Global chains pile the Christmas tat high – but I found joy in a tiny Scottish farm shop
The wreath is made from real pine branches. It is attractive and cheap. I can smell the pine. But the label confirms what I already know: made in Germany and shipped across the sea then loaded on to lorries along recently expanded motorways, to this supermarket in Scotland. And it so happens that I know the people who made this and the million other wreaths that sit in the warehouses of Europe’s supermarket chains. They are “unskilled” workers from the mountains of southern Bulgaria. I can hear their voices, humorous and philosophical. They know it’s absurd, and many of them are Muslims, too.
“You plant the saplings and next season you cut the branches and make Christmas wreaths for the Germans.”
“The amount of times I’ve had my eye stabbed! But I like the smell of pine.”
“You can do extra hours. You live onsite, you work in the rain and mud, your hands freeze, but we’re used to it.”
“When the weather’s bad, the women go in the greenhouses and us guys are outside, planting.”
The plantation workers are from Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine. Then they take their hard-earned euros home for the holidays, to their own pine forests. They are the invisible worker bees that produce the cheap reliable honey on our global shelves. Nobody thanks them. Of course, they’d rather be doing this same work at home with their dignity intact, but the pay there is poor. They can’t even cover their energy bills.
I look around the supermarket and can’t find any foods grown in Britain. Not one scrap of clothing is stitched here. Why do these “Nordic” jumpers cost £7? I know the women who made them, too. They are from the same mountain villages and sit at the sewing machines six days a week for €300 a month. Not enough, so in summer they travel by the cheapest bus to France to … plant asparagus. It’s the exodus of entire villages, like in war.
In his prophetic 1973 book Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics As If People Mattered, EF Schumacher diagnosed the illness of modern civilisation as “gigantism”. It’s the principle of global capitalism, or any industrialist top-down system: our planet is treated as if things will never run out. His call for a more connected, fairer and less materialistically driven model was considered idealistic – from a gigantist point of view, that is. A view so prevalent still, in our collapsing civilisation, that it’s hidden from itself the way the subconscious is hidden from the conscious. Until it’s acted out as
fateful events.
I go looking for a wreath in Black Isle Berries. This is everybody’s favourite family-run farm-shop in a barn that sells vegetables grown here. It started 25 years ago as a small soft-fruit farm, and grew. But not gigantically.
People come not just for veggies and coffee but for therapy – because small is real. The young employees are local. It’s busy seven days a week: berries in summer, root vegetables in autumn, baking the trademark focaccia with Scottish rapeseed oil, and the coffee is roasted in Inverness. They used to employ workers from other parts of Europe before Brexit and the pandemic. Now any left are clients.
“Our Romanian clients convinced me to grow more pumpkins this year!” Not just to carve for Halloween but to actually eat in stews. There’s an idea!
Every student who works here ends up passionate about food. How the growth cycles revolve, how weather affects crops. They become the biodynamic farmers of tomorrow.
“It’s an endless learning curve,” says one woman.
“I spend my money on food, not clothes,” says another. “Coz I see that you’re not what you wear but what you eat.”
This summer, rain cut the berry season short. But no matter what, there’s the brightness of making a mark, on real things. The honey is not “EU and non-EU blend”, but from hives over there. The dairy products are from the Black Isle Dairy and the meat from local farms, and nowhere else can you get
Scottish goat’s cheese.
The economic model that is wrecking the future minute by minute is fuelled by the doctrine of gigantism. This includes the power grid that tramples our forests, peatlands, and rivers, to serve faraway buyers, and whose gigantic infrastructures are not renewable. Over-production, over-consumption, over-destruction – this is the business of all our top-down structures, it seems. As if people didn’t matter. For everyone I know, the only hope comes from the grassroots. The human scale is nature’s scale, not industry’s. Schumacher called this “enoughness”. A forgotten art we are remembering, like a memory jolt when you hit rock bottom.
“A few big global chains monopolise the world. Shops like us are pushed out but we hang on,” says the owner, in between crates. He is a melancholy stoic.
No wreaths, only useful things here. I scavenge the field for end-of-season marrows and fallen leeks – they like you to do that, otherwise it goes for compost. Among the muddy onions I see it: everything that brings death suffers from gigantism.
Every lover knows that small is beautiful. Only the addict needs more – the Buddhists call this the hungry ghost. It’s the stuff of horror films, the stuff of our daily war. Idealist or cynic, we simply have to reseed ourselves and our places, with more of what we want to see next season.
It’s all big commercial pine plantations around here, and I end up making my own small wreath. I mark Solstice, not Christmas. But the making of the wreath reminds me why I wanted it in the first place – because the smell of pine brings me home and that’s
were posted on its intranet. What a grim, shaming fact that this should have been needed.
When institutions fall into crisis, they fall hard. I’m old enough to remember the crisis at Covent Garden in the 1990s, when the Royal Opera House acquired three general directors in a year, ran up staggering debts during a redevelopment, was castigated by a Commons select committee, and had the entire board resign en masse – with quite a lot of the drama captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I’ve watched other organisations brought to their knees, too.
What I know is this: if you recognise the name of the chair, it’s bad news. Functioning institutions operate with their trustees in the background, quietly supporting and challenging. Not, like Osborne, becoming the story. The trustees’ most important job – one that the BM’s are currently undertaking – is to appoint the right director and then let them get on with it. In this case it must be someone who understands museums in their every cell, and someone, too, with the guts and skill to turn the BM’s broken culture around.
I love the British Museum, despite everything. I have had my eyes opened, my imagination set on fire, my intellect challenged by it too many times to mention. There are exhibitions – I think of Ice Age Art a decade ago, and The World of Stonehenge last year – that have changed the way I understand the world. A fortnight ago, I stopped by to admire the beauty of the Parthenon sculptures, the galloping horsemen and reclining gods innocent of their role in a diplomatic feud. The museum was full of schoolchildren. The place was vibrating with the energy and excitement that comes from the encounter with glorious, awe-inspiring objects. But taking £50m from a polluter? It fills my heart with dread that the museum should take so wrong a turn.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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