Speaker 1: Got to review this.
Speaker 2: Oh, Rob McFarland's is the River Alive?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the new Robert McFarland got to review that for
Speaker 1: the Critic, which would be a very interesting read. And
Speaker 1: once the embargo is lifted on it, which is on
Speaker 1: April the twenty sixth, we had to talk about it
Speaker 1: because I thought what might be quite a good idea
Speaker 1: is that we ought to go and read more. So
Speaker 1: therefore books that you have read or have just read
Speaker 1: that we ought to occasionally going to talk about that because
Speaker 1: you know, we are all literarty types. And and then
Speaker 1: you know, why do we go and have almost a
Speaker 1: book club? But not a book club? Too bad?
Speaker 2: If it was a book club of Robert McFarlane books, though,
Speaker 2: we wouldn't get anywhere. Because I love his writing. I
Speaker 2: wish I could understand it.
Speaker 3: Have you ever found if you just pretend to be
Speaker 3: the character of whoever's writing it, suddenly you can understand it.
Speaker 2: Does that work for natural history? If I pretend to
Speaker 2: be a grebe?
Speaker 4: Can I ask how do you fight?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: Do you have like a a reading hour? Is there
Speaker 3: a specific time that you read?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: How do you fit that in? Because quite honestly, at
Speaker 3: the moment. It is not a habit I can keep
Speaker 3: up in any way, shape or for no.
Speaker 1: I am with you on that personally, well sat on
Speaker 1: the loo, and before I go to sleep, I'm a
Speaker 1: terrible I've got a very low light reading lamp, so
Speaker 1: I don't keep Claire awake, and I read before I
Speaker 1: go to sleep. And then, because I'm now middle aged,
Speaker 1: I then wake up at about half pass three and
Speaker 1: I have to go for a week too much information,
Speaker 1: and then I come back and I can't go back
Speaker 1: to sleep again immediately, So then I probably read for
Speaker 1: another hour until about half ass four and then doze off,
Speaker 1: and then the alarm clock goes off at six, and
Speaker 1: up I get again, So I get about two three
Speaker 1: hours of reading in it. We're really weird times of
Speaker 1: the day. So yeah, what do you do? Richard?
Speaker 5: One?
Speaker 2: As I trying to catch up with that, because I
Speaker 2: misheard him, I thought you said, have you got a
Speaker 2: reading owl?
Speaker 3: That would be I mean that would be pretty good, Callum,
Speaker 3: does look like the head week.
Speaker 2: So I've got two readings. I do fiction just before bed?
Speaker 2: Are you talking again? Calum?
Speaker 4: Sorry?
Speaker 3: I was just going to share a little story.
Speaker 2: You can have your story in a minute. Oh no,
Speaker 2: have your story now then?
Speaker 4: Fine, No one can specifically about ours.
Speaker 3: We had a sub editor at at work and I
Speaker 3: decided to buy her a present, which was an owl
Speaker 3: that one owl says who and the other says whom
Speaker 3: with a question mark, and she really liked that.
Speaker 2: So what have we done this week?
Speaker 1: Well, you go first, to go first, okay, So why
Speaker 1: you've been Okay, usual stuff. I went off and planted hedges, planting, planted, planting,
Speaker 1: lots of hedges. But today I went to that there London,
Speaker 1: and I had a meeting with my publisher because I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know, but I've got a book
Speaker 1: coming out on the first.
Speaker 2: It's got a book coming out, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: About hedges, and who's publishing it unbound? Yes, and it's
Speaker 1: called Words from the Hedge and I think it's going
Speaker 1: to be huge. Anyway, I had this publisher's meeting with
Speaker 1: the lovely Rena, who is the head of communications, the
Speaker 1: lovely Flow, who is the poor individual who actually had
Speaker 1: to edit the thing, and Patrick Galbraith, who is the
Speaker 1: sort of editor commissioning editor who did it. And so
Speaker 1: we had a chat about all the various events which
Speaker 1: we are going to go to with the book and
Speaker 1: some of the press stuff. So now all the hard
Speaker 1: bit and by me is done. And now my wife
Speaker 1: Claire has organized this huge tour which we're going to do,
Speaker 1: of which the good news is that the Country Slide
Speaker 1: Pod is going to get involved in some of these events,
Speaker 1: going off to things where we can go and sort
Speaker 1: of talk our stuff and hopefully that might inspire people
Speaker 1: to go and hopefully buy my book, so that would
Speaker 1: be quite fun. And then I went out for lunch.
Speaker 2: How close are you coming up to me?
Speaker 1: Cheltenham? Cheltenham Science Festival? Where else am I going? Sort
Speaker 1: of your way? Exeter? That's a bit quite a long
Speaker 1: way south against the Exeter Comedy Festival, Exter Literary Festival.
Speaker 1: Where else am I going?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 1: The game Fare? That's quite sort of west. Most of
Speaker 1: them seem to be rather east southeast now all the
Speaker 1: way down to Kent. But there's nothing actually specifically in
Speaker 1: Wales yet, But who knows it. It's funny when with books,
Speaker 1: I mean, is my first book I've ever published, and
Speaker 1: it is that the whole marketing thing is very weird,
Speaker 1: very weird. I don't understand how it works, but you know,
Speaker 1: I just go where I'm told, really talk about it
Speaker 1: and hedges.
Speaker 3: I'll just wait for it to be on Instagram reel
Speaker 3: and now I'll just give it after twenty five seconds.
Speaker 1: Now what you can do is you wait till it
Speaker 1: comes out on audio, and then you can think, are
Speaker 1: wonderful all those chapters with me just talking at nauseam?
Speaker 3: I think that genuinely, I think that your book would
Speaker 3: be really, really good as an audiobook, because it's not.
Speaker 3: Certain books really don't lend themselves very well to being
Speaker 3: audio books, but certain ones really do. But I find
Speaker 3: it really like I've been editing for like two days
Speaker 3: straight and I've had nothing but podcast and audio books
Speaker 3: because I just I go into auto pilots so I
Speaker 3: can listen and take in information, but obviously I can't
Speaker 3: read while I'm trying to airbrush people's wrinkles out of
Speaker 3: there from under their eyes. So yeah, I rate the
Speaker 3: audio books the only time I get to do it.
Speaker 3: And you know what I've had, I've started doing when
Speaker 3: I go on a dog walk and there's nothing much
Speaker 3: to do, I launch a conversation with chat GPT on
Speaker 3: my phone and you can do like a full conversational
Speaker 3: piece with it. So I've had a full education on
Speaker 3: trying to learn wine. So today I explored what the
Speaker 3: different Italian great varieties had to offer. Also, it helps
Speaker 3: with the pronunciations because I see lots of wine names
Speaker 3: and I'm like, what is this an?
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I've been to Multipli. It's very nice place.
Speaker 1: Any road listen. So we now know what you've done.
Speaker 1: Is that is that Callum has done chat GBT and
Speaker 1: I've been to London and swander around doing literary stuff,
Speaker 1: having lunch in swanky South Kensington restaurants at my friend
Speaker 1: James Chiverini's with fascinating lady and a gentleman briefly today
Speaker 1: who are quite high profile, I suppose, and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to tell you exactly who that they were, but
Speaker 1: they were. They were huge, fun, very entertaining and very
Speaker 1: cutting edge. And I was sat in this restaurant and
Speaker 1: I could see most of the crew from the Daily
Speaker 1: Mail sat on a long table and because of the
Speaker 1: person that I was was sat with was quite high profile.
Speaker 1: You could see them all even though they were drunk
Speaker 1: his lords and onto their seventeenth bottle of wine, you
Speaker 1: could see them going, who's that bloke? Who's with that
Speaker 1: famous geezer and his wife and they were sort of
Speaker 1: waving the waiter over and I can I'm not a
Speaker 1: lip reader, but like I say, who's see. It was
Speaker 1: quite good. Yeah, I was talking about you today. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I was talking to somebody from the Royal Countryside
Speaker 2: Fund and we were talking to them about a project
Speaker 2: we're trying to get funded here and we're saying, you know,
Speaker 2: we want to do hedge laying and coppicing in part
Speaker 2: of that. And the guy said, immediately right, you'll have
Speaker 2: to have the king gup. The King parents mad on
Speaker 2: hedgelaying knows all about the styles, knows all about hedgelaying.
Speaker 2: It's a big deal.
Speaker 1: He's he is the president of the National Hedge Layers Society.
Speaker 1: He has a lot of his hedges laid. Obviously he's
Speaker 1: placing in the Cots Horse and he's got they've started
Speaker 1: laying hedges two at Sandringham arm he has think it's
Speaker 1: telling tales out of school. But he slightly infuriated his
Speaker 1: partridge keepers because he wants to put trees in the
Speaker 1: hedgerows are Sandringham and of course the worst thing, the
Speaker 1: last thing you want for gray partridge conservation are trees
Speaker 1: in your hedgerows because a gray partridge loves a hedge,
Speaker 1: but he hates a tree because he knows that death
Speaker 1: perchaes above in that tree. So yeah, so therefore they
Speaker 1: don't really want that. So the predator purchase are what
Speaker 1: we call trees. I mean, absolutely superb. Put them all
Speaker 1: at the end in a little spinny or a cop
Speaker 1: sort of type affair at the end of a hedge. Fantastic,
Speaker 1: but not along the length of the hedge. But you know,
Speaker 1: he's the king. He gets to do his own shizzle
Speaker 1: and why not. But I don't think it's a very
Speaker 1: good idea personally. If you want great partridges.
Speaker 2: Well you can't say that that's treason.
Speaker 1: Treeson I guarded loyally guarded his mother back in the day,
Speaker 1: sat on a horse. In actual fact, I was mortared
Speaker 1: once on Queen's lifeguard. I would then they weren't actually
Speaker 1: aiming for me. They were aiming for John Major, they
Speaker 1: being the IRA. But it was quite fun as a
Speaker 1: sat a little horse called Lancelot, and the IRA decided
Speaker 1: that they wanted to mortar ten Downing Street. The bass
Speaker 1: plate was about half we was in the back of
Speaker 1: a transit van. It was about half the way down
Speaker 1: from horse Guards, heading towards Fowler Square, and they'd cut
Speaker 1: out the roof of this transit rafah and they lobbed
Speaker 1: these things over there and they landed in the garden
Speaker 1: of because people don't know, it's quite a sizable garden
Speaker 1: at the back of ten Downing Street, and they landed
Speaker 1: in there. But these things washed over my head and
Speaker 1: my little horse Lancelot that I was sat on on
Speaker 1: guard on at the time sort of went bloody hell.
Speaker 1: He wasn't very steady under fire. He dropped to his
Speaker 1: knees and rolled over and I just managed to extract
Speaker 1: myself from underneath. And some pillock of a rayal military
Speaker 1: policeman from the SIB, which is their sort of version
Speaker 1: of the CID, said what did you do at the time?
