I’m grateful to Careth for taking up the Slow Life. She’d had a job at Barclays Bank before working for me, very successfully, as a receptionist at the Newby Bridge Hotel. And then she got an offer she couldn’t refuse, to join a friend in running the riding school at Witherslack (http://www.witherslackridingschool.co.uk/ ) As well as teaching all of my children to ride, Careth has been the provider of the most precious commodity in my garden – horse manure. Her 29 horses produce mountains of it and each year I’ve been very kindly allowed to remove about 50 tons.
This year, I’ve been slow on the uptake and there were only 20 tons of well-rotted manure left when my tractor arrived at the stables. Which has meant that, for the first time ever, I’ve had to use another source and as there was some lovely-looking cow manure available, I decided to try it out. I’ve always fought shy of cow manure because of its reputation for harbouring weeds, but this stuff seems to be very rich and, unlike the horse manure, is teeming with worms. It’ll be an interesting experiment, and one I hope I won’t regret.
My home town of Grange-over-Sands is the archetypal slow town. Its citizens, most of them being elderly, move slowly; for them the 30 mph sign isn’t a speed limit it’s an unattainable dream. Grange is almost unique in the modern world in having an abundance of independent food shops so that you can do your weekly shop without visiting a supermarket – which is handy as there isn’t one. It’s an ideal candidate for becoming a “Slow Town” under a scheme promoted by the Slow Food movement and last year, with the backing of Slow Food, I proposed this to the Town Council. Unfortunately my proposal was rejected, not on the grounds of cost (because I’d anticipated that by agreeing to underwrite the costs) but with the unassailable logic of their inherent slowness, or to put it another way, they were so slow witted and lethargic that they couldn’t be bothered.
If the idea had been proposed in Japan, I’ve no doubt it would have been welcomed enthusiastically. The barrenness of being busy, as Carla Carlisle puts it, is something well known to the Japanese, whose working hours are punishingly long. “Slow” is big in Japan, so much so that whole cities have become “Slow Cities”*, and the Slow Food movement has more members in Japan than any country except Italy.
The extraordinary thing is that whilst most Japanese opt for the city life with no access to a garden or an allotment, the possibility of living the good life is greater there than in any other developed country. This video tells the story of a young couple, Sean and Misa, who were given a farm in Shikoku rent-free on the sole condition that they cultivated the land to prevent it from being reclaimed by the forest. There are dozens of abandoned farmhouses in the same community and all over Japan, and so the opportunity taken up by Sean and Misa is available to many more.
*Here’s the ‘Slow Life’ Declaration of the Japanese city of Kakegawa, which I think is rather lovely and should be read, ever so slowly, to the Town Councillors of Grange:
The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:
SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.
Every Japanese business has an English name and there’s something very endearing about the fact that they never quite get it right. The best boutique hotel in Fukuoka is called “With the Style”; the largest second-hand book shop is “Book-off” (there’s a branch of the same business, which sells second hand computers with the wonderful name of “Hard-off”). I was browsing through Book-off when I can across a book by Alex Kerr called “Lost Japan.” What a find it turned out to be. Although Alex Kerr is an American, the book was originally written in Japanese and in 1994 it won the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan, the first time a foreigner had won the award. The book tells us what it’s like to live in Japan and how Japanese society works.
When the author first came to Japan in the 1970’s, he noticed that when people left the countryside to live in a town, which they were doing by the thousands, they wouldn’t bother to sell their house in the country, they’d just abandon it, sometimes without removing anything – they’d leave the furniture, the bedding, even utensils. He went searching for the house of his dreams in Shikoku and fell in love with an abandoned wooden house with a thatched roof, which he bought for $1,300, and set about restoring. He called it Chiiori, “the house of the flute”, and what he did was so unusual that it’s now become a tourist attraction.
Alex Kerr laments the loss of the Japan which he first encountered when he arrived in the seventies. But in one respect the Japan which he loved is still there. Strangely, although property prices in the cities are amongst the highest in the world, no-one wants to live in the countryside, which is still littered with abandoned houses, which can be acquired for a song. The irony is that millions in the cities hanker after the Slow Life. If they cared to look they’d find that it’s there, right under their noses.
I wanted to use live rabbits in my ‘Mr McGregor’s’ garden for the Gardening World Cup, but the rules wouldn’t allow it. This was a pity because nothing could have been more authentic. Beatrix Potter kept a rabbit hutch by her back door – for the pot of course, not as pets. When I was doing my research at Hill Top the orchard there was overrun with rabbits and there were obvious signs that they’d visited the vegetable patch. The National Trust, who run Hill Top, didn’t know what to do with them, but Beatrix Potter wouldn’t have hesitated. They’d have been shot in a trice and then into the pot.
