A colour-supplement countryman? Me?
Leafing through a weekend colour supplement, I find that yet another former urbanite currently sees himself as a Wiltshire countryman.
This time, the famed chef and restaurateur Marco Pierre White was describing a typical Saturday at the hotel in Box Hill where he now lives and works.
I have a relationship with White – not that he knows it. I met the fan of stock cubes some years ago, while stumbling around the basement of a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge. I must have been looking for the gents. All I can remember was opening a door I shouldn’t have into a busy kitchen where stood the strikingly charismatic giant, his unforgettable face glowering beneath a chef’s hat.
‘Are you Marco Pierre White?’ I enthused. ‘No,’ came his emphatic reply. Lesser Wiltshiremen might have wilted, no pun intended, at their attempt at affability being so rebuffed. But I didn’t take it as a personal insult. Instead I reversed happily out of the kitchen, grinning at the quickwittedness of White’s response, which I dined out on each time the famous name was mentioned.
Yet, as I read of White’s plans to turn the 14 acres around his hotel ‘at the top of the hill, with views all the way to Bath’, into a nature reserve, a different ‘historic’ insult resurfaced in my brain. This one, by contrast, I had found troubling.
Twenty-five years ago, when staying with a Norfolk fruit-farming friend, and seeing his woodsmen poised to clear a spinney of goat willow, I protested that it was the host of the purple emperor butterfly.
‘You’re not a real countryman at all,’ retorted Desmond. ‘You are a colour-supplement countryman.’
His implication was that, unlike him, with his real lived experience on the land, who viewed goat willow as an invasive weed, I had ‘mugged up’ all my rural knowledge from reading the colour supplements of weekend newspapers. I was in danger of becoming one of the species all farmers dread – ‘an ecologist with a clipboard’.
There may have been an element of truth to the gibe, which is why it wounded. And why reading Marco Pierre White’s Saturday prompted me to turn the tables and accuse him of being a colour-supplement countryman.
1. White has an acer plantation of 600 trees. Planting a monoculture of one species is unwise in an age of globally derived imported tree diseases.
2. He is planting acres of cow parsley. Why? Cow parsley is a coarse, rank weed-like thistle. Both are pleasant to look at but cow parsley is a wayside herb that, along with docks and nettles, comes unbidden readily enough. Its rightful position remains in the second tier of desirable species. No, Mr White, you should be planting yellow rattle ( Rhinanthus minor).
Yellow rattle parasitises grass, allowing finer wild-meadow plants to gain a foothold.
Colin Tudge, the science writer and broadcaster, tells us that we already have solutions to the problems of biodiversity loss and soil erosion.
But, sadly, according to the wildlife trusts, a generational step change in policy has just been missed in the latest round of inducements to farmers.
We green-blobbers thought we might join more progressive countries in banning glyphosate.
‘Could you farm in the event of a glyphosate ban?’ I asked a local farmer at a recent lecture in a village hall.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Glyphosate is a real life-saver.’
No doubt this amiable rustic, a third-generation tenant farmer, views himself as a ‘real’ countryman and the likes of rewilders like me and Marco Pierre White as flies in his ointment. ‘You can’t eat trees,’ he observed. Don’t get me wrong, Mr White – we need dynamic people like you in the country. I wouldn’t even mind more Soho Houses or Babington Houses, so fed up am I with dankness and isolation.
Another dynamic incomer, the insurance supremo Robert Hiscox, has converted a Methodist chapel into a state-of-the-art indie cinema in our local town of Marlborough.
Here you can carry your drinks and upmarket ‘nibbles’ from the bar into the deep-seated comfort of the spanking new auditorium and escape from what Waugh’s Mr Salter, editor of the Daily Beast, disliked about the country, namely ‘its solitude and self-sufficiency, its bloody recreations, its darkness and silence and sudden, inexplicable noises’.
It was with a certain wry amusement that I also got round to reading the property-news headlines (in a colour supplement): ‘Rural buyer’s remorse is the newest property trend’. Now that really rang a bell. Not a day goes by when I myself don’t wonder whether a property in Barnes might deliver more bird sightings at its wetland centre than we see down here in Wiltshire.
And, what’s more, Mary could walk to the shops.