Speaker 1: And I was a fairly young trooper and I was saying, well,
Speaker 1: I was upside down because my horse fell over. He goes,
Speaker 1: what could you have done to stop it? And my
Speaker 1: and the guard commander is a court force called Fletcher,
Speaker 1: and he was a right tough He ended up going
Speaker 1: into the Foreign Legion in the end, and he said,
Speaker 1: what do you think he was King dinner do with
Speaker 1: it smacking out of the air with his king sword
Speaker 1: and this military policeman sort of I think I won't
Speaker 1: argue with you, and yes, all right, fair point. You
Speaker 1: know what I'm I supposed to do. I'm wearing something
Speaker 1: that went out fashion and Queen Victoria's reign. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that's my I can't even remember how we even got here,
Speaker 1: but we got here, and you now know it's just one.
Speaker 2: It's just one tumbling thing after another. I mean sometimes
Speaker 2: it's like throwing a load of bingo balls into a river.
Speaker 2: This podcast sort start off with an order you chuck
Speaker 2: them all in and then just stuff comes out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Plastic pollution in rivers. There you are, what about you? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It is your bit now, so you are now going
Speaker 2: to talk to us about conservation and Milton Keynes? How
Speaker 2: many bitcoin between here and the moon and this spaniel
Speaker 2: that you met last week?
Speaker 3: Due to Trump tariffs? Bitcoins not reaching the moon just yet?
Speaker 2: Is it not?
Speaker 3: Beat as Day? Did a beat as Day? It's good
Speaker 3: fun as fun as beat as days are missing sausage
Speaker 3: roll Sam out of the lineup a beats Day? Very disappointed? No,
Speaker 3: sausage rolls on the last day.
Speaker 2: That did you miss Sam or did you miss sausage rolls?
Speaker 4: Both in equal measure?
Speaker 2: All right, as where's a hierarchy of needs on that.
Speaker 3: Some say he's actually part man, part sausage roll Others
Speaker 3: say it's more of a sixty forty split.
Speaker 1: But has he has he changed since we gave him
Speaker 1: a knighthood? You know? Is he now a bit more aloof?
Speaker 1: Is that why though I'm not luring myself to come
Speaker 1: on a beat's day, I've got a knighthood. I'm not
Speaker 1: hanging around with all these scum he sort of.
Speaker 4: Let's be honest, He's probably got invites.
Speaker 3: For the rest of the season after that.
Speaker 1: I think this is the case. Anyone who gets mentioned
Speaker 1: on this podcast now is both blessed and damned because
Speaker 1: wherever they go, they said, you mentioned whether.
Speaker 3: Or if we don't like them, then Kim and the
Speaker 3: rest of Korea make sure they get taken.
Speaker 2: Out number one in career again.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: Do you know what? I went looking for the Korean
Speaker 1: embassy today because I had someone told me that apparently
Speaker 1: the North Korean Embassy is actually in a suburb somewhere
Speaker 1: in a semi detached behind a private hedge. So I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I'm for japes and a laugh. I will go and
Speaker 1: look for the yes for some Korean banter. So I walked, obviously,
Speaker 1: to walk to Old Portico. You've got to go past
Speaker 1: so many of the embassies. You go past the French embassy,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I'm not going to go and have
Speaker 1: the French one. That's got no comedy value at all.
Speaker 1: Then I came to the Panamanian embassy and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: this will be fun. So there weren't that many people
Speaker 1: walking along there, so I got my phone out and
Speaker 1: turned it onto reverse. So I was going to do
Speaker 1: a little thing, and suddenly this man came out and
Speaker 1: he said, you can't film here, mate, And I went,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm just doing this for a podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't film me. I went oh, And so I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not getting in trouble with the Panamanians. You know what.
Speaker 1: Look what happened to McMillan over the Panama Canal. There
Speaker 1: was all sorts of hassle. So I walked on and
Speaker 1: I thought, that piece of comedy gold is now at
Speaker 1: an end.
Speaker 2: Anyway, if you were in a public place, well, don't
Speaker 2: get all I want to get all photographery about you.
Speaker 3: But technically I don't think he's got any rights to
Speaker 3: tell you. But then maybe yeah, if you're in a
Speaker 3: public place, public right away, he's got.
Speaker 2: Film members, he's Otherwise Google street View wouldn't exist.
Speaker 1: No, No, I mean I have to say that there
Speaker 1: is one place up in I think it's an outskirts
Speaker 1: of Newcastle that they just put this thing on a
Speaker 1: WhatsApp group and said the Google vans coming around and
Speaker 1: just every other snapshot as you go along on this
Speaker 1: street view thing, just Jordie's sat there with their penises
Speaker 1: exposed because they just stood there in the windows or
Speaker 1: garden gates of that.
Speaker 2: Every time I've been to Newcastle, that would lead me
Speaker 2: to believe that you could have just done that on
Speaker 2: any random day and filmed in a direction and you
Speaker 2: would have seen somebody in a state of undress.
Speaker 1: They have got a great sense of humor, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they are the funniest. So anyway, we now onto have
Speaker 1: you said what you've done other than oh no, you
Speaker 1: did some other exciting things, isn't you.
Speaker 3: I was also in London. I had a couple of
Speaker 3: days in London, which is quite nice.
Speaker 2: Went round.
Speaker 4: I went to Fallow restaurant.
Speaker 2: Oh like them.
Speaker 3: They've got an exceptional YouTube channel and if you want
Speaker 3: to learn to cook like I don't know, fancy sauces
Speaker 3: and stuff, the Fallow YouTube channel is probably the best
Speaker 3: resource because it's actual chef.
Speaker 2: Stuff and works as well. It's done from a very
Speaker 2: practical point of view.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's there's not much messing. It's straight in. This
Speaker 3: is exactly this how you make it taste amazing And
Speaker 3: I've turned a lot of those recipes and stuff in
Speaker 3: there with Partridges, Pheasants all that jazz made amazing sources
Speaker 3: and pimped up a lot of game meet using that.
Speaker 3: So when I got the opportunity to go to the restaurant,
Speaker 3: I was blown away and I just was, yeah, it
Speaker 3: was really good.
Speaker 2: Are working there or are you just passing around?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: Just drinking and eating and having a laugh.
Speaker 1: And it was.
Speaker 3: I'd go as far to say it's the best meal
Speaker 3: I've had in London.
Speaker 4: That good.
Speaker 3: Oh god, Yeah, it's really worth going Fallow. Saint James's
Speaker 3: wholeheartedly recommend. I had a beef rib that. I mean,
Speaker 3: it didn't look like much at all, but it was
Speaker 3: smoky and incredibly beefy and probably one of the finest
Speaker 3: pieces of meat I've ever tasted in my life. It
Speaker 3: was just so unbelievably good. So highly recommend that place if.
Speaker 4: You get a chance.
Speaker 3: But I also went to the Harold's Food Market during
Speaker 3: that time and they're selling lots of game meat down
Speaker 3: there as well, which was really interesting. Partridges you can
Speaker 3: buy a wood pigeon, you can buy mallards everything down there.
Speaker 3: I think that's the best selection of game meat I've
Speaker 3: seen anywhere. I think even my local butchers hasn't got
Speaker 3: quite as much as that in the in the window,
Speaker 3: and they show a fair bit.
Speaker 2: Fortland's had a good pile last year as well. I
Speaker 2: don't know if they have if they kept up with it,
Speaker 2: but they sort of. Everyone seemed to go over to
Speaker 2: a decent supply of game. But it is nice. It's
Speaker 2: weird you have to go right into the middle of
Speaker 2: London to see it, whereas a lot of provincial towns
Speaker 2: you you struggle to find game of that regularity in
Speaker 2: that that's equality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, the same with Borough Market. Borough Market is
Speaker 1: a wash with every single conceivable but a game you
Speaker 1: want to have their you know, you think where I
Speaker 1: went for lunch today, I had a venison shank, and
Speaker 1: then when lap along two doors down is open, that's
Speaker 1: nothing but game. So it's actually, bizarrely is that the
Speaker 1: Capital is best served whether it be for butchers or
Speaker 1: for restaurants, that's where you get wild meat, that's it.
Speaker 1: Whereas hick where it's actually shot and processed, and then
Speaker 1: it's a bit seemed to exist, but it was ever Thus,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there used to be special trains
Speaker 1: used to go from great Yarmor filled with game and
Speaker 1: wild fowl into the Capital. So I suppose we're actually
Speaker 1: only repeating the pattern that's always been.
Speaker 4: That funny.
Speaker 2: You're burying the lead a little bit here, callum as well,
Speaker 2: because have you been moonlighting on any other productions.
Speaker 3: My final thing was I was invited thanks to thanks
Speaker 3: to your good reputations and the fact that you two
Speaker 3: had already done it onto the Guns on Pegs Podcasts.
Speaker 3: Had a very extensive, long conversation with the chaps on there,
Speaker 3: and it was it was really good. It was a
Speaker 3: really good time. Actually, it was really fun. I listened
Speaker 3: back and I was trying not to be too controversial, but.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 4: Obviously I didn't try that hard.
Speaker 1: I think they did very well. They let you talk
Speaker 1: and they asked you a question. They pulled the ripcord
Speaker 1: and they let you talk. And I think that narrative
Speaker 1: of the let's talk to Callum the fascinated observer and
Speaker 1: you showed your fascination and some of the questions that
Speaker 1: you asked of it. You know, why is that normal?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: I think particularly about the clothing was very interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shuffle, shofflegate.
Speaker 1: Yes, shogate. Yeah. And I think there was a lot
Speaker 1: of it's worth while listening to the Guns on Pegs
Speaker 1: podcast anyway, because obviously we are not a shooting podcast people,
Speaker 1: but they are.
Speaker 3: I did have to get that across several times because
Speaker 3: I just going to make sure and probably there's there's
Speaker 3: I So a point I do want to make is
Speaker 3: they also ask excellent follow up questions to lead me
Speaker 3: into stuff.
Speaker 1: When I sort of follow up questions, they ask Callum.
Speaker 3: Ramble onto non sequiturs, which unbelievably I have a tendency
Speaker 3: to do. And so some of my favorite podcast co
Speaker 3: hosts also have a tendency to ramble into non secutars
Speaker 3: on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: So yes, I've never done anything like that.
Speaker 2: I've never had Tuesday, Build Build Pump.
Speaker 3: So yes, it was a really good podcast. I thoroughly
Speaker 3: enjoyed it. I should imagine there's probably some people listening
Speaker 3: that have come across from there, which I'd like to
Speaker 3: say welcome.
Speaker 1: They've left already, don't worry, they probably have as.
Speaker 3: You talk about a load of Bill hooks, hey, and
Speaker 3: then yeah, just you know, there is actually some good
Speaker 3: content on this podcast episodes including tree Man, Harry Hoblin,
Speaker 3: Harry Hoblin, Demand the Legend. It's actually a really good
Speaker 3: episode and not just as ambling like this any any
Speaker 3: other leons.