In the absence of live rabbits I’m very happy to make do with Peter Rabbit. Alan Ward has created this amazing model of Peter Rabbit eating radishes. I’ve taken this photo of Peter in my kitchen garden and I’m hoping that he’s going to look just as splendid in Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch.
It’s been announced today that this summer is officially the worst on record. Well, I take that with a big dose of salt not least because it seems odd that the worst weather should go hand in hand with the most bountiful harvest. We’ve had a better crop of fruit and veg in our kitchen garden this year than ever before and from what I hear, we’re not alone in that. Why should this be so when the summer has been so cold and damp? One theory has been put forward by Ian Bell who is a biodynamic farmer from Dorchester. He argues that it’s to do with last winter’s heavy snowfall. This is what he says:
“Nitrogen joins with carbon and minute quantities of arsenic, lead and mercury, all of which are held fast in the crystalline structure of the snow and carried to our soils: an infinitely more powerful mediator of fertility than anything you can buy from the garden centre”.
He’s undoubtedly right on the latter point – you won’t find many garden centres listing “arsenic, lead and mercury” among their list of ingredients, and I’m not sure that I want them leaching into my veg.
Whatever the merits of Ian Bell’s argument, there is no doubt at all that the increase in carbon dioxide in the air improves crop yields. It’s common practice for horticulturalists who grow crops under glass to use air enriched with carbon dioxide to improve growth rates. When the increase in carbon dioxide in the air was first recorded, about 70 years ago, it was noted that this could prove of great benefit to humanity because of the effect on crop yields. They have been proved right, but this is a fact which is barely mentioned nowadays, when the increase in carbon dioxide is portrayed as being wholly evil. If the prediction of warmer weather ever turns out to be true we’ll have a double benefit, because there’s nothing crops like better than a little extra warmth.
When I took the plunge and bought a dairy cow, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a Holstein. Holsteins are the black and white cows that you see in the fields everywhere and they are popular with dairy farmers because they have been bred for one purpose and one purpose only – to produce as much milk as possible. So much milk that when their udder is full it’s grotesquely distended. I went for a honey coloured Jersey instead even though they produce half the milk of a Holstein, but at least I could bear to look at the thing.
Holsteins produce good milk, but poor meat, which is why they are never used for meat production. But this causes a problem because cows need to have calves in order to keep on making milk and half of the calves are male which, for obvious reasons, are hopeless at making milk. So it’s the normal practice to shoot male calves when they are five days old. Farmers don’t like doing this, but they’ve no alternative as Holstein meat is unsaleable. Until now that is. The marketing guys at McDonalds have ridden to their rescue. They know the value of letting their customers know that they sell only British beef. They also know that their customers aren’t at all fussy about the quality of what they eat. Why not, then, sell them meat that no self-respecting butcher would touch, but which they can truthfully call British. A dairy farmer on Farmer Today gave away the story when he explained that it costs him £800 to feed a male calf for a year, but McDonalds will pay him £900 for the carcase and even a paltry £100 profit makes it worthwhile. I was amused to hear the farmer add that McDonalds’s aren’t alone in this racket – his other customer is Tescos.
The usual fate of a “buy one, get one free” offer is that the one you pay for gets eaten and the “free” one sits in the fridge until the sell by date passes, when it gets thrown in the bin. Fridges are essentially cupboards for perishable items and most of the good food which gets thrown away has been sitting in the fridge. This is a surprisingly modern trend – when the Queen was crowned in 1952 fridges were very rare – in fact only 2% of households had them. Fridge-freezers only became popular 25 years later. Food snobs like me take a lot of pleasure in pouring scorn on the “bogof” generation and their shockingly wasteful habits, but in truth most of us are just as bad, at least I am. The only difference is that my waste food isn’t in the fridge, its in the garden. It was a mortifying experience for me to walk round the kitchen garden today and see just how much of the summer produce hadn’t been picked or had gone to seed. Red currants, runner beans, lettuces, all going to waste, because I haven’t had the time or the energy to harvest them at the correct time. My waste will end up on the compost heap; theirs in the bin – that’s the only difference.
I have a rule never to read anything in the papers about sport or the royal family. There’s more than enough drivel to wade through as it is. But I broke the rule today when I saw a headline which read ” ‘Mankind is faced with extinction’, says Charles”. ”What’s the old fool on about now?”, I wondered. It turned out that he has become the president of the World Wildlife Fund and used the opportunity of his inaugural address to say that we are so busy driving animals to extinction through our abuse of the planet’s resources that we run the risk of annihilating ourselves. He calls it “the sixth great extinction event”.
