Caravan Touring and Wasting Time

In one way wasting time is a privilege which we should all occasionally exercise, although what might seem a waste of time to one person is valuable endeavour to another. I was checking out an e –bay entry for a seller of a caravan today and was advised that ‘time wasters’ would not be welcome. As I have difficulty in deciding what is a waste of time I promptly moved back to my inbox and deleted this impatient vendor once and for all.

My wife and I might ‘waste our time’ or spend it, by going off in our old caravan. Current value £300. Never shy of the controversial we would be prepared to go head to head with the devil incarnate of the anti-caravanning world, namely the national petrol head leader, Jeremy Clarkson. Why, because caravanning as has the potential to be a low impact leisure facility, it tends to cross seasonal boundaries, and it is democratic pastime: it’s said to be the national sport in Holland, now that is sad.

It is low impact because a touring caravan is not a permanent feature. Many of the locations where used are purely temporary, or at least, rather small and hidden, when compared with the vast aluminium cities of Porth Cawl or the east coast. It is flexible as to season as many of us choose to take our main breaks in early or late season or during the winter months, thus leaving room for the prisoners of the school holiday booking season free of us older types. Finally, it is democratic because our green and pleasant land becomes available to all, whether in a £300 van or in a gin palace on wheels. It is mainly a middle to working class pastime, although the touring caravan was invented by the upper class. Mr Toad of Wind in the Willows was recently cited by a spokesperson for the Caravan Club as a fictional example of an early enthusiast. It was also pointed out that he only went off the rails, and the road come to that, when he dumped his caravan (the horse drawn) in favour of the speed which could be achieved by the solo motor car i.e., when he joined the Clarkson Camp.

In addition to all these benefits it is a significant contribution to the rural economy. Large static sites are sometimes unfortunate eyesores, but not always, while touring sites can be very small, allowing a regular contribution to the income of a farm. In spite of these benefits there is a large body of snobs out there who would rather pay silly prices for the poor standards which often prevail in many of our hotels. We do not like hotels much anyway. They are usually too hot, the beds and bedding are unpredictable, and the regimentation of the breakfast slot is contradictory to our idea of leisure.

Of course last year’s rise in caravan and tent sales is reminiscent of the boom of the sixties. The bookings reported by both the Caravan Club and Camping and Caravan Club (we belong to the more flexible latter organisation as we occasionally use one of our many tents) will not last. As with the last boom, this will be ended by a series of bad summers. People who buy the dream need to acquire certain fortitude, and realise that leisure is not just about having relaxation provided but to a great extent working for it. I suppose to that extent it can become a sport when you travel light or the weather gets heavy.

The national speed limit for caravans and trailers is 60 mph on motorways and dual carriageways and 50 mph for the rest. This is safe for the caravan driver and provided he or she keeps an eye open for tail backs, should not inconvenience solo drivers any more than a heavy lorry. Granted, you will see caravans breaking all these rules, even using the outer lane of a motorway which is out of bounds to all trailers, but this is a question of enforcement in the same way as it is for those motorists getting away with the horrendous breaches of the Highway Code every day

Mr Clarkson’s real bug bear is his belief that caravans cause holiday traffic hold ups and he greeted with great glee the experiment on the M5 on the climb out of Bristol which confined caravans to the nearside lane. I have heard nothing of his views regarding the result of that research. This is not surprising as he, along with Jonathan Ross, is the cause of many a quick channel change when his presence spoils one of our favourite programmes. The research showed that most caravan drivers got into the nearside lane for the climb even before the prohibition came into effect and that the worst offenders were fully paid up members of the middle lane club and lorry divers who took up nearside and middle lanes while they seem locked together on conversation. Apparently the middle lane driver is seeking to overtake its stubborn competitor which sometimes seems to go on for 5 minutes.

Why caravanning is picked on by so many is something which deserves a PhD thesis. Motor Sport and luxury road legal sports cars with ridiculous top speeds are apparently perfectly acceptable. Likewise football and coarse fishing because thousands take part and so the disruption and pollution they cause is brushed away, usually at public cost . So before you join the Clarkson tirade brigade just examine your own motives and take a look around and put some toleration lenses in your specs. Failing that take a look at your own leisure footprint and impact before becoming an uninformed snob.