Speaker 1: Obviously, Chalon Davis, he was excellent, and I'm really particularly
Speaker 1: looking forward to was it week after next? Is We've
Speaker 1: got and Dobson on? Yeah, we've got Andy Dogson on
Speaker 1: talking about reed beds.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm particularly excited about this because I know bogger
Speaker 2: all about it. I get I get to ask loads
Speaker 2: of questions like what is a reed? What do you
Speaker 2: do with the reeds? What the reeds taste off? Can
Speaker 2: I eat reeds? Can you burn reeds?
Speaker 4: Can you give me a taster?
Speaker 3: So am I right in thinking that they when they
Speaker 3: there's something about regenerating the habitat when they take the
Speaker 3: reeds out.
Speaker 4: Is that a thing, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, basically Andy is from he comes from about
Speaker 1: I think four generations of thatchers and they are the
Speaker 1: bee's knees. And obviously here in Eastanglia, one of the
Speaker 1: major mediums that you use for thatching is water read
Speaker 1: fratchur my tease Australis, I think is the Latin name
Speaker 1: for it. And the interesting thing where he's going to
Speaker 1: come from is the fact that we do not use
Speaker 1: British read half as much, three quarters as much, seven
Speaker 1: eighths as much as we used to do, because there
Speaker 1: are certain organizations that say, don't cut it, you know,
Speaker 1: or we've got to leave it alone otherwise the bittens
Speaker 1: will suffer. And so we end up if we're going
Speaker 1: to look after historic buildings with having to import water
Speaker 1: read from Ukraine, from Turkey and Egypt and places like that,
Speaker 1: which of course is not ecologically sustainable. And there's also
Speaker 1: a big question, and this is the thing I really
Speaker 1: want to understand from him, is that is it actually
Speaker 1: yet another thing that you're getting certain sort of wildlife
Speaker 1: NGOs saying, oh, leave everything alone. It will be fine,
Speaker 1: Is it not? Actually that these habitats are suffering as
Speaker 1: a result, and that we are also missing out on
Speaker 1: getting this sustainable product which we could be using on that.
Speaker 1: So I'm really looking forward to it because I don't
Speaker 1: think another podcast would have thought about reed beds. But
Speaker 1: they are such vital habitats they need to be managed.
Speaker 1: And we're asking someone who's about to get his doctorate
Speaker 1: in reeds. I don't think there's another read doctor anywhere.
Speaker 1: But he's also really understands it because he's a proper
Speaker 1: thattor and he's from a family of Thatchers.
Speaker 2: And what I was going to say, if he's a
Speaker 2: fourth generation Thatcher, does that mean that somewhere in the
Speaker 2: village is someone with a surname minor that absolutely hates him.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: I've been sitting on that joke for about three minutes now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish I'd sat back on it.
Speaker 3: If you're waiting patiently not listening to a word, let's.
Speaker 1: Shut him up by asking what have you been up
Speaker 1: to this week? Richard?
Speaker 2: I've been up to absolutely nothing.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: I wrote an article for Scribehound on wild garlic and
Speaker 2: why you're not doing enough with wild garlic. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: Ramsoon's is a better name for it, wild garlic, sort
Speaker 2: of the weird modern name Ramsen's is more is probably
Speaker 2: the most common English name. And over here in Wales
Speaker 2: it's crab a crab a gavier. But rams AND's you
Speaker 2: get place names named after wild garlic. So Ramsey and
Speaker 2: it's in Suffolk. Ramsey, yeah, yeah, named after the Ramsey bottom.
Speaker 1: My father's family. A lot of them come from Ramsey.
Speaker 1: And I think it's actually Huntingdon shere? Was it Lincoln shere?
Speaker 1: I can't remember that sort of fends man.
Speaker 2: As well, there's Ramsey there. I didn't know that most
Speaker 2: places with rams in somewhere in the name in England
Speaker 2: are more likely to be doe with wild garlic than
Speaker 2: they are to do with the sheep. Well, I never
Speaker 2: there you go. That's that's that's your bit of value
Speaker 2: for today and for everything else. Like what you do
Speaker 2: with wild garlic, I've broke it down into five or
Speaker 2: six different things, so you do it throughout the sea.
Speaker 2: You just do one thing, So you do stuff different
Speaker 2: stuff with the young leaves than the mature leaves, and
Speaker 2: then the flowers and you can pickle them and do
Speaker 2: all sorts of things of them so cool.
Speaker 3: So I found my first wow garlic, that's what.
Speaker 4: What do you call it?
Speaker 3: Ram ram ramsons?
Speaker 4: So what do you do with the young lea?
Speaker 3: To found my first ones when I was pigeon rooshing
Speaker 3: about a week ago, and I picked them and left
Speaker 3: them in the fridge to die, but I have every
Speaker 3: intention of actually using it.
Speaker 2: So raw, fresh and raw to pick them, wash them,
Speaker 2: make sure it's actually wild garlic, and then you can
Speaker 2: eat those raw. They're the ones for salads and things
Speaker 2: like that. The more mature they get, the more they'll
Speaker 2: benefit from a little bit of heat and a little
Speaker 2: bit of cooking. So March tends to be when you
Speaker 2: start to get the mature ones. But the young ones
Speaker 2: now they've got a real kick to them, So they're
Speaker 2: the ones are going salads and sandwiches and things like that.
Speaker 2: And the flowers are the best bit though, wait for
Speaker 2: the flowers to come up, although actually the seed heads
Speaker 2: that are left behind after the flowers have died back,
Speaker 2: you collect those and you put them in a side
Speaker 2: of vinegar or a white wine vinegar, and you make
Speaker 2: a sort of a.
Speaker 4: Garlice caper that sounds good.
Speaker 2: I nick that from a chef at La Manoir because
Speaker 2: I was trying to knock me down on the price
Speaker 2: of forage, so you told me a recipe as part payment.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite things was to get the wild
Speaker 3: garlic and you hold it used something like a I
Speaker 3: think I used cold press rape seed oil, and I
Speaker 3: held it at a temperature of like eighty something celsius,
Speaker 3: so it didn't like quite fry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's quite volatile the compounds in there.
Speaker 3: And then gave it like ten minutes or something, and
Speaker 3: there was a trick that would make it a very
Speaker 3: deep green and ensure that you didn't wash all the
Speaker 3: color out. And you had this stunning wild garlic oil.
Speaker 3: And I saw it on I don't know it was
Speaker 3: a TikTok or something. I followed it to a tea
Speaker 3: and it come out absolutely perfectly. And I never wrote
Speaker 3: the notes down. So if anybody knows exactly what the
Speaker 3: trick to make in a wild garlic oil to be
Speaker 3: a deep, rich green, you.
Speaker 4: Just let me know.
Speaker 2: So the thing with that is, I bet that didn't
Speaker 2: taste much of garlic at all, because the more you
Speaker 2: mess around with garlic and wild garlic and temperatures the
Speaker 2: more you lose a flavor of garlic. So this is
Speaker 2: another sort of chef secret. When you have wild garlic
Speaker 2: whatever and in a restaurant and it really tastes of garlic,
Speaker 2: chances are they've lobbed some bull garlic in there as well.
Speaker 2: Because wild garlic is you should think about it more
Speaker 2: as an onion that tastes a little bit of garlic
Speaker 2: rather than a true garlic. So the more you mess
Speaker 2: with it, the less it tastes off garlic. It's this
Speaker 2: weird thing out the really popular foraged items for restaurants.
Speaker 2: Often you have to mess with to actually meet the
Speaker 2: customer expectation. It's like chicken O the Woods. People always say, oh,
Speaker 2: chicken O of the wods, it's wonderful. No, Chicken of
Speaker 2: the Woods generally tastes of butter because that's what it's
Speaker 2: swimming in when it served you on the plate. And
Speaker 2: it doesn't have nothing wrong with deep flavor at all. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, butter's fine, but it is it's a delivery
Speaker 2: vessel for butter. Mostly puffballs.
Speaker 1: They don't taste a lot, did they really.
Speaker 2: No, But they'll absorb the flavor of whatever you put
Speaker 2: them with At Fallow.
Speaker 3: We had a cabbage and it had like a little
Speaker 3: truffle thing next to it, so they they're very transparent.
Speaker 3: So I googled what they did to this cabbage to
Speaker 3: make it taste unbelievable, and it turns out they confee
Speaker 3: it in butter, then fry it in butter, then cook
Speaker 3: it in butter, and then smother it with butter, and
Speaker 3: then put butter on it, and then smokes and butter
Speaker 3: and then put butter with it. It's basically just a
Speaker 3: buttered cabbage. There's a lot of butter in it. Let
Speaker 3: me just tell you.
Speaker 2: I was going to go on a limb going on
Speaker 2: a limb there and suggest that recipe might be French.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it is one of the best.
Speaker 1: It is peculiar. A country that is renowned for not
Speaker 1: really wanting to die in war is more than happy
Speaker 1: to kill itself and others by their cuisine. Not the
Speaker 1: fact it tastes bad. It's just there's just a half
Speaker 1: attack on a plate.
Speaker 2: What a way to go though, smoking a gal naked
Speaker 2: from the waist down eating.
Speaker 1: Well, it's cabbage.
Speaker 3: No, I wouldn't like that, just just for the obituary.
Speaker 3: Choking on a steak bad Oyster.
Speaker 2: Hello everybody. Richard here the one in Wales, not the
Speaker 2: hedge laying Suffolk. One week we got Hugh, my mate
Speaker 2: from Petrovelin Farm, to give me a little sort of
Speaker 2: audio summary of what he's doing with yogurt. Well, a
Speaker 2: few of you suggested that we should do that every
Speaker 2: week and give a little bit of time over to
Speaker 2: a small rural business so they can describe what they
Speaker 2: do and people can hear about their services. We put
Speaker 2: a thing out on x and this is one of
Speaker 2: the responses we got. We did get a few others.
Speaker 2: They're a bit weird, so we've shoved those at the
Speaker 2: end of the episode. You can hear them there. But
Speaker 2: for now, this is Jonathan.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 6: My name is Jonathan Harpm and I'll run a company
Speaker 6: called Ethic collabora Culture and we're based there in the
Speaker 6: Fens and we're a triecare company. We specialize in optimors
Speaker 6: and the trees health threats into our natural law span
Speaker 6: and we do this utilize and some very fancy kit
Speaker 6: we can order decompact the soil injecting beneficial natural nutrients
Speaker 6: straight into it. We inject trees again nutent strain in
Speaker 6: the tree system, or in certain cases we can even
Speaker 6: pick them up and move them out of the way
Speaker 6: using one of their tree spades.
Speaker 1: Um that will do.
Speaker 2: And you can read more about Jonathan's services at Ethicalarborder
Speaker 2: Culture dot co dot uk. Now back to the show.
