In TV-speak we have the TX date (transmission date to you and me)-of The Hotel Sunday April 17th at 8pm. Previously we had been told that the first episode would go out on Tuesday April 26th, and I expect that the date has been brought forward to get in ahead of the mighty brouhaha of the Royal Wedding. Wayne, the General Manager at the Damson Dene, and Paul and Lavinia, who are now his assisstant managers, joined executives from Channel 4 and the staff of Dragonfly, the production company and several dozen representatives of the press (“hacks” in TV-speak) for a preview of the first episode. ​

It was five years ago, following a research programme which took me to Kobe in Japan, that I started on the road to producing England’s first herd of Wagyu cattle. The Japanese government won’t allow the export of their native cattle, but it’s possible to get frozen embryos of pedigree Wagyus via Holland, and I arranged for some to be inserted into my own pedigree Belted Galloways at my farm on the Duddon Estuary. ​

The Crown Imperial (Fritillaria Imperialis) begins to emerge from the ground in late February, at the same time as the early tulips, but comes into flower much earlier. The one pictured here flowered on the 18th March, but none of my tulips has the hint of a flower as yet. They are planted deep down and our free draining soil seems to suit them. They may be lovely to look at but boy do they stink!. It’s the foliage, not the flowers. Their malodorous scent seems to have two advantages. First, the deer don’t touch them; secondly, there is not temptation to pick them and put them in vases, so that they will look pretty in the garden until the tulips have taken over.

I was rather taken aback when walking into the courtyard at the Royal Academy to be confronted by a slate building. The structure looked every bit like one of those business units which is put up by Cumbrian farmers when they get a grant for “farm diversification”. What on earth was it doing in the centre of London? It turns out it was the RA’s attempt at the reconstruction of what is known as the Merz Barn, which had been used as a studio by the German artist Kurt Schwitters in Elterwater. It is known as a barn, but was in fact a hut or lean-to and has achieved iconic status as a work of art in its own right. One wall of the original has been removed to Newcastle University, where it has been valued at £14 million, a sum of which Cumbrian farmers can only dream, grant or no grant.
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The below picture shows the original, the picture above, the reproduction. They are not even close approximations. 

If you are in Grange-over-Sands in March and you breathe in deeply you are bound to smell garlic. This often puzzles visitors. Are they in an outpost of France? Not quite- they are breathing in the aroma of wild garlic, which is everywhere in Grange at this time of year. The photo shows the wood just behind Main St.; every inch of ground in the wood is covered in the young shoots of wild garlic. ​

In a few weeks the Damson Dene Hotel will, if Channel 4 has its way, be famous. This cartoon, which appeared on the front page of the Westmorland Gazette has been drawn in response to a preliminary flurry of publicity in the local papers about a TV series, based at the Damson Dene, which has the preliminary title of “The Hotel”. It will be shown in 8 one hour episodes on Channel 4, after the watershed. ​

​The filming of the programme, which took up a great chunk of our lives last summer, was made by an independent company called Dragonfly who made the well known ‘fly on the wall’ series, The Family and One Born Every Minute. The latter won a Bafta last year.

I’ve come across a story which is so strange that I can hardly believe it’s true. It concerns Elizabeth Cotten, an American folk singer. I wouldn’t know anything about her if I hadn’t been so captivated by a song I heard on the radio that I went onto the internet to find out what it was. The song, Shake Sugaree, is practically unknown but it turned out that its author had written several well known songs including the classic Freight Train. ​

I don’t patronise any supermarket for the very simple reason that if they get my custom the small independent shopkeeper doesn’t. But I’m very interested in what the supermarkets get up to which is why I accepted an invitation for a behind the scenes look at a new Booths store in Garstang at the invitation of Slow Food, Lancashire. ​