The Idler

Country Diary: 20

The Idler’s Editor, Tom Hodgkinson, has retired to a Devon farmhouse. Here’s the twentieth part of his diary.

LAST WEEK I built a dry stone wall. It was only about eight inches high and two feet long, but it is a wall, and it is made of stones, and there is no concrete in it or anything like that. I built the wall to raise a flowerbed in the front garden. I spent a day digging out all the stones, digging the soil and adding barrowloads of cow muck. Then Arthur and I planted two hundred tulip and daffodil bulbs, so we hope for a fine display come the spring. One of the advantages of living on a farm is that there is a limitless supply of fantastic compost in the form of cow dung, which I shovel up from the floor of their barns and cart around the place. I’d never aspired to shovelling shit but now I find I quite enjoy it. When you see it as lovely plant food rather than useless crap it puts a whole new complexion on the stuff. I’ve been reading books by the great self sufficiency pioneer John Seymour and has has really clarified the role of compost and muck in the garden. His writing has the great trick of both explaining the reasons behind the various processes behind vegetable growing and making it seem fun and easy. Plus he’s a great and opinionated writer, so reading his book itself is a great pleasure unlike say, IR Heyasson of the Expert series which I now consider to be irredeemably bourgeois.

WE HAD MARK Manning to stay, also known as Zodiac Mindwarp. He is now living in New Orleans with his new girlfriend and they were over here to visit his son who lives nearby. He was most amused by our Crap Jobs book and when I showed him round the farm, with its three eggless chickens and apologetic vegetable patch, he chuckled and said I must be the worst chicken farmer in the world and why didn’t we do a book called Crap Farms. Very funny.

RESPONDING TO MY complaints earlier in the year about strimmer maintenance, a reader has suggested I think about a scythe. No moving parts, no noise. In this idea he is joined by John Seymour, who makes it very clear that in the old days, before the Second World War and the advent of farming machinery, the whole business was a less lonely and less noisy affair. When you worked with horses and scythes rather than tractors and strimmers you could hear the birds sing as you worked. Plus the work was done in large groups rather than by one lone farmer with his earmuffs on.

SEYMOUR says that any tenant would be a fool to plant fruit trees for his landlord and any landlord would be a fool to plant fruit trees for his tenant, and that the tenant/landlord system is one of the reasons why there are so few fruit trees on British farms. I ignored this and went to the nursery to buy a Victoria plum which we planted at the top of the allotment. At the nursery they say it may bear fruit next year, and then should bear a lot fruit the follwing year. By which time the landlord may well have chucked us out or something else cataclysmic may have happened but I fgeel it’s best to live in the now and for now we live here.

A TRIP TO London where I saw Babyshambles play two consecutive nights at the Duke of Clarence in Islington. Both were fun but the second night was particularly special. I met a Babyshambles/Doherty fan called Felix who is also into the Idler. He gave me a CD of Shambles MP3s and a brilliant book, a tale of turn-of-the-century anarchists by GK Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday. I was there with Sacha the photographer, as I am trying to get an interview with Peter Doherty for the Idler. I collared our hero sitting on a scooter outside the pub after the show but he said, “not now, no.” I said, “tomorrow?” He said, “tomorrow, yeah! Here! Oh… no… we’re going to Italy… What about Sunday?” Then he had his photo taken with two Japanese girl fans and I sloped off, saying I’d call his manager.

WE HAVE suddenly embarked on a consumer frenzy - I don’t know why, we still don’t have any money - and yesterday bought a tumble drier and a new CD/tape/radio for the kitchen at a total cost of ��300. Which means more debt and more work. I suggested to Victoria that instead of buying a new CD player we should buy a new guitar and I could sing and entertain the family in the evenings as they did in the old days. Victoria seemed to think that pre-recorded music made by professionals was preferable. I am undeterred and next time I feel I have got ��200 spare I am seriously considering blowing it on an old piano. Then I could learn a new skill.

THERE HAVE BEEN cows in the garden. The farmer moves his cows around from field to field and the other day it was the turn of the field in front of the house. They also trampled up and down the lane outside the house. We had two days of mooing, which was quite nice, before they were moved again. I bumped into the farmer’s wife and she apologised because one of the calves had invaded my vegetable patch. “I hope there isn’t too much damage,” she said. I smiled but then started getting worried. These bullocks are enormous and must weight about three tons. I’d seen what they had done to the grassy knoll outside the house, churning it into mud within twelve hours, so I feared the worst. I went up there to inspect the damage. Each of my six raised beds was dotted with deep holes made by its hooves. The kale plants and the leeks had been left untouched, but he’d eaten all the greenery from the parsnips and he’d also eaten most of the leaves from the plum tree. So it wasn’t too bad, I guess. But I did reflect that instead of the endless digging, rotovating and muck-spreading I’d done last year to prepare the soil, I would have been better off simply putting two cows on the vegetable patch for a week. They would have eaten all the grass, ground up the earth and manured it beautifully. Apparently pigs are even better for this task.