Speaker 2: Talking of inappropriate behavior, We've had an email, so if
Speaker 2: you want to there's an email address in our show
Speaker 2: notes if you want to send us some stuff people do,
Speaker 2: and we've we've got some future events lined up that
Speaker 2: came about from those emails. But this one I'll make
Speaker 2: them anonymous, so they say, dear all, I am a
Speaker 2: retired solicitor from Oldham, so not your target audience. I
Speaker 2: am sure, no, that's that's that's within the bracket. However,
Speaker 2: I enjoy listening to your conversations, even though they are
Speaker 2: occasionally a bit laddish callum real, especially while working outside
Speaker 2: in my garden. So I'm going to skip ahead a
Speaker 2: bit here. I feel that I have no concept as
Speaker 2: to whether most of our agricultural land is farmed by
Speaker 2: huge landowners slash companies on an industrial scale, using agrichemicals
Speaker 2: with no thought for wildlife, and merely owning land for
Speaker 2: agricultural relief purposes. Alternatively, is most of our land farmed
Speaker 2: by small family farmers in a more traditional manner with
Speaker 2: an innate love of their land and animals who will
Speaker 2: suffer most from the odious loss of agricultural relief. Do
Speaker 2: we live in a countryside largely stripped of all its wildlife?
Speaker 2: Or is the countryside in a healthier state than that?
Speaker 2: Is the countryside becoming more industrialized in its management and
Speaker 2: unfriendly towards wildlife, or has there been a step change
Speaker 2: towards a more environmentally friendly way of farming over recent years.
Speaker 2: What is the balance between these extremes. I would appreciate
Speaker 2: your insight as non farmers, but with a strong relationship
Speaker 2: with the land. There you go.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's you know, that's rather serendipitous that should come through,
Speaker 1: And thank you very much for bothering to actually ask us.
Speaker 1: I think that it's rather ab aside, because I'm writing
Speaker 1: an article at the moment for the Critic, which is
Speaker 1: about how we actually got from the about the time
Speaker 1: when the repeal of the corn laws in eighteen forty six,
Speaker 1: forty eight something like that, and how that shift, how
Speaker 1: government then decided that it was better for Britain to
Speaker 1: import food than it was to grow it here. Ok.
Speaker 1: And so what was the corn law that the corn laws, Well,
Speaker 1: there was a I think we're basically we put tariffs
Speaker 1: against the imported goods and that was a Tory thing. Wig.
Speaker 1: Someone was someone called free traders, and what they believed
Speaker 1: was it was better that you should have free trade
Speaker 1: so that we could import stuff because ultimately what it
Speaker 1: would do would force the price down. So therefore, rather
Speaker 1: than ensuring that our farmers earned lots of money that
Speaker 1: if you imported food from largely the colonies, because of
Speaker 1: course we were, rather we had a pretty win win
Speaker 1: situation is that if we imported loads of wheat from Canada,
Speaker 1: well we were still getting a drawer out of it,
Speaker 1: because you know, Canada part of the Empire. If we
Speaker 1: imported once we had frozen transportation and we were able
Speaker 1: to import lamb from the colonies of New Zealand and Australia,
Speaker 1: well then fantastic, we could import that, but we were
Speaker 1: still getting a drawer out of because we owned those
Speaker 1: two countries as well. So therefore the free traders were
Speaker 1: were very much that we could import food. And that
Speaker 1: sounds like a history point. You know what the hell's
Speaker 1: that got to do with today? But what it was
Speaker 1: the start of was the driving down of food prices.
Speaker 1: So therefore farmers in this country had to try and
Speaker 1: compete against countries where they could have cheaper production costs,
Speaker 1: either because the scale that they could achieve, or otherwise
Speaker 1: in more modern days. Let's be perfectly honest. You know,
Speaker 1: if we're important costs, labor costs, kenyon beans, well, because
Speaker 1: a kenyan is going to get paid buttons compared with
Speaker 1: what you're going to have to pay someone for here.
Speaker 1: And so of course all these various things that happened.
Speaker 1: So actually from the repeal of the corn laws, you've
Speaker 1: had this issue. Now, why does that affect wildlife? Well,
Speaker 1: largely because the moment you have to start cutting costs,
Speaker 1: you increase in industrialization, you increase mechanization, you reduce the
Speaker 1: numbers of people who are working on the land. So
Speaker 1: therefore a winter work only fifty sixty years ago, but
Speaker 1: certainly before the Second World War, winter work on a
Speaker 1: farm in Suffolk would have been right, lads, with all
Speaker 1: the corners in the grain store, find and do the
Speaker 1: off you go, you eight men, you're going off to
Speaker 1: go and do the hedgerow management. Well you don't have
Speaker 1: that anymore now because you've just got a flail mower,
Speaker 1: and so therefore you've reduced all these people. So our
Speaker 1: addiction to cheap food, aided and arebtted and enabled by
Speaker 1: government has, i would argue, is responsible for the decline
Speaker 1: in wildlife. And so when you think about it, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, when we joined what we know as
Speaker 1: as the European Union, the UK spent thirty one percent
Speaker 1: of its monthly income on buying food, right, that's how
Speaker 1: much it costs. By the time we left in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: we bought twice the amount of food for only ten
Speaker 1: percent of our monthly budget. So food had becomes so
Speaker 1: cheap by that point. Now something's got to give. If
Speaker 1: you're going to grow food for that cheap, it means
Speaker 1: that wildlife's going to take the hit because you're going
Speaker 1: to increasingly rely upon sprays, you're going to increasing rely
Speaker 1: upon lots and lots of artificial fertilizers. You're going to
Speaker 1: try and eke out every single inch of value from
Speaker 1: that field. So it's an interesting point. But I would
Speaker 1: say that if you're looking for a point a finger
Speaker 1: of blame. It's the consumer, but largely it's the fault
Speaker 1: of successive governments of various hues insisting that food must
Speaker 1: be cheap, aiding and abetting supermarkets who forced that price
Speaker 1: down because they wanted to go into price wars, and
Speaker 1: our farmers were forced into a position where they are
Speaker 1: and wildlife has suffered as a result.
Speaker 3: So let me just need that in a nutshell, I'm
Speaker 3: trying to get my head around it. So we've made
Speaker 3: food to a price that's that's the cheapest it's ever been.
Speaker 3: And as a result, then that the farms aren't having
Speaker 3: enough having as many staff as previously.
Speaker 1: More industrialization, more specialization, right.
Speaker 3: So then that's so the need for food costs to
Speaker 3: be cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper has driven
Speaker 3: less people and more and less funding for wildlife, I suppose.
Speaker 3: Or is it just just the practices of the farming.
Speaker 1: I think the practices of the farming have certainly been
Speaker 1: up until we got elms in. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: it was about eighty three. Margaret Thatcher was surprisingly green.
Speaker 1: It's something that I mean, she was talking about climate
Speaker 1: change very early on. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: she was a chemist, she understood the science, and she
Speaker 1: brought in the first environmental schemes and funding for farmers
Speaker 1: back in about eighty three because they started realizing, ooh,
Speaker 1: all this industrial farming which we had been pushing so
Speaker 1: that everyone can eat as much as they want for
Speaker 1: ten bob and a rabbit skin has had some repercussions.
Speaker 1: And then from the eighties through to elms. You know,
Speaker 1: now we've got it's completely different. Changed.
Speaker 2: And eighty one was a Wildlife in Countryside Act, which
Speaker 2: was landmark piece of legislation which encapsulated all ecological management
Speaker 2: into law in one place, rather than being scattered across
Speaker 2: twenty different things. Somebody once told me that the Wildlife
Speaker 2: in Countryside Act was effectively the Antiquities Act recobbled together
Speaker 2: and were sort of a find and replaced for schedule
Speaker 2: monument and put schedule of protected species. And that's why
Speaker 2: I read so weirdly in places when you look at
Speaker 2: the protection given to some areas and not others.
Speaker 3: So what is I don't really know what the elms,
Speaker 3: elms trees.
Speaker 2: We used to have.
Speaker 1: Elms, the Environmental Land Management Scheme. When we left the EU,
Speaker 1: all our funding for farming came under the Common Agricultural Policy,
Speaker 1: and so because that was more or less invented for
Speaker 1: supporting peasant Portuguese farmers and French farmers who are and
Speaker 1: tirettle farms because you know, they have these weird rules
Speaker 1: about inheritance and whatnot, and got time little farms. It
Speaker 1: was designed for us in Britain where average farm size
Speaker 1: was slightly larger. The Common Agricultural Policy with its basic
Speaker 1: payment scheme which gave you a amount of money for
Speaker 1: the amount of land that you owed, that was a
Speaker 1: really good thing, but it was slightly the thing that
Speaker 1: encouraged things like milk lakes and grain mountains and what not.
Speaker 1: And so then they brought in which was funded through
Speaker 1: which was across Europe. This the comryside stewardship schemes there,
Speaker 1: which was supposed to enable you to go and apply
Speaker 1: for grant funding to do good things for wildlife. But
Speaker 1: it also it subsidized your growing food basically by this
Speaker 1: basic payment scheme. And the more money that you got
Speaker 1: was the bigger the farmer you were. You got more
Speaker 1: money if you had more acres. Now, when we left
Speaker 1: the European Union, Michael Gove came up with this brilliant
Speaker 1: idea because he was the Defra secretary. I think is
Speaker 1: a brilliant idea. And actually most farmers thought it was
Speaker 1: a good idea, and less possibly it was a little
Speaker 1: bit ropy for some of the upland far because they're
Speaker 1: so complicated what they have to do up there, and
Speaker 1: their margin on what they earn is so tiny. But
Speaker 1: the Environmental land Management scheme was this thing is saying
Speaker 1: we're going to replace all that European stuff and we're
Speaker 1: going to pay you public money for public good. And
Speaker 1: in other words, what that was was we aren't going
Speaker 1: to subsidize your food. We're going to try and make
Speaker 1: you have a nice, wonderful We're going to do all
Speaker 1: our politicians stuff and work behind the scenes to go
Speaker 1: and get you fantastic trade deal all around the world
Speaker 1: so you can export food and we're going to make
Speaker 1: sure those nasty supermarkets don't rip you off. But the
Speaker 1: money we're going to give you is to improve air quality,
Speaker 1: improve habitats for wildlife, water quality, all the public good
Speaker 1: in the environment. That's the idea and it worked. It
Speaker 1: worked like an absolute charm. This is the weird thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, Michael Gove, I would argue was the greatest
Speaker 1: death ro secretary we have had in I don't know
Speaker 1: how long, And of course, in typical conservative mindset saying oh,
Speaker 1: you've done quite well at that, let's go to move
Speaker 1: you to somewhere else exactly, it seems to be that
Speaker 1: was going yeah, yeah, yes, well done, We're going to
Speaker 1: go and shove you off and do something else instead.
