A hunt for rich pickings
IN the 19th century, some of my ancestors left their village smallholdings to set up as seed merchants in a market town. Others across the nation fled the certain poverty of the countryside for the possibilities of the cities. BACK TO THE LAND WITH KATE HUMBLE (BBC2) points at a rewind operation, although on a smaller scale.
She was in Cornwall for the start of the new series, Duchy of HRH Prince Charles, swelled by hundreds of thousands of money-spending visitors in the summer months and yet, somehow, still qualifying as ‘the poorest county’.
It wasn’t clear what that statistic meant really but you could see how, in a place with hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline and beaches, there wasn’t much doing in the winter. Kate met valiant individuals trying to change the story, diving for seaweed, foraging for seasonal herbal beers, growing wedding flowers and rearing ducks. At every stop there was a tale of someone, often a pair of people, taking a gigantic risk and being passionate to the point of obsession with their particular rural scheme.
While many of them had tried city life and fled from it, it was clear that the city and its tastes and fortunes loomed large. From the range of sustainably caught, dried and fresh seaweed to the locally grown wedding flowers, the price tag reflected the amount of labour that went into the products and the size of the punters’ wallets.
If all that kept the countryside alive and working, then fine and dandy. In some of these businesses, though, you sensed a tension between keeping it real and keeping a roof over heads.
Desperate to find a house for themselves and their young family, seaweed harvesters Tim and Cara went from drying their product in two caravans to building a specialised unit to experimenting in growing seaweed themselves. Success meant growth, growth meant success, but how much can countryside grow without becoming city?
After so many TV attempts to film them, I’m not sure THE SECRET LIFE OF FIVE YEAR OLDS (C4) is really that secret. Anyway, if five year olds have a secret life then it’s one we don’t see on the telly because, well, that’s what secret means. The theme of last night’s child-safari was right and wrong and various ‘experiments’ proved the potential among the average little ’un for going over to the dark side.
As the class was divided into orange and green groups and they swiftly busied themselves creating borders and putting up threatening signs, we saw the history of nations unfold. When Elsa had had enough of all the tensions though, she marched over to the opposing group, had it out with them and ushered in a new age of peace. Equally impressive was young Luke, who saw how his team was winning all the points in an unfairly rigged quiz and defected to the losing side.
The children weren’t just making grand gestures, they showed themselves, often, to be capable of stopping, thinking how others might feel and changing tack.
Unlike a group of adults, no-one tried to justify being in the wrong, no-one got stuck defending a ridiculous point of view because they were too embarrassed to climb down from it. These kids swapped from naughty to good like they were swapping stickers. You wondered how they’d learned to do the right thing so easily. More to the point, you wondered how grown-ups forgot it so quickly.