Gathering Winter Fuel

Our county is very green. If you don’t like green you had better not come. I am not referring to politics but to the many woods and green pastures we have. That said our communities try to be green and wood burners of various types are popular. Likewise growing your own vegetables and trying to confine shopping trips to either market days or the local shops are other green habits. Although 25% of the nation’s gas passes us by just a few miles away, we don’t have mains gas. Electricity arrived up here in 1963 so solid fuel, especially wood and coal for Rayburn Regents was very popular. There contemporaries are usually oil fired now with bottled gas and electricity being the other choices. We have several heating and cooking facilities. We have storage heaters for background heating, a Clearview wood burner which provides the bulk of our space heating and a fifty year old York Stove. We also have a solar panel. All these sources will soon feeding a five foot tall heat store which has two Economy 7 immersion heaters for times when one or more of the other inputs are not working. We are hoping that our plumbing system which was installed 50 years ago when we had a gravity fed system from a well across the fields will now make more sense. Ever since we went onto the mains in 1977/8 it has been rather eccentric.

The Yorkist was designed to burn house coal, not anthracite, and will heat water, run a main oven, a warming oven, and will convert to an open fire from a closed stove when it has a hotplate. We have a lot of soup and stews in winter as a result. This very efficient miracle was installed before the electric came and when Welsh coal was available. Unfortunately, coal is no longer cheap and has never been green and so we now burn well seasoned wood and dried shredded hedge cuttings. The only problem is keeping it in at night, especially when a strong westerly is blowing. The solution is to use about 250 kilos of coal per winter, but the guilt weighs much more. There are wood fuels manufactured from waste wood but these are still very expensive (barbecue premium really) and so until the price comes down we will still burn a mix of wood and coal in extreme weather.

For this winter we will be trying some Forest of Dean coal. It is a bit greener in that it won’t have come far, unlike some coal which could, it seems, have come from anywhere on the planet. For years I have been searching in vain for any statement of origin on house coal bags. I can hear the less compromising green folk tut tutting from here and I don’t like using even this small amount, much like I am sure many of you don’t like using gas from Quatar or Oil from Alaska, Nigeria and anywhere else. Not to mention the coal fired power stations and nuclear plants that account for much of your electricity bill. But until a good slow burning recycled product arrives at a reasonable price, we have little alternative for our much loved stove when there is a high wind coming at us from off the hill.

It is estimated that some 70% of our woodland is not being managed and that present supplies could be increased by 2 million tonnes. Although wood is not supposed to go to landfill, there is still a lot of wood being wasted. It is particularly distressing to see developers’ and foresters burning timber rather than putting it into the green energy market. We have a lot of such fuel going to waste and such is the stupidity of the system, if you want to make arrangements to collect such material from factories etc you will have to buy a licence to keep within the law.

Meanwhile, as all kinds of alternative fuels are sough, thousands of old houses are wasting fuel and the costs of doing something about it are a major discouragement to occupiers. The answer lies not in meeting demand per se but in reducing it along with reducing waste. This involves both avoiding wasted heat and wasted potential fuel. But all the promoters of environmental tokenism can do is promote wind and nuclear power, while cutting grants and increasing the complexities and costs for those of us who would like to be micro generators. Even simpler, would be a wide spread subsidy for all types of insulation, including double glazing. However, this is unlikely while environmental tokenism stalks the corridors of Whitehall and bankers’ bonuses need to be paid. Even worse, nothing much is said of the water power which powered so many industries before the shift to fossil fuels and the path to global warming was taken.

Dacier

The Black side of the White Stuff

I was making a list of the perils which our local farmers have to face. Foot and mouth, bovine TB, blue tongue, brucellosis, the weather, market fluctuations and the bank manager are just a few.. The latter is particularly important when jus one of these threats strike. This is not to mention the rising cost of water ( already £1000 a month for many, even with their own private supply), diesel, interest rates, rodent control, feed merchants, fertilizer costs, rent and vets bills. This is by no means a full list. All this has to be taken on in the hope you will have something to sell to someone who wants to buy it.

This week some dairy farmers had to take a bashing. Dairy Farmers Great Britain (DFB) went bust on Thursday. This farmer’s co-op produced 10% of our milk requirements but had been having difficulties for some time. This led to a restructuring, with members having to put up more of an investment if they wanted to stay in the organisation. Apart from contractual obligations trying to find another buyer for your milk is by no means easy so the co-op managed to keep going. Unfortunately the members then found that the price they were getting was. It is now becoming a common complaint from dairy farmers that they are selling for less than the cost of production. While this was happening the Co-operative Society, your local store, put its milk contract out to tender in January. Since they were a major purchaser from DFB the final blow came when the new contract went to Wiseman, Dairy Crest and Yeo Valley.

