August 14, 2020 - 12:07pm
It’s probably too early to make accurate predictions about the reordering of economic life yet to come, but the past few months of enforced domesticity have not been entirely disastrous. Even if the elaborate baking craze of the pandemic’s first few weeks has been quietly shelved, and rustic sourdough loaves replaced on social media feeds with photos of holidays as far from home as possible, many have taken on board Voltaire’s advice, in Candide, that for a good and peaceful life, “we must cultivate our garden”, turning our attention inward from the stresses of an uncertain world.
My own experiment with the good life centres around chickens, a trio of hens acquired just before the lockdown rush. Clemmie, Floogie and Buttercup are, together, a gentle introduction to livestock keeping, and a pleasing distraction from the outside world. Their lives, circumscribed to the small suburban garden in which they scratch around, are a strange echo of our own newly limited horizons. As you’d expect from far-diminished descendants of the dinosaurs, our hens are ferocious predators, searching out the slugs and snails which would otherwise ravage our modest vegetable patch with cool genocidal determination.
They each have their individual personalities — Clemmie the proud and dominant leader of the three, Floogie timid and retiring, Buttercup so affectionate and desirous of human company that she will jump into my 4-year-old’s lap for snuggles. And it will be difficult, when the time comes and their egg production slows, to repurpose them for the table.
But those days are, fortunately, far off. Acquired as egg-producers, our hens keep their side of the bargain so enthusiastically that it’s increasingly difficult to make a dent on the ever-growing supply. We have already approached the limit of the amount of eggs one family can consume, with quiches, omelettes, frittatas and mousses all rapidly losing their appeal. Instead, we hand out boxes of eggs to neighbours, visitors, acquaintances — really, to anyone who will take a box— and have been pleasantly surprised to find ourselves drawn in to a previously unsuspected local barter economy, rewarded for our industrious trio’s labours with backyard honey, bags of homegrown vegetables, and shelves full of pickles and preserves.
Even the regular chore of cleaning out their dung-filled ark, scrubbing their perch and raking their dirty straw into the compost heap, is a strangely calming retreat from the outside world. Our pandemic experiment with back garden farming may be a modest one — my attempts to convince my wife we can squeeze in a small goat have sadly not been successful — but for us it has undoubtedly been the happiest result of this baneful period.
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SubscribeI’ll stick to a cheaper Co-op vanilla tub, made in Cornwall.
I didn’t think ‘political correctness’, if that’s what I can call it now, could get any more bizarre!
Appears that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Why does it appear that someone out there wants us to turn against each other for the slightest reason and separate communities and countries? Who would benefit from that I wonder? I am all for sensible concepts where people are not victimised, but this just feels like another infringement on the public about to and more control being imposed on our freedom. Perhaps I am sensitive to this type of action from authorities and governments at this present point in time, and why shouldn’t I be? It makes me feel uncomfortable about what I believe is happening around the world this year!
We had chicken in the 70’s and got them from battery farms, it was amazing how sickly they looked initially and then how quickly they improved to healthy looking hens. Home laid eggs are a endless treat.
Been there, done that, recommended!
Good article. We need to go further and remind all we live in a democracy and free speech is a fundamental right even if this can offend. Even the SNP cannot be this stupid as to try and enact this piece of legislation.
Congratulations! It’s a very wise move. All success with it.
To that end, go to great lengths to keep the chickens safe. Have – if need be – padlocks on their ark-door, make sure it cannot be overturned by any determined predator.
Foxes (yes, they are even in towns nowadays) and dogs can go to equally great lengths to get at the hens; who are of course wholly dependent on you for their security.
I wish Clemmie, Floogie and Buttercup, and you, long happy lives.
Great article. Whatever happened to tolerance? My other ( better?) half and I would have been divorced years ago with out it.
Sharia. Plain and simple.
When you pull a thread, doesn’t the garment unravel?
This is a class war, disguised as a civil rights movement, waged by the ultra-rich against the masses. Arbitrary divisions along racial and sexual lines are being drawn in order to foment chaos and unrest. The government, mass media, mass education and big corporate conglomerates are all complicit in this.
Western societies are being split in two. On one side are those who see how our public and private institutions are rapidly being transformed into totalitarian engines of propaganda and mass control. Those who are alarmed by and comment on this process are lumped in with the extreme far-right in order to censor and cancel their arguments.
On the other are those who believe these institutions are fighting for their civil rights and/or sexual proclivities. They’ve been ‘educated’ into believing their degrees make them more enlightened and smarter than those without college degrees. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather, they have been educated into being effete, resentful and feeble-minded. Basically they’ve been educated to become a neutered servant class for very powerful social engineers. Unfortunately, many of them are now in charge of important cultural institutions for a long while believed they could effect change quietly behind the scenes through NGOs, journalism and education. But then Trump and Brexit happened. The great unwashed rebelled against this vision of a future imposed upon them by their betters and began to fight back.
During these last few years we have witnessed the velvet glove of the post-liberal ‘elites’ sliding off to reveal the iron fist of mass control and totalitarianism. Trump and Brexit were NOT supposed to happen. Something went wrong and now their power is being challenged. They will fight tooth and nail to keep what authority they have even if it means violent protests, racial riots, quarantined lockdowns, and economic devastation.
As their narrative is now being challenged on all sides, they will most likely double-down on their tactics. Expect to see many more bizarre changes made to language, math, science etc.
