The Lie of the Land

"You see chickens," said Giles Coren, speaking to Libby Purves on Radio 4 (there I go again, giving myself away), "I see Velociraptors."

God I love Giles Coren.  Not just for his slept-in looking face with its half-hearted beard effect, nor for the profane outrages he commits backstage at The Times (though I love him especially for these) but for his... metropolitan-ness.  This week saw the first episode of 'Giles and Sue Live the Good Life' go out on BBC2, an attempt to recreate the classic seventies sit-com of the same name.  Of course, the only reason this programme is remotely watchable is because Coren is entirely antipathetic to the self sufficient 'good life'.  And that's where I really get him...

I have been living in Dorset for almost twenty years.  A twist, a slip, an accident of fate has dropped me, essentially an urban animal, into an alien environment and I am still reconciling myself to it.  I am not for one moment saying that I don't absolutely love living in Dorset; I do.  I love the soft, undulating, feminine landscape.  I love being close enough to the sea to be able to stand at the end of the land and think big thoughts about being infinitesimally small (in the cosmic scheme, obviously; there's nothing infinitesimally small about my thighs, for example).  I love being part of a village community where everybody knows my business, I love the darkness of the skies at night and the sunrises over the Chase which I can see, uninterrupted, from my kitchen window.  I adore living here.  I only have to get to Junction 6 of the M3 and I'm practically hyperventilating at the claustrophobia that is life in Suburbia.

No, what I struggle with is the drive toward sustainable living that is going on under my nose, led by my husband, my horticulturist pal, David, and Mr Fothergill, mail order purveyor of fine herbs and seeds.  Between the three of them, my half acre plot is being turned over to food production in a way that would bring Giles Coren out in a rash. 

"Time for a new bed," my husband said in an unusually firm and decisive manner.  I raised my eyebrows, unused to him making unilateral decisions about furniture.  "Did you have something in mind?" I asked, my imagination roaming the shop floors of John Lewis and Laura Ashley.
"Fourteen foot by four," he replied. 
"Doesn't sound a standard size," I said, "won't that make the bed linen really expensive?"

Of course, what he had in mind was not an exciting 'leap-on-that-Sugar- let's-make-our-own-entertainment' kind of bed, but a raised vegetable bed.  For raising vegetables.

In the original programme, it's Tom Good who desires a life close to nature,  and wife Barbara who goes along with it, supportively.  Perhaps my husband imagined I'd be much the same.  I was once I asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and I did actually answer 'Felicity Kendall', so it wasn't perhaps, such an unreasonable assumption.  My nine year old self  had worked out that there was something desperately attractive and sexy about Felicity Kendall in those dungarees on 'The Good Life'.   I could see that she had a certain kind of power, but I mistakenly took that power to lie within the dungarees, not the woman.  This led to some regrettable fashion errors in the late eighties and many invitations to join the Gay and Lesbian Soc. at university. 

 I failed miserably at being Felicity Kendall back then, and have gone on to fail pretty spectacularly on the supportive wife front, eschewing Sunday afternoons weeding and pricking out (oh go on then, a little pricking out has occurred from time to time) though I am quite happy to eat the results of my husband's efforts.

Our garden now has five raised veg beds.  Side by side and initially empty, they looked like a row of graves.  For a while I was wary of ending up in one myself.  "What do we need five for?"  I asked, "Are you planning on feeding the entire village?"
He looked at me with incredulity.  "Given that you have written for gardening magazines," he said, "have you learned nothing about crop rotation?"

Well, let me tell you.  I bloody have now.  It involves losing your husband to the garden, or to seed catalogues or to Gardeners' Question Time.  It involves washing a lot of thick socks and corduroy trousers.  And it involves applauding the harvest, even if it's curly kale and you hate curly kale more than anything.  The only good thing about the whole business is that I get to wander around with a trug.  Tragically, it appears I'm more Margo than Barbara.  (But hey, maxi dresses are having a moment...)

The other thing we have in our self sufficiency drive, like Giles and Sue, is chickens.  Five of them at the moment, free ranging, or rather, free rampaging, or even free ravaging the bits of garden that aren't veg beds.  The children have given them names to make the bonding process easier, but I lack the empathy required to make a relationship with poultry even with whimsical names like Rose and Marje and Bernard (poor Bernard, not just a chicken, but a gender confused chicken).  Just like Giles, I can see them only as expressions of primitive nervous systems, all jerky, jurassic impulses with feathers.  I challenge anyone to look a chicken in the eye and tell me it has a soul.

I shall be spending the next few weeks praying that my husband is too busy to watch Giles and Sue as they turn a perfectly decent north London garden into a small holding.   They've got a pig and I don't want him getting any ideas...