The receivers have guaranteed to take the members milk for another two weeks and to pay for it. This would seem only fair but it is little consolation because members have lost all their investment in the co-op plus last months milk cheque and the first 2 days of June. The current guess at the average loss for May is £14,000 per member. This will vary according to the size of farm. This means that a major cash flow problem has arisen within the industry and a rush by dairy farmers to find a new purchaser. Their bargaining position will not be strong and the big buyers will drive a hard bargain. There will also be some smaller producers, especially those in remote areas, who will not be seen as good bets due to the costs of collection. As though this is depressing enough, some farmers will have seen the last of up to £90,000 of their investment in DFB. Various reasons are being circulated as to where it all went wrong and we will have to await the receiver’s findings in the autumn. In the meantime we should expect more to leave the industry and imports of milk to increase.

The retailers say they don’t make much profit on milk. This might have something to do milk being used as a lost leader, presumably with the loss being borne by the farmer. They also say that their alleged 50% mark up on hard cheese is not supported by the evidence. Unfortunately the evidence seems to suggest that more upland farmers will be leaving the industry, never to be replaced. In the meantime the consumer should realise that more milk will be imported while home grown milk will come from cows who never see a blade of grass and are fed on imported feed stuff harvested from cleared tropical forest areas. The end losers will of course be all of us as the environment goes down hil and food security becomes a thing of the past.
Dacier

Where compassion quotients run out

Having just returned from a short trip to Birmingham, where my daughter set up this site for us, I thought we had better get started. Over the weekend much was made in the papers of the Times Rich List, the motivation for which seems to be found somewhere in a combination of envy, prurience and the celebrity culture. Of course the dastardly plans of the Chancellor to bring in a draconian rate of 50p in the pound for earnings over £150,000 also featured, along with the recession’s ( when does ‘depression’ become the correct term?) effect on the capital values of rich peoples assets.

I cannot say I felt any sorrow for the less rich , and talk of such people leaving the country led me to feel that perhaps if they are that fickle with regard to their residence then perhaps we should do without them anyway. One commentator claimed that, ‘… you do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer'. Surely, it should have been ‘…by making the rich less rich’. As a mere amateur and a fully paid up citizen perhaps I should have been stunned into silence by the utterance of a professional ( some journalists, you may have noticed, despise the rise of the amateur commentator by means of a blog) but in hard times I cant help feeling that those with loads of money should be expected to pull their weight like the rest of us, as the new age of austerity bites. At least the rich will not be out of a job or out of a home.

Although the view persists among some quarters that the rural communities are littered with rich farmers and minor aristocracy, the truth is that per capita incomes are generally low. Take for example the report in the Independent back in 1999 (27/4), where Ben Gill of the National Farmers Union was reported as saying that hill farmer’s incomes were likely to be no more than £5300 per annum. Things certainly haven’t got better and the drift out of the industry continues. ( listen to BBC radio 4 Farming Today for this continuing theme) Farming is a tough life which has to be conducted against everything nature can throw at you including the inevitable outbreaks of disease. The foot and mouth outbreak has left permanent damage, and TB continues to cost the tax payer millions. Sooner or later our upland areas will start to decline as the industry which formed and maintained it will have gone. Visual amenity will not be the only thing lost. So those of you out there not on the Rich List (national average income of £ 521 per week for men and £412 for women: National Statistics 2008) might be tempted to cast your eyes up to the hills and to heights of riches, and ponder.

We could of course phase out livestock farming, but that is a theme which will be returned to if I manage to keep turning on the computer.

Dacier

First post from Tales from under Black Hill

You have arrived at our site which will attempt to see the world from a slightly remote location. Free from the daily grind of commuting through traffic jams, by train (regularly delayed or cancelled) and free of the pressures of the work place, Tales from under the Black Hill will cover a variety topics. These will include commentaries on rural life and the political and environmental issues in the wider world that can be observed from a hillside location. Perhaps, of more importance, and put bluntly, what someone, at one step removed from urban England’ thinks of what is going on out there, down there and around the world.

As a failed hippy and an inheritor of the ‘Good Life’ approach of the nineteen seventies you can expect a bit of ‘make do and mend’, brushes with the new bureaucracy of the Blair years and a great deal of reasoned sounding off. That’s if there is enough personal energy available to turn the computer on and enough money in the bank to pay for the energy from the national grid. Oh, and by the way, there might be time to let you know how the banjo playing is coming along after forty years of neglecting that noble art.