It will likely get worse if Trump is re-elected again in November. The violent looting and racial tensions are a warning to us about what to expect if we vote the wrong way again.
Good article. Let’s hope Patel can get on and resolve this problem of illegal immigrants.
Were there any particular aspects of the ‘long thread’ that you didn’t agree with?
Given that the contents came from The Guardian and Huffpo, disagreement is almost guaranteed.
At the time we looked at Italy and saw overwhelmed hospitals. It was thought being in a care home much the safer option. No Government would deliberately set out to kill the elderly, it is just not a vote winner.
But if you really want to blame anyone, blame the NHS doctors and managers who supervised the discharges.
NHS managers are principally to blame. They have been dictating clinical policy. A case of the administrative tail wagging the medical dog.
Similar tail-wagging-dog problems plague almost all large organisations with a centralised funding structure and/or government regulation being the most significant determinant of profitability.
‘Ironic’? Or just what any standard Far-Left government would want to do?
My understanding is that anthropologists do not accept that ‘races’ exist at all. If they do, where are the genetic or geographical boundaries between them? Countries and cultures exist because they tend to self-reinforce by manufacturing identities and boundaries, for good practical reasons. Pigmentation of skin is real, but ‘colour’ is in the eye of the beholder. It puzzles me that the politically-correct are so quick to label people like President Obama, Meghan Markle and Senator Harris as ‘black’ as soon as they show the slightest hint of pigmentation, or admit to having any ancestry other than Northern European. (One must exclude swarthy Mediterranean types so beloved of early photographers of the primal and artless). Are these anti-racists and discrimination-haters saying that only pure Aryans can call themselves ‘white’? After a few months in supposedly dull and rainswept southern England, thanks partly to coronavirus preventing me from travelling far, I probably have darker skin than either of the two ladies mentioned. I must have at least two ancestors who came out of Africa. So what is it really about? History? But that’s a bit theoretical as the past is another country that busy people have time to visit only occasionally. Culture? I probably have more in common with those three ‘black’ people than with most of my fellow countrymen. At base, it’s probably about not having enough of something to go around, which is ‘situation normal’ because every organism will push itself to a state of subsistence given the chance. When that happens, groups form and separate because it’s more stable. So racial categories are reactionary, but I suspect not to ‘race’.
Those who neglect the elderly today will one day all too soon become elderly themselves. All of us are working on becoming elderly all the time.
From the picture it looks like the chickens are out scratching about in the garden. What do you do about foxes?
At root the problem is any sort of essentialism — the notion that any one particular aspect of yourself is sufficient to identify and classify you definitively and irrevocably.
Social media seems very good at amplifying the worst aspects of human nature, aspects that our forebears created a whole system called “manners” to control. The adage “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” seems to have been forgotten.
I find the act of killing an unborn child reprehensible and hateful beyond words. Will I be able take the NHS and others to court?
And that about sums up the substance of the woke racial justice thesis””it feels like…”
Lived experience, anecdotes, statistical anomalies, feelings, and emotions are all the driving force behind the BLM movement at large, as opposed to measured analysis, facts, and dispassionate conversation.
Emotions can be easily manipulated by a press apparatus that makes a decision to collectively focus their [our] gaze upon a particularly heinous event, and offer absolutely no nuance or statistical context to its actual rarity.
The result is a mass of people who feel like a black person is “literally being hunted” [““Lebron James], or a black friend of mine speaking irrationally about when he goes out for a run in an LA suburb, he feels like he’s going to be shaken down by a racist cop, despite easily accessible policing statistics in that suburb showing nothing of the sort.
As Sam Harris put it in his 207th episode, “If you care about justice”and you absolutely should”then you should care about facts.”
Of the many stats given in that episode, here are few:
There are about 50″“60 million encounters with cops each year.
Of those 50″“60M, there are about 10 million arrests (down from a 14 million high in the 90s), and of those 10 million, ~1000 people are killed by cops each year. So 1 in 10,000 arrests end in a police killing. Of these 1000 deaths, some, if not most are entirely justified, some aren’t, and some are hard to judge.
Of this 1000, about 50% are white. About 25% are black. Of this 1000, last year about 50 were unarmed. Just over 10 of those were black.
“Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else need to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact it’s something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.” ““Sam Harris
Wonderful!
Three decades of promoting multi-culturalism has instead resulted in a multiplicity of mono-cultures. How can the alleged benefits of diversity be obtained when a white person enjoying a curry is cultural appropriation. God help the Lancastrian who likes Yorkshire pudding.
That all looks very natural and bee friendly. The more self sufficient we are the better, I think.
Do you let them in amongst your veg? I don’t let my hens into the veg patch – they love brassica leaves, beans, courgettes, lettuce as much as we do. Instead, I go around the garden hunting slugs and snails for them (which they love).
One of the wonderful things about keeping hens is that the food waste going out to the bin men or even the compost heap is reduced to almost nil.
This is a good example of corporate hypocrisy on a grand scale and utterly despicable. But somehow using this egregious nonsense as a stick to beat the ‘left’ with is pathetic; I don’t know anyone on the ‘left’ that supports this kind of corporate drivel and does not see it for what it is. Suggest you read George Melly’s Revolt Into Style, published in the early 1970’s and as relevant today as it was then.
I also know of nobody who has declared they are a tree, if they have then perhaps they should be investigated for mental illness.
‘their high coronavirus death rates, among the worst in the world’
Really?
https://www.worldometers.in…