Now it happens that only a few days ago the science writer, Matt Ridley, examined in The Times the facts about the “sixth mass extinction” (another such event was the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs). He referred to the analysis made by the scholar Willis Eschenbach of the 190 bird and mammal species that have become extinct globally in the last 500 years, as recorded by the American Museum of Natural History. Only 9 continental species (as opposed to those confined to an island), have gone extinct – and they are, the bluebuck, the Labrador Duck, the Algerian gazelle, the Carolina parakeet, the slender-billed grackle, the passenger pigeon, the Colombian grebe, the Atilan grebe and the Omilteme cottontail rabbit. Only the last three vanished in the last sixty years. Not one of the nine became extinct because of climate change or the loss of rain forest. In Eschenbach’s words “This lack of even one continental forest bird or mammal extinction, in a record encompassing 500 years of massive cutting, burning, harvesting, inundating, clearing and general widespread destruction and fragmentation of forests on all the continents of the world provides a final and clear proof that the species-area relationship simply does not work to predict extinctions” .
Prince Charles is becoming more curmudgeonly every year, which is a pity. On any rational analysis the world has become a far better place during his lifetime. One indicator of this is that wildlife is thriving and that rates of extinction (which are perfectly normal in nature) are falling. It’s daft of him to say otherwise, but the WWF makes its money from its message of doom and Charles wouldn’t have been invited to become their President if he didn’t agree.
Shop bought tomatoes are usually vile. “Vine tomatoes” are even viler because insult is added to injury by being charged double for the same tasteless product with a piece of stalk attached.
The only tomatoes worth eating in this country are those you grow yourself. We are picking ours now and they have a deep intense flavour which I find irresistible and so tomatoes are dominating my eating right now.
Here’s my recipe for a simple tomato sauce to go with pasta:
Pick 8 good sized tomatoes. They must be dark red in colour. The redder and squishier the better. When tomatoes are used in a sauce they must be skinned, but nothing could be easier. Bring a pan of water to the boil, drop in the tomatoes, count to ten and remove them. The skins will slip off. Chop up the tomatoes, removing any bits which are green or hard. Then put some olive oil into a frying pan and slowly cook one large chopped onion and one chopped clove of garlic. When they are soft throw in the tomatoes. After a couple of minutes of fairly fierce cooking add a large piece of salted butter . Let it all bubble away while the spaghetti is being cooked. The salt in the butter and the salt in the spaghetti water is all the seasoning you’ll need. I always add a knob of butter to the spaghetti after it has been drained. Don’t worry if you’ve run out of parmesan- it doesn’t need it.
This dish is simplicity itself, and is the epitome of Slow Food, even though the preparation and cooking time is only a quarter of an hour.
If you don’t fancy spaghetti, the sauce is delicious as a topping on thick toast- I think the Italians call it crostini
There are some very persuasive salesmen with some very glossy brochures going around trying to persuade hotels to “invest” in food waste digesters. These are very large plastic bins which plug into the mains and, with the aid of a “bio-enzymatic formula” will turn food leftovers into grey water. I’ve got news for these guys- there’s another way to get rid of food waste that doesn’t need plugging into the mains and at the end of the process produces something more interesting than grey water, namely pork chops, black pudding, bacon, brawn and, if you are brave enough, pigs trotters.
The people selling these digesters claim that they are environmentally friendly even though they come with a huge carbon footprint in the form of a large lump of plastic and even though they require the constant use of electricity. On the other hand, the alternative, a pig, really is environmentally friendly, as they will eat everything, including the bones (which bio-digesters don’t). In fact if you ever wanted to dispose of a body, leaving no possible trace, a mature sow will do the job most effectively (but do remember to remove any rings).
So, why aren’t these smiling salesmen going around asking us to invest in a sow? The answer is that since 2002 it has been illegal to feed food scraps to pigs. This law was brought in as a knee-jerk reaction after the last major foot and mouth outbreak. There isn’t the faintest scientific justification for the ban. But the result of the ban is that landfill sites are filling up with food waste, pork is far more expensive than it should be, and hoteliers are endlessly pestered by charming salesmen to “invest” in ghastly, environmentally unfriendly, food digesters.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials Thoreau
The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden where we grow our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening is all about patience.
The principles of Slow Food are "good, clean and fair" - 'good' means that the food should be of good quality, 'clean' means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, 'fair' means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don't use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general with the aim of achieving a good work/life balance.
This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.
There's also quite a lot in this blog about Japan and the Japanese. This is because I admire their way of life and the fact that the Japanese, more than any other nation, are trying to embrace the Slow Life, even to the extent of having Slow Cities.