Speaker 2: You can't possibly have two years of competence in one go.
Speaker 4: And have you thought about foreign policy?
Speaker 1: Yes exactly, Yes, we're not going to put you off,
Speaker 1: and you're going to say how are you with tanks?
Speaker 1: Do your tank is? Yes? I do. It's one of
Speaker 1: those things of the gun on right off you go
Speaker 1: m O D for you mate. You know he was
Speaker 1: made the he was made the dutchy of Lancaster book.
Speaker 1: You don't even know where lancashyere is anyway, Look.
Speaker 3: Did so did they cut? So they cut food subsidies
Speaker 3: and then with the intention of backing up elms as
Speaker 3: something for environmental good to best practice farming.
Speaker 1: Best practice farming precisely that so that we were going
Speaker 1: to have where the idea was supposed to be that
Speaker 1: the farmers could actually make money from their food is
Speaker 1: the fact that they would create market forces that paid
Speaker 1: a fair price for they did. But also is that
Speaker 1: all the environmental good they had, because let's be honest,
Speaker 1: seventy two percent of our land mass still is farmland.
Speaker 1: They were saying, well, you're gonna have to look after
Speaker 1: that for wildlife, and we the consumer, the taxpayer benefit
Speaker 1: by the fact we've got cleaner water, cleaner air, we've
Speaker 1: got more wildlife about, we've got more trees, we've got
Speaker 1: more hedges, we've got floristic margins, we've got meadow land back.
Speaker 1: We have got all the things that all the environmentalists wanted.
Speaker 1: So to ask that question, is the countryside and a
Speaker 1: healthy estate? I think that little bit there is it Well,
Speaker 1: I think it was heading the right way if i'd
Speaker 1: be perfuse. I'm not a Tory. I ripped up my
Speaker 1: Conservative Party membership card quite a long while ago now,
Speaker 1: But I think that Gove created something and he got
Speaker 1: some support from Rishi Sunak that really made it a
Speaker 1: workable thing. It was so good that the Labor Party
Speaker 1: when they came into Powis and we're not going to
Speaker 1: touch elms, was there the thing they said? Then they
Speaker 1: had them going with this twenty two billion pound black
Speaker 1: hole shizzle that they just explain all their stuff away
Speaker 1: and then they now buggered it all up. But I
Speaker 1: think it was a great scheme, I really do, and
Speaker 1: I think that wildlife was getting in a better way.
Speaker 2: Isn't it quite telling that we're on a Britain's premiere
Speaker 2: rural podcast depending on whose chart you were consult and
Speaker 2: not one of us as a tory. That's that interesting?
Speaker 1: Isn't that very insightful? I think To answer this question,
Speaker 1: and it's a very wide question, and it's one that
Speaker 1: probably would take about two hours to fully answer, the
Speaker 1: countryside has become more industrialized, and it's become more industrialized
Speaker 1: because it had to. But this started back a long,
Speaker 1: long while ago. You know. You think of how we
Speaker 1: in Britain have always been very very good at inventing
Speaker 1: stuff to make farming easier. And you know Bake Well farmer,
Speaker 1: George Jethrow Tull, all those people, they all invented stuff
Speaker 1: to make farming easier. So we've always been industrializing. But
Speaker 1: I think the financial incentives to be more industrialized came
Speaker 1: from government, ah and it necessitated the decimation of wildlife
Speaker 1: and the wider environment, because the only way that farmers
Speaker 1: could keep their head above water and feed the beast
Speaker 1: was by doing that. Gove created elms, which reversed that
Speaker 1: and was already started. It was in such short order
Speaker 1: of how quickly things you could see. My god, there's
Speaker 1: more starlings about. My god, there's dunnocks everywhere, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, My god, we've got this. Yes, you could
Speaker 1: go to some places, ah and you seeing as much wildlife.
Speaker 1: But I mean that's not surprising, because you know, not
Speaker 1: all farmers have embraced the ideas. But it was a
Speaker 1: great thing, and I think we're now taking a backward
Speaker 1: step courtesy of the current government.
Speaker 3: At some point I suggested that we should do a
Speaker 3: episode of what we'd like or what we think the
Speaker 3: countryside looks like in the future. But just looking out,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Two a couple of years into the future,
Speaker 3: I mean, inflation's running wild through, prices are going up
Speaker 3: and up and up. A loaf of bread costs Avivor
Speaker 3: what does farming look like in a situation where well
Speaker 3: on the trajectory we currently are, What does farming look
Speaker 3: like from a standpoint of wildlife? Are we going to
Speaker 3: be hammering the most efficient. Let's produce food for the
Speaker 3: cheapest as we possibly can because we need to curb
Speaker 3: this inflationary issue that we have. Is in the short term,
Speaker 3: is wildlife really going to take a hit due to
Speaker 3: spiraling costs?
Speaker 2: See my whole My take on the whole thing is
Speaker 2: it really depends where you're looking. I mean to answer
Speaker 2: the original question from our emailer, looking at rural North
Speaker 2: Wales compared to looking at rural Suffolk, it's a completely
Speaker 2: different world livestock farming versus out arable farming. Just I
Speaker 2: mean meant I was meant to be but the client
Speaker 2: just canceled. I was meant to be in western Shropshire
Speaker 2: tomorrow on the Welsh border. And I've said before this,
Speaker 2: particularly in spring, you can blindfold me, take kidnap me,
Speaker 2: and then I'll drop me off somewhere and I could
Speaker 2: tell you which side of the border I was on,
Speaker 2: just based on the land management practices.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the difference is?
Speaker 2: So I would say the English side is more diverse
Speaker 2: in species in sort of just hetererospecies, planting species or
Speaker 2: something like that. More diverse and tree species, different livestock
Speaker 2: as well, more of a mix as well a lot
Speaker 2: of dairy, but you will start seeing more pigs and
Speaker 2: more things like that. In the livestock side of things.
Speaker 2: It just feels more pastoral, whereas Whales feels wilder despite
Speaker 2: not necessarily having the visible diversity. So part of that
Speaker 2: is terrain, part of that soil. Part of that's income
Speaker 2: because you just earn more as a farm in England
Speaker 2: than you do in Whales, and I know that to
Speaker 2: your friends on both sides of the border. Policy makes
Speaker 2: a huge difference to that, but also number of people
Speaker 2: looking after the land, so there are more people running
Speaker 2: smaller farm that cover a smaller area in England than
Speaker 2: you have in Whales, whereas Whales you have some fairly
Speaker 2: poor farms that cover huge areas. So you can have
Speaker 2: a huge acreage of mountainside, very poor scrub mountainside or
Speaker 2: unimproved pasture or whatever the coding is these days, that
Speaker 2: will dwarf the acreage of somewhere in Shrupture or Herefordshire
Speaker 2: or somewhere like that. But the farm in Herefordshire will
Speaker 2: probably have three times a turnover. So all of those
Speaker 2: factors affect it, which means to say, is the country
Speaker 2: sy getting worse or better. Well, it depends where you're looking.
Speaker 2: And the thing about the future, I always try and
Speaker 2: look for the past to find lessons, and it's the
Speaker 2: Industrial Revolution made a weird thing happen. So it's difficult
Speaker 2: to sort of tell for certain, because you're only going
Speaker 2: off anecdotal accounts and contempt accounts from them, and people
Speaker 2: weren't writing much about this sort of thing. Then it
Speaker 2: did seem that nature was in a fairly parlor state
Speaker 2: at the end of the eighteenth century a lot of farming.
Speaker 2: Farming had pretty much reached the pinnacle of what it
Speaker 2: could do without mechanization, without industry providing things for it,
Speaker 2: which means it was almost like an over farmed organic
Speaker 2: farm that you see now, edge to edge, grazing lots,
Speaker 2: not much time to rotate between things, trying to get
Speaker 2: more and more out of it. Then came along the
Speaker 2: Industrial Revolution, and then a lot of people moved to
Speaker 2: the cities to working these places, going from your literal
Speaker 2: cottage industry to working in a factory, going off there,
Speaker 2: going off to be injured in some horrendous mill accent,
Speaker 2: or be somewhere. Was it Catherine Cookson who we always
Speaker 2: writing about going off to move from the countryside to
Speaker 2: the mill, and.
Speaker 1: Eighteen fifty one was the first year that there were
Speaker 1: more people in the census who lived in urban areas
Speaker 1: and the countryside. So I do a talk for various
Speaker 1: things saying eighteen fifty one was this pivotal year because
Speaker 1: for the first time we stopped being a rural economy
Speaker 1: and became an urban economy. And obviously that has carried
Speaker 1: on going Now. I think it's about sort of nineteen
Speaker 1: percent of the population of this country now live in
Speaker 1: rural areas. But of that nineteen percent, it's something like
Speaker 1: four percent are actually directly involved in farming, and obviously
Speaker 1: then there's others like.
Speaker 4: Me and Richard workers.
Speaker 1: Probably no, I think it's it's more or less in
Speaker 1: stasis now. I don't think it can get any less.
Speaker 2: Depends what you call a rural worker as well, because
Speaker 2: somebody working on a laptop on a broadband connection in
Speaker 2: a cottage, are they a rural worker or not?
Speaker 1: Well working on that that's difficult, I suppose, I suppose
Speaker 1: frontline troops if you like. But I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that's interesting about this issue that Richard highlighted
Speaker 1: is to create a one size fits all policy for
Speaker 1: farming and also for the environment. So therefore, where ELMS
Speaker 1: is really challenging, and where they were starting to get there,
Speaker 1: there's an adjunct of ELMS which is called the SFI,
Speaker 1: which is a Sustainable Farming initiative which added greater flexibility
Speaker 1: to ELMS. And what that was a caterph was the
Speaker 1: issue that Richard has said is that you have got
Speaker 1: such a difference. You know, I say right at the
Speaker 1: start of my book. I don't often talk about my book,
Speaker 1: but there is you cannot be an expert on hedges.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. You can't be an expert on hedges because
Speaker 1: a Dorset hedge compared with the Suffolk hedge is like
Speaker 1: comparing Jupiter with Mars, right, they both planets, but utterly different.
Speaker 1: So therefore you've got to understand so much about the
Speaker 1: intricacies of soil, climate history, geographic location, all these various things,
Speaker 1: just weather patterns and systems that to have a one
Speaker 1: size fits all policy is very, very difficult. And I
Speaker 1: think that they had done this where we've suddenly arrived
Speaker 1: as a big problem. So you've asked the question, which
Speaker 1: I think is a very good one callum, which is,
Speaker 1: where do I see it if this economy keeps going
Speaker 1: the way it's going, and what will happen to wildlife?
