You can’t have the town without the country

I am now trying to get stuck into some real country living having been on a quick tour of the Black Country and Birmingham to go to the dentists and to meet up with our daughter. Those of you who follow me on twitter may have detected an urban element in my comments. That’s because I grew up at the centre of a county town in the south of England which is now surrounded by motorways and bungalows. A short bike ride would mean I was in the countryside. In the fifties that meant cherry and apple orchards. A longer bike ride would bring me to cornfields, hop yards and mixed farms and then the high downland. A longer bike ride would find me descending the old coastline escarpment through chestnut under wood onto Romney Marsh.

From my town centre bedroom window I could observe the summer weekend dash of London Transport buses taking community outings to Margate and Ramsgate, I saw the Olympic Torch pass by being carried to the 1948 Olympics and later the Monte Carlo Rally speed through the traffic lights fixed at green at the top of the town. But what fascinated me just as much were the sheep, and occasionally the cattle, which on rare occasions were driven down the High Street to the Tuesday livestock market in Market Meadow.

And that’s the point which we seem to have forgotten. Its not town and country, its town with country and visa versa. That is why the growing interest in getting your hands on some real food is well overdue. Real bread, real beer, fresh vegetable and properly produced meat is all part of a reaction against the mass production of protein and carbohydrate that the food industry makes available to the thousands of victims of long working hours which makes it impossible, so they think, to prepare real food.

I am an expert on this subject. As a bed sit teenager the height of my quick fix cuisine was a Vesta Curry! I haven’t read the ingredients list on this dietary anachronism for some time but I bet when I was eating the stuff, when the e number did not exist,salt and fat was high in the list. Ironically, when I eventually became a mature student and escaped the bedsit I spent one summer making the stuff and saw chicken and beef flesh come in at one end of the factory, get dried to a crisp, so much so that you could press it to dust between your fingers, to eventually be thrown in with the curry source ( mainly fat) and then dried out again. The meat that came in seemed to be soaked in a strong brine and I remember thinking, I don’t think I would start off making a curry this way. Not that I ever did of course. But one thing which this brought home to me was that the ‘food’ I used to pull from the shelves in my NW10 ‘supermarket’ had been manufactured in my own county and was the product of a farm somewhere. Who knows where? I also remember thinking that not far from the factory where I worked and acquired the need for a bath every night after the shift, to rid me of the smell of curry, were those green fields and hop yards where it all starts as well as the deep litter sheds and battery farms where the chicken meat came from. I don’t know about the beef, but I can imagine.

The schism that has arisen between the urban and rural is literally fatal for many. We once pointed cows out to our neighbour's children when we all went for a ride out into the countryside from a large east-midlands industrial town where we lived at the time. To the statement that, ‘..that’s where milk comes from, pointing to a dairy herd, was met with laughing and the comment, ‘ Don’t be silly it comes from the milkman’. That was then. Is it better or worse now? I suspect the freezer stuffed with ready made meals in may homes sums it all up. Unless we restore the relationship between town and country which I grew up being fully aware of, both sides of this relationship will be condemned to a short lived future, in which both will be diminished.