brother data systems.

So it’s rather cheering to learn that more than 60 per cent of people in Ireland never or rarely use the postcode system assigned to them by Eircode. Thirty per cent absolutely ‘never’ use it, and another 32 per cent use it only ‘occasionally’, according to the polling boxwallahs.

Are the Irish slow to take up the postcode system because there’s still a rebel element of being ‘agin the government’? Maybe. Or maybe because the postcodes are just a bit of a nuisance and householders can’t be bothered – sure, the postie knows where we live!

My explanation is somewhat more poetic. I think that people like an element of ‘narrative’ in describing location. It’s claimed that women are more inclined to this tendency. When a woman gives road directions, she’s more likely to say, ‘Turn right at the supermarket, go on a bit until you pass a pink house, turn left at the church, then you pass a school.’ A man is more likely to give technical instructions, noting road signage and the formal identification of a road (‘Left at the sign for the A278’).

Now that GPS is taking over, with its robotic voice instructions, the narrative is being erased from locality – just as postcodes may neutralise location.

The resistance to using them in Ireland is an attachment to a sense of identifiable place: to Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, or Doolin, Co Clare, or Skibbereen in West Cork – not identified by the soulless A82NT92, V95VC56 or P81AC60.

In the end, the algorithms will win. But it’s pleasing to see a little resistance just the same.

At the springtime’s UK-EU negotiations, it was reported that ‘trade talks in Brussels will be held (primarily) in English’. The EU would pay for all translations into French (as well as presumably into all the other 23 official languages).

When I first reported from Brussels, back in 1973, French was blatantly predominant. But English has since gained ground on all fronts. The Swedes and the Dutch now publish their scientific papers in English. Forty per cent of Europeans speak English as their first foreign language – four times as many as speak French or German as a foreign tongue. There are even those who suggest that English should be formally adopted as the lingua franca of the European continent.

English is surely tops for trade talks – but German is still brilliant for those portmanteau words such as the glorious Schadenfreude – pleasure at the discomfort of others. Another terrific one is Fingerspitzengefühl – having an intuitive feeling, as if at the tips of one’s fingers.

And my absolute favourite: Verschlimmbesserung – the improvement that makes things worse. Very apt for oldies lamenting ‘Why do they keep changing everything – and making matters worse’?