Speaker 1: That's the thing that worries me. Of course, I want
Speaker 1: my farmers to be in a good state, because they
Speaker 1: can't be green if they are in the red. That
Speaker 1: is the first obvious thing. But all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: land use under this current administration has changed, so Gove
Speaker 1: and the Conservatives and you know, he then went off
Speaker 1: and he's stopped being an MP's now the editor of
Speaker 1: the Spectator and dah da da da da. But he
Speaker 1: had left a situation where we suddenly farmers were starting
Speaker 1: to actually we're just in the middle of the big
Speaker 1: farmland bird counter at the moment we've suddenly gone. I
Speaker 1: would get farmers ring me up, or they'd send me
Speaker 1: a WhatsApp and they'd have a little picture of loads
Speaker 1: of goldfinches feeding on a feed ride or something like that,
Speaker 1: or I say, rich, what's the and you know, I'd
Speaker 1: have to go and try and identify some blurry moth
Speaker 1: that they had done. Oh I found this on my thing,
Speaker 1: because it'd suddenly become quite engaged with nature more and
Speaker 1: they were actually interested in it, and they'd almost be bragging, Oh,
Speaker 1: I've got sixteen pairs of gray partridges on my place
Speaker 1: and you know, and then you'd see someone a bit quiet, Well,
Speaker 1: I've got more limits online than you have. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, this current government under that Miliband idiot, is
Speaker 1: that he's now looking at land as a place where
Speaker 1: he can put solar panels and wind turbines, because his
Speaker 1: idea of being green is this fictitious energy system that
Speaker 1: he's got, which we all know anyone who can count
Speaker 1: up to sort of five on one hand can say
Speaker 1: it doesn't add up. And so therefore what he's trying
Speaker 1: to do is do a land grab to put green
Speaker 1: energy production on places. And I don't think in the
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things that this is going to be
Speaker 1: that good for wildlife, and it's obviously appalling for our
Speaker 1: food sustainability and security. So therefore, I think, to answer
Speaker 1: your question, callum, where are we at If this economy
Speaker 1: keeps going the same way. It's only going to hit
Speaker 1: us in our pockets, but it's also going to kick
Speaker 1: the poor old yellow hammer right in the egg laying department.
Speaker 1: And I think to answer our question that we were
Speaker 1: set by our listener. I would say that that piece
Speaker 1: where she said, have we become more industrialized? Yes, and
Speaker 1: we have discussed as the reason why we had turned
Speaker 1: a corner. And we were still industrially farming land to
Speaker 1: grow food, but we were almost farming just as industrially
Speaker 1: for nature as well. We were creating mixes, we were
Speaker 1: creating cover crops, we were creating floristic mixes which worked
Speaker 1: far above what if you just left it to nature
Speaker 1: to do. Because we've buggered up the lamb for such
Speaker 1: a long while, you couldn't just rewild it because it
Speaker 1: doesn't work. So therefore, companies are OHK, banking, kings and
Speaker 1: places that had developed all these seed mixes that you
Speaker 1: could sow and drill, and they were getting funded by
Speaker 1: the government, and they were punching above their weight for wildlife.
Speaker 1: The GWCT had done all this research. If you put
Speaker 1: these here in this situation, in this soil, this will work.
Speaker 1: It was going so well, and I fear we're going
Speaker 1: to have a terrible industrial future and we're going to
Speaker 1: see nothing but wind turbines, and we're going to see
Speaker 1: nothing but bloody solar panels, and nature is going to
Speaker 1: not thank us one bit, and I would imagine that
Speaker 1: that's the way it's going to go, and we won't
Speaker 1: be any rich or better fed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that removal of the removal of the
Speaker 2: money is going to be the biggest factor because you
Speaker 2: can Okay, so for nature, you can do two things.
Speaker 2: You can either do some really positive management, which has
Speaker 2: to be careful but also has to be quite intensive
Speaker 2: in places in the hedge lettings, fairly intensive. You're cutting
Speaker 2: out a big chunk of stuff and throwing it to
Speaker 2: one side to make something that will be good then
Speaker 2: for twenty years, but it's going to be targeted. You've
Speaker 2: got to do it in a way that makes sense
Speaker 2: across an entire landscape. The other thing you can do
Speaker 2: is just walk away and leave it, which isn't actually
Speaker 2: bad for nature, but what it does do is take
Speaker 2: a long long time for the effects of man to stop.
Speaker 2: So I won't say where it is, but I've been
Speaker 2: observing over the last couple of years natural region at
Speaker 2: a big estate somewhere in England that's being left for rewilding,
Speaker 2: and every time I go there, I can still see
Speaker 2: the lines of the crops that were put there five
Speaker 2: years ago, because that soil is going to take a
Speaker 2: decade to start looking like a meadow again. It just
Speaker 2: looks like a scrubby field that's been left to go over,
Speaker 2: and the same with lots of the other corners. So
Speaker 2: nature will restore, but it will take decades to do.
Speaker 2: And that's what people always get wrong with this. You know,
Speaker 2: the sheepwrecked mountain landscape of whales. Yes, the sheep are
Speaker 2: eating the saplings and preventing anything else from growing up
Speaker 2: to that there. But if you took the sheep off,
Speaker 2: it would then still be a scrubby, fairly poor landscape,
Speaker 2: then covered in these weird grasses as well, and then
Speaker 2: you might get some heather coming back, but then the
Speaker 2: heather would just get burnt off the first time as
Speaker 2: a wildfire. It would take a long long time for
Speaker 2: the trees to return back as well. It's not happening
Speaker 2: in your lifetime to any significant amount. If you want
Speaker 2: to return it. If you want to change a landscape
Speaker 2: to look like something else, to make it a better
Speaker 2: habitat for a species or a set of species, or
Speaker 2: to improve the balance to offset something else elsewhere, you
Speaker 2: have to manage it. You have to do stuff to
Speaker 2: it and all that money is going. Almost the best
Speaker 2: bet for nature in a lot of these places is
Speaker 2: that it can just be left alone to do something
Speaker 2: for at the timescale it needs. And that's the other thing.
Speaker 2: The people aspect of this, because I think we're going
Speaker 2: to have almost well, we're already seeing it people returning
Speaker 2: to wanting to move out of cities and live in
Speaker 2: rural areas, because living in a rural area now compared
Speaker 2: to say even two thousand and nine, it's hugely different.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and nine it might as well have
Speaker 2: been the eighties living in rural Northeast Wales. No internet,
Speaker 2: there's no buses, everything's still in black and white. You
Speaker 2: couldn't do much. But now I'm sat here on one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty megabit internet connection. There's no difference to
Speaker 2: me between me and Callums relatively urban sort of edge
Speaker 2: of village place where he is, and we've got good
Speaker 2: access and there's a Greg's drive through opening in the
Speaker 2: local town at some point. You know, if you're living
Speaker 2: here as a commuter village, it's not much difference to
Speaker 2: somewhere just outside of Chester, what's ten fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2: So they'll have a lot more people moving here, a lot.
Speaker 2: All the new houses are being built in villages and
Speaker 2: the edges of green towns, which means new road, which
Speaker 2: means new access things, which means compacted soil for a
Speaker 2: long way around from all the construction site. I'm a
Speaker 2: little bit less worried about the lack of money for
Speaker 2: management of landscapes, and I'm more worried about the change
Speaker 2: in population density in places, because adding people to an
Speaker 2: area means wildlife always has a poorer outcome. It never wins.
Speaker 1: I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that,
Speaker 1: and I okay, here's an interesting thing. And again it
Speaker 1: shows the difference between regions and even regions within counties.
Speaker 1: The Breckland, which is the north bit of Suffolk, and
Speaker 1: the south.
Speaker 2: The bittery bit.
Speaker 1: No, that's more the bittens are over the broads, the
Speaker 1: brecks are these very dry. It is the driest place
Speaker 1: Stanton down that it's always the thing. It's the driest.
Speaker 1: I think it has the record for the coldest place
Speaker 1: in England, the hottest place and the driest. It is
Speaker 1: an utterly bizarre place in and that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why they made so vast swathes of it into
Speaker 1: a military training area near Thetford and the Thetford Forest
Speaker 1: and one on. And one of the interesting things that
Speaker 1: there's a fantastic, fascinating scientist called Paul Dolman who's a
Speaker 1: professor at the UEA, and he's done a lot with
Speaker 1: the farm cluster up there, and they're looking at because
Speaker 1: they had this absolutely superb and unique flora and fauna,
Speaker 1: but particularly the flora that was there, and a lot
Speaker 1: of it relied upon the old heath being there and
Speaker 1: that it was being gnawed down to the quick by rabbits.
Speaker 1: Now bear in mind the rabbit is a non native creature,
Speaker 1: but the brex had been created by rabbits largely just
Speaker 1: gnawing the this very poor, sandy, gritty soil down to
Speaker 1: and these weird little things started growing in there and
Speaker 1: that was the only place you'd find them in the UK, where,
Speaker 1: of course the rabbits all died. The farming practice has
Speaker 1: changed because we're so blooming clever. We managed to learn
Speaker 1: if you've destone this place and you can actually turn
Speaker 1: it into vegetable growing land. It's nice and light and
Speaker 1: so therefore if you put enough fertilizer in it you
Speaker 1: can grow vegetables. After about ten crops is absolutely knackered
Speaker 1: and if you leave it alone, it goes back to
Speaker 1: heath relatively quickly. But the downside is not what breckland
Speaker 1: used to be because there aren't any rabbits anymore. So
Speaker 1: therefore is if you're looking at it, the idea of
Speaker 1: rewilding breckland, you can't do it because you lose all
Speaker 1: these unique bits of flora. So what they actually do
Speaker 1: is that they go in with essentially a power harrow
Speaker 1: and they bash up vast suedes of this heath and
Speaker 1: to try and recreate what the rabbits were doing. And hey,
Speaker 1: press the it's the only way they could come back.
Speaker 1: Some bright spark from the Wildlife Trust said let's reintroduce rabbits,
Speaker 1: which they did, and then they all died because the
Speaker 1: diseases of VHD and mixed motosas were still there. But
Speaker 1: it shows you that if you want sometimes to get
Speaker 1: this just this idea of shutting the farm gate, walking
Speaker 1: away and say let's rewild it, it doesn't work. But also,
Speaker 1: more to the point, even if you follow you think
Speaker 1: about farmland, right, it grows our food and so if
Speaker 1: you think stuff it am I going to import all
Speaker 1: our food and we're going to put wind turbines all
Speaker 1: over it, and we're going to put solar panels all
Speaker 1: over it. It's not rewilding, is it, Because it's not
Speaker 1: wild because you've got these bloody great big turbines and
Speaker 1: thing and solar panels everywhere. So therefore there is always
Speaker 1: someone wanting to do some land use, you know, either
Speaker 1: grow food and make a profit out of it, or
Speaker 1: put turbines and panels up and make a profit out
Speaker 1: of it. So therefore I think rewilding although an excellent idea,
Speaker 1: and I think every county should have a wildcn hill
Speaker 1: and a NEP, but it only needs one and the
Speaker 1: rest of it we should be able to farm because
Speaker 1: we need to eat, and we should be more food sufficient.
