Sunday, November 04, 2007

Agribusiness

In my dispatch from the Kentish badlands yesterday, I forgot to mention the area's weird and vaguely menacing farmland, in which the only human life to be seen was the occasional well-wrapped Polish worker toiling on the fields. This at times gave the scene an air of Millet or Van Gogh - except that the fields and the toil were themselves mysterious. It was impossible to see what was growing, under ridges of tight opaque polythene, but there were acres of it (out-of-season soft fruit probably). Walking through all this was more of a trudge through an alien landscape - and that, sadly, is what much country walking feels like these days. The countryside, which in living memory was as familiar and readable as it still is in picture books and toy farms, is now a strange, marginal and alienating place, where much of the time it's impossible to discern what is going on, and why - and where the human presence is sparse and as mysterious as the landscape. As so often, one thinks fondly of the fields of Normandy, where farming still resembles an intelligible core human acitvity - despite the hectares of maize being grown for biofuel. But that's a subject in itself...

6 comments:

  1. Nige, you should visit northwest Shropshire where rolling pasture and woodland is still the norm. It's not dramatic like the hills south of Shrewsbury, but just as beautiful in its own way. Agribusiness may ruin all this in the future, but for now it's still dotted with farmhouses and herds of cows.

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  2. Ah that sounds more like it, Sophie - long may it last. Pastureland does seem more resistant, despite everything, and rolling pasture with woodland really is the best kind of landscape, isn't it? In the arable East and the built-up South we have far too little of it...

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  4. The application of materialism to everything from being human-the consumer-to the landscape-the consumed. I've a rather long piece if, or even if not, interested: Materialism is Materialism.

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  5. Kent is pretty horrid Nige. Some friends of ours once took us to a quaint village pub for Sunday lunch, in a saloon bar who's habituees looked like the 'A Wing' at Parkhurst, holding conversations that oscillated between muffled whispers and that sort of chuckling guffawing that the English working classes go in for when gathered in numbers. Was it called West Kinsbury or something- anyway a real nest of hoods if ever I saw one. There's the odd valley down in Beevor/Starkey rich historians land near Canterbury, but the rest of it is like London tippage. I like Romney Marsh mind you. I don't like pubs but there's a really weird one out there run by a woman who used to be in the Land Army. The pub where time stopped. But that's in Sussex inn'it? Go west young Nige to find real countryside. Or Lincolnshire.

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  6. What's Rodney Marsh got to do with anything?

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