Speaker 1: But the bits that you don't need to farm, the
Speaker 1: land sparing, should be managed and it should be managed
Speaker 1: in such a way that it is bashing above its
Speaker 1: weight for wildlife. And this is where the rewilders and
Speaker 1: the conservationists have a locking of horns. And I think
Speaker 1: that is the answer to the question that we have
Speaker 1: been set is that yes, we've become industrialized and isn't
Speaker 1: it good? Because industrializing to make it better for nature
Speaker 1: is a great thing because we humans are part of nature,
Speaker 1: and so therefore, why shouldn't we use our intellect to
Speaker 1: try and undo some of the dirty stuff that we've
Speaker 1: done since eighteen forty six they bought in the repeal
Speaker 1: of the corn laws. What do you think? Callum?
Speaker 3: A lot of people, So a lot of people do
Speaker 3: say rewilding doesn't work, and I have seen quite a
Speaker 3: lot of evidence to show such stuff.
Speaker 4: But then equally.
Speaker 3: There's places where places get leveled and quickly trees grow,
Speaker 3: particularly fast growing trees, and within ten years there is
Speaker 3: a reasonable amount of biodiversity that does come back you yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: But for other things that aren't curlews, I have I
Speaker 3: did do a bit of researching because quite a lot
Speaker 3: of people have said before that rewilding absolutely doesn't work,
Speaker 3: and it appears in some edge cases.
Speaker 4: I think it might.
Speaker 2: It depends what depends what people's definition rewilding is. If
Speaker 2: it's just get hands off, then all you're going to
Speaker 2: do is then the back of climax of vegetation until
Speaker 2: there's a fire, it burns down and your reset.
Speaker 1: In Californians, how that goes.
Speaker 3: I'm particularly thinking there was some stuff about some woodland
Speaker 3: that people had left, and within ten years some quite
Speaker 3: nice sizeable trees grew back and the forest looked healthy
Speaker 3: and not not as terrible as it could do. But
Speaker 3: I should imagine this probably as well as rewilding, there's
Speaker 3: probably somebody on a nearby state doing a deer management
Speaker 3: plan and some other stuff as well that go that
Speaker 3: go alongside.
Speaker 2: We've had that humans on these islands for a long,
Speaker 2: long long time now buggering it up. It hasn't been
Speaker 2: wild for many thousands of years. So the rewilding part
Speaker 2: is it's a bit like like a listed building status.
Speaker 2: I think you've got to decide, okay, which bit are
Speaker 2: you preserving? Which state are you going? Because I've seen
Speaker 2: listed buildings from the sixties, you know, because it's preserving
Speaker 2: an architectural style of the mid twentieth century, which means
Speaker 2: you're stuck with your law and you and you weird
Speaker 2: brickwork and stuff like that. So which when you're rewilding,
Speaker 2: where are you going back to? And I think that's
Speaker 2: the problem I have with the term rewilding is I
Speaker 2: never know what that person means when they say, rewilding.
Speaker 3: Just turning it like you said that, you said that
Speaker 3: that trees might not return in your lifetime, which is
Speaker 3: probably true in a vast amount of places that Like, So,
Speaker 3: I've got an area around where I live that has
Speaker 3: changed rapidly over the past like twenty years, and the
Speaker 3: only it's largely just left alone. They grace horses on it,
Speaker 3: and it's just left alone. But it doesn't really change.
Speaker 3: The only thing that did change is it became very
Speaker 3: marshy due to a leak that the local authority won't rectify,
Speaker 3: and now we have like quite an interesting area of
Speaker 3: what you could only describe as wet woodland thanks to
Speaker 3: the leaky which is which is actually a very unintentioned
Speaker 3: good consequence.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that things is is
Speaker 1: that it's like most of the debates in the countryside
Speaker 1: and about farming, is that rewildings seem to be a
Speaker 1: fantastic idea because if you think about it, it spends.
Speaker 1: You know, I get paid not a huge amount of money,
Speaker 1: but I get paid money to go and lay hedges.
Speaker 1: The idea about rewind thing is that basically, you buy
Speaker 1: this farm and you shut all the gates and you
Speaker 1: block up the drains and you walk away and hay
Speaker 1: press though as if by magic or the wildlife will
Speaker 1: come back. Now we do as conservationists, practical conservationists, we
Speaker 1: try and create wilder spaces around the edge, but we
Speaker 1: create them well. That the Rewilders argument is that nature
Speaker 1: knows it better than me and Richard Gould, right, that's
Speaker 1: the which is probably true. But the problem is is
Speaker 1: that how soils behave, particularly when they've been intensely farmed
Speaker 1: for such a long while, or you've got circumstances like
Speaker 1: I've explained in the Brex there whereby circumstances dating back
Speaker 1: to when the Normans bought rabbits over I mean, good god,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's something that you then have to go
Speaker 1: and recreate that because you want to go and have
Speaker 1: this space, you have to have human intervention because if
Speaker 1: you actually just left the bres alone, it's missing that
Speaker 1: vitally ingredient of rabbits, which we know we can't bring
Speaker 1: back because it will die. So therefore, what you're going
Speaker 1: to do if you want the brex or do you
Speaker 1: want to have that? So I think that human intervention
Speaker 1: is a necessity.
Speaker 2: Back to the ice Age well, but even then there
Speaker 2: are the mix of animals we had has changed, and
Speaker 2: the reason things changed after the Ice Age because certain
Speaker 2: things died out, because the habitat changed, because the climate changed,
Speaker 2: which led to greatest amounts of some populations and less
Speaker 2: of others. We can't return back to some fabled point
Speaker 2: unless you remove the humans as well and carefully sculpt
Speaker 2: things back into that point and then sort of start
Speaker 2: the clock again. Because if you took out the forty
Speaker 2: acres of fields behind the house here that are not mine,
Speaker 2: just stop farming, just didn't do anything with it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there'd be trees grown up in the fields within a
Speaker 2: couple of years, and there'll be all sorts. It would
Speaker 2: also be KFC for foxes because there isn't much ground
Speaker 2: nesting bird habitat around here, so that all try and
Speaker 2: go there, and then every fox from miles around will
Speaker 2: be choosing to snack on things there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the apex predator, then you have then that's where
Speaker 3: the real wildest thing come and say, okay, yes we
Speaker 3: have got a problem with predators, and we have the
Speaker 3: apex predators anymore.
Speaker 1: So then you have this thorny issue of people trying
Speaker 1: to sort of say, well, we're going to put links
Speaker 1: there and we're going to put wolves over here, and
Speaker 1: they will do this. I mean, that's why, really it
Speaker 1: doesn't work, because putting apex predators in is obviously a
Speaker 1: bonker's idea. There's no two ways about it. If we
Speaker 1: decided in fourteen hundred and sixty five whatever it was
Speaker 1: that in England that wolves were incompatible with us when
Speaker 1: we had a population in the whole country about the
Speaker 1: size of London now, then it probably means that now
Speaker 1: we've got seventy three million to have all we're going
Speaker 1: to they ain't going to be very compatible now. And
Speaker 1: the old things have gone all the way down to Cornwall,
Speaker 1: and they were saying this is about the only place
Speaker 1: we've found in England where there's any space left. And
Speaker 1: we still killed them anyway because we thought they don't
Speaker 1: work because you stop eating our sheep. You know, they
Speaker 1: weren't just going, oh, we're wolves, we'll only eat roe deer.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't work like that because nature isn't like that.
Speaker 1: You go for the easiest option, and an easier option
Speaker 1: is to go and kill a sheep than it is
Speaker 1: to go and kill a road deer. But anyway, or
Speaker 1: a German chancellor's pony, yes, or a German chancellor's pony.
Speaker 1: But I think, you know, if we get back to
Speaker 1: the whole point, is that, yes, we've industrialized. Yes we
Speaker 1: nature is in a parlor state compared with what it was,
Speaker 1: and I'd say it's in a parlor state probably compared
Speaker 1: with what it was towards the end of the Second
Speaker 1: World War that was where the tipping point started. And
Speaker 1: then probably by about nineteen seventy ish when we joined
Speaker 1: the European Union what it was called back then, it
Speaker 1: really ramped it up. And then we got to a
Speaker 1: point where in about the late eighties early nineties a
Speaker 1: lot of species had actually become more or less unsustainable.
Speaker 1: And so therefore you can't rely upon mother Nature to
Speaker 1: do because human beings created the mess. So it's up
Speaker 1: to us to get us out of it. It is.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think we're not going to resolve this
Speaker 2: now in this evening's episode. So I think Callum's got
Speaker 2: a thing to finish us up with. Just as were.
Speaker 4: Your gloss off the top of you. He's wearing a
Speaker 4: little beanie hat.
Speaker 3: Now he looks like a he's like a ship Craig
Speaker 3: Davey and sit there.
Speaker 1: He needs a kestrel on his arm.
Speaker 3: Craig anyway, just how nature has changed so completely outside
Speaker 3: of farmland. My area has changed quite significantly in the
Speaker 3: past sort of well, even in.
Speaker 4: The last few years.
Speaker 3: Today, there used to be a heron on the pond
Speaker 3: every single day. That seems to have gone, but it's
Speaker 3: been replaced by kingfishers. So I see kingfishers around all
Speaker 3: the time now and up until a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: In twenty years agoing around that pond never saw a kingfisher.
Speaker 3: There's kingfishers around there. All the frogs seem to have
Speaker 3: died off. They didn't come back. The last two springs
Speaker 3: no frogs had come back. But when my son was
Speaker 3: a boy one two years old, we used to go
Speaker 3: and see the frogs around there. They've all gone. We
Speaker 3: now get woodcock in the woods where we never ever
Speaker 3: had those before. More head sparrows than ever before. Sparrow
Speaker 3: hawks are also plentiful as well, due to a lot
Speaker 3: more people. I think lockdown was really good for a
Speaker 3: lot of people that were doing supplementary bird feeding. They
Speaker 3: were enjoying the gardens.
Speaker 2: More buffet for sparrow hawks.
Speaker 3: But that also meant that the sparrowhawks absolutely loved it.
Speaker 3: And I often see them because they know where there's
Speaker 3: a larger concentration of birds in the urban garden. They
Speaker 3: I was on the phone to you once, Richard, actually
Speaker 3: and sparrow hawk absolutely destroyed a sparrow in front of me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And we've got red kites that have now been replaced
Speaker 3: largely with buzzards. We never had red kites before. Now
Speaker 3: they've been largely replaced by buzzards. And I saw one
Speaker 3: hedgehog in the past five years and it was like
Speaker 3: the size of a football. For some reason, it was
Speaker 3: the biggest hedgehog I've ever seen the headhog life.
Speaker 2: And it was the last last hedgehog.
Speaker 3: Probably you joke, but I think that might have been
Speaker 3: the last hedgehog. He was having an absolute word of
Speaker 3: a time. I haven't seen a hedgehog in five cases,
Speaker 3: and I used to see him. I used to see
Speaker 3: him regularly as a kid.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting point. So therefore, there is a lot
Speaker 1: of wildlife. You live on the urban net fringe, the
Speaker 1: urban edge, and I think it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that that's probably a place where you know more wildlife
Speaker 1: is almost observed. The wildlife where I live isn't observed
Speaker 1: because most of the time people don't have access to it,
Speaker 1: thank God, so they don't see it. You know, I
Speaker 1: know what it's there. I was watching the other day
Speaker 1: planting a hedge and I discovered something quite fascinating because
Speaker 1: I'm now old, and you know, I try and plant
Speaker 1: five hundred hedge whips a day, right, and so about
Speaker 1: every fifty or so, I stand up straight my back
Speaker 1: and go oo, and I stop for five minutes. I
Speaker 1: have a quick suck on my old vape thing. And
Speaker 1: I watched the skylarks out on some stubble that was
Speaker 1: to my left hand side, and I saw there was
Speaker 1: a pair fighting up in the sky, and then I
Speaker 1: realized there was another pet and there are about five
Speaker 1: skylarks fighting. They do not fight on the ground. They
Speaker 1: go up, not as high as they do when they've
Speaker 1: actually got their territory. But when they're sorting a territory,
Speaker 1: the place that they seem to want to the bit
Speaker 1: of territory they want to take ownership of is the sky,
Speaker 1: so they're not battering hell out one another down on
Speaker 1: the ground where they will actually nest. They want to
Speaker 1: try and get this is my air space. So they
Speaker 1: have this little dog fight. And I realized that the
Speaker 1: reason why I've only just noticed it because I'm getting
Speaker 1: older and stiffer. And I stopped more and think that
Speaker 1: a five minute break. I actually stopped and watched, and
Speaker 1: I think that's what we should do more of. Is
Speaker 1: the big farmland bird counter at the moment is go
Speaker 1: out there and watch. Shut up, look around you and observe.
Speaker 1: And if you can record in some way for the
Speaker 1: big farm bird count is a great thing. But just
Speaker 1: in your own data bank and say, well, I never
Speaker 1: and so that little observation you've had is great. My
Speaker 1: observation fascinating, I think.
Speaker 2: And if you haven't come across it before, already, go
Speaker 2: and download the Merlin bird app. Oh yeah, it's like
Speaker 2: Shazam for birds. So you download it onto your onto
Speaker 2: your phone and you have to download the pack that's
Speaker 2: all the sound files for West I think it's like
Speaker 2: Western Europe or something, but that's got our birds on it.
Speaker 2: And then you just leave your phone somewhere in a
Speaker 2: meadow or on the edge of the garden or the
Speaker 2: edge of the truck and it will tell you at
Speaker 2: its best gets what species it's hearing, and then you
Speaker 2: can screenshot that and you can you can add it
Speaker 2: and add it to your list of things that you've seen.
Speaker 2: But it's a really good way of almost like passively
Speaker 2: recording it because it will pick out all the differences
Speaker 2: in the song. But the other thing as well, with
Speaker 2: waiting to see birds. If you're out doing some work
Speaker 2: in the countryside, does a lot of our listeners are,
Speaker 2: or you're visiting it, don't just stop and then immediately
Speaker 2: scan and go, well, there's nothing here. There's the amount
Speaker 2: of stuff that you'll see if you sit quietly for
Speaker 2: ten minutes. It's them being noisy and buggering around that
Speaker 2: scares them off. If you can sit quietly and stop
Speaker 2: jigging about, they will start to become more active again.
Speaker 2: The other one is standing in the field in the
Speaker 2: middle of the night with a thermal imager, possibly a
Speaker 2: Hicck micro one who can sponsor us if they like.
Speaker 2: If you think the countryside is devoid of wildlife, go
Speaker 2: and stand in a field with a thermal imager at night.
Speaker 2: You'll be amaze what's honking around out there in the fields.
Speaker 2: Just when you're all abed more. We've had another review. Accidentally,
Speaker 2: Great stumbled upon this by chance. I was looking for
Speaker 2: unvarnished but deeply knowledgeable rural dispatches without the overly tweet
Speaker 2: sentimentality or the dry academic spreadheaty common in other shows
Speaker 2: concerning the countryside and conservation, and found exactly that here.
Speaker 2: Love the rambling, unedited chat and the easy dynamic of
Speaker 2: the three hosts. More of this please, And that's from mess.
Speaker 3: My favorite bit is they think the ramblings unedited, it
Speaker 3: would be so much worse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's about two hours of editing per podcast that
Speaker 2: is just cutting out all the dross. Is amazingly these
Speaker 2: are the best bits.
Speaker 1: It's a weak thing, do you know. I think actually
Speaker 1: eventually people is going to think that Amy's name is
Speaker 1: actually that she's called poor Amy.
Speaker 2: Well, we I think we've picked up some new listeners
Speaker 2: as well over the last couple of weeks, so welcome
Speaker 2: to all the new listeners. And we know that some
Speaker 2: people are sort of listening and then going back through
Speaker 2: the back catalog because you can see how the numbers change.
Speaker 2: So I think, you know, people seem to be happy
Speaker 2: with that, So thank you, and if you do. If
Speaker 2: you do like this and you haven't shared it with
Speaker 2: your friends already, then please do because that helps us
Speaker 2: reach new audiences. It doesn't sort of automatically get shown
Speaker 2: to people you Sometimes you have to share it manually.
Speaker 2: And if you want to leave us a review then
Speaker 2: that would be really useful too, because that tells other
Speaker 2: people that this is this is worth their time, because
Speaker 2: I think that's the thing with podcasts. You look at
Speaker 2: it and go that's an hour and a half? Can
Speaker 2: I be asked with an hour and a half? So
Speaker 2: if this, if they read some good reviews, they know
Speaker 2: it's worth clicking download. So thank you for that. Just
Speaker 2: a reminder that Callum and I and with Amy and
Speaker 2: toe poor Amy will be attending the British Shooting Show
Speaker 2: on the Friday in a couple of weeks time, which
Speaker 2: I think is that's thirteenth, fourteenth something like that, on
Speaker 2: the whatever the Friday is, and we're going to be
Speaker 2: going around there with.
Speaker 3: My fourteenth Valentine's Day val pictures of Richard Nigus which
Speaker 3: he signed and he's kissed every one of them.
Speaker 2: On Valentine's Day, You're going all the way over to
Speaker 2: the neec on your own then.
Speaker 1: Calm, you're not taking your missus with you.
Speaker 3: I'm taking nine. I don't think she's going to want to.
Speaker 3: Some people do actually have to. They've got surprisingly, people
Speaker 3: have got real jobs where they have to turn up
Speaker 3: to places, so they can't just stick around and go
Speaker 3: to like Birmingham or wherever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you said with such which hate Birmingham. It's the
Speaker 2: nec It's not that bad.
Speaker 3: I once stayed in a hotel that was about half
Speaker 3: a mile from Birmingham. But what they didn't tell you
Speaker 3: is called the Arden Hotel, where they didn't tell you
Speaker 3: it was half a mile but the wrong side of
Speaker 3: whatever that motorway was, and it was seventeen pounds in
Speaker 3: a cab to get across the road, and it has
Speaker 3: the worst burger that's ever existed. And my friend accounted
Speaker 3: the same story, which I feel was like, did I
Speaker 3: tell you this story? And it just so happened that
Speaker 3: we've been to the same hotel and had the same experience.
Speaker 3: Imagine a hockey puck in a limp bun and that
Speaker 3: was what we were served for about seventeen.
Speaker 2: Pounds, hockey puck and the limp burn. I think that's
Speaker 2: the correct way to end this podcast, so thank you
Speaker 2: to everyone. Thank you for listening. Please like and subscribe
Speaker 2: No that's YouTube, No just you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also send us money as we have several people who've
Speaker 2: been sending us lots of nice things, including Louise again,
Speaker 2: so thank you very much Louise. Yes, we will spend
Speaker 2: it on some sort of gin or maybe just the
Speaker 2: hosting costs for the podcast. So thank you very much everyone,
Speaker 2: Bye bye, thy thanks.
Speaker 7: Hello as Angus Blair brave Heart McNeil.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 7: As you know, cats in Scotland are history. If you
Speaker 7: want to make sure it's steeds that way, called today
Speaker 7: for a free quotation. We've got fen traps, gen traps,
Speaker 7: pole traps, cage traps, even they ones for bears. They'll
Speaker 7: catch a cat, dinny you worry, So let's make cat's history.
Speaker 7: If you see one in the garden, call us today
Speaker 7: eight hundred two three four two three four. We'll go
Speaker 7: on our website for a quotation www dot scotch cats
Speaker 7: get it you will.
Speaker 5: Hello, Hello, Hello, this thing on this This is Jeremiah
Speaker 5: I run. Jeremiah's are sluicing with sluice arses mainly on
Speaker 5: the world, but we also we also go out as
Speaker 5: far as Wig. On the other side, we don't We
Speaker 5: don't go into into Liverpool though we know we don't
Speaker 5: go there, but we sluice ourses mainly human, but we've
Speaker 5: we've also been known to do goats, pigs and we
Speaker 5: once did a recalcitrant lama that refused to get bathed.
Speaker 5: But but mainly mainly it's human. So our sluicing is
Speaker 5: mainly what we do. We've got sort of three tiers
Speaker 5: of service. We've got a basic one which which is
Speaker 5: cold water, We've got a premium one which is warm water,
Speaker 5: and then we have a Premium Deluxe version which is
Speaker 5: where we use soup soap as well.
Speaker 2: We can use soap and we can use soup, but
Speaker 2: if you have soup then then really that's extra. That's
Speaker 2: a bespoke quote. So if you if you go to
Speaker 2: our sluicing dot org because we couldn't get dot co
Speaker 2: dot uk because that Git from Portsmouth has got that one,
Speaker 2: our sluicing dot org that's where you'll find us.
Speaker 8: You all know it's me Hubert's Washington Smyth bringing you
Speaker 8: a very unique experience for you and the lad It's
Speaker 8: simulated hunting of poor people will take you for the day.
Speaker 8: You will track along our shed and you'll see tenants
Speaker 8: super some you saying about bifters and other such things.
Speaker 8: And then you'll get to go into the simulated area
Speaker 8: and hunt poor people.
Speaker 4: You'll get to use.
Speaker 8: Different caliber of weapons, anything of your choice.
Speaker 4: It's a fantastic day.
Speaker 8: Monte, Johnte Bonte and Conti will be there.
Speaker 4: I hope you'll calm down.
Speaker 8: It's twenty pounds per person and you'll all get a
Speaker 8: glass of Bollinger on arrival. Thank you, brilliant