Self-Sufficiency in Style

stop the world?

part one

It is very tempting to believe that by going self-sufficient you can leave a world of greed and unpleasantness behind.  Alas, you can't.

This is going to be a story that will disturb most of the readers. They will be tempted to believe that is is a fabrication by an imaginative writer or the ravings of a crank.

By chance, the writer, through his smallholding, stumbled into the story of a generation. Even more strange, events have not yet run their course and the final chapters not even written.

You will be reading history being made.

It was a question of the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

If you doubt this quite extraordinary story, from time to time, the appropriate references will be given, so you can check the facts from public records.

Perhaps, because fellow smallholders and homesteaders will be reading this, the place to start, as lawyers always say, is the very beginning.

January 1984 is the time. I was a busy shipping man based at Britain's major seaport and involved in some pretty sensitive work - shipping people often are. It was a world where military activity was quite normal and even conducted in parallel with contact with regimes such as Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Yugoslavia during their civil wars and so on.

I'd talked to my Israeli agents on the telephone during the last Gulf war. They were sitting on the floor under their desks and the thud of Scud missiles landing could be heard down the line.

There were Libyan staff on secondment to my office around the time that Woman Police Constable  Fletcher was killed by gunfire from the Libyan embassy in London. One had defected too, to be hunted by his  "colleagues."

I'd worked for the US Sealift command, and the British equivalent.

I'd handled troop transports and been on board such famous vessels as the "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Tristram"; the first sunk, the other damaged with great loss of life during the Falklands War. 

I'd even had the job of telling the master of a British merchant ship, that he was to become an aircraft carrier and sail to war. A picture of the vessel MV "Astronomer" in her new role in Prince William Sound hangs above my desk as I write.

So, as they say, I'd  "been about", normally from the safety of an office or a cold quayside though. This becomes important later in the story.

Most British readers will remember this. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel "Sir Galahad".

I was not there, but knew the ship well as an agent for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary for some years.

...and with a big lawn in front.

We bought a new home and moved in January 1984. It had lots of land including an enormous grass piece in front of the house.

I bought a sit-on mower - and on getting it out of the barn for the first time - drove it into the wall. Whilst we were waiting for spares to repair the damage to arrive from the States, inspiration struck.

"Why don't we keep the grass down with some sheep?"

We bought four sheep, electric fencing, batteries and the seemingly endless list of things to go with the animals. We put them in lamb each year and sold most of the off-spring, also slowly increasing the flock size.

We discovered that we liked sheep - and eventually actually managed to bring ourselves to eat the lambs.

There is a lot to learn about sheep.

Still, his wife loves him!

The taxman asked what we were doing, but since I still had a full time career in shipping, he was happy to do a deal, whereby so long as I claimed no tax credits for the "farm", they would make no claim on the tiny income. We sold a few eggs and a little lamb.

To this day, his comment is remembered: "I have a wife just like that. The place is full of animals, all costing me money."

That taxman was a realist. He has probably since been sacked for making sexist remarks.

An Australian, he upheld his country's honour by keeping a flock of sheep as a hobby and by taking a more commercial view of his small-scale farming activities. Although how he could claim his goats were commercial, beats me.

One day, he brought to my attention the fact that new sheep quota rules were coming in from the European Union or EEC as it was then.

It seems that providing you kept a dozen sheep for a specified period, you would be granted a valuable commodity known as a sheep quota. This quota could be bought and sold.

Bad advice from down-under.

I'm only slightly surprised that they did not use a calculator. The twelve ewes were in a quarter-acre paddock.

We did just that, increasing our numbers slightly, obtaining a "holding number" and filling in all the right pieces of paper.

It was our introduction to agricultural bureaucracy and the "holding number" designating us a farm, I suppose.

Two men arrived and spent two hours counting twelve sheep. That was our first experience of Britain's now infamous Ministry of Agriculture (MAFF). These were the people whose legendary incompetence gave the world "Mad Cow" disease.

In due course, a letter arrived, telling us in virtually incomprehensible English, that the quota had run out and we were not going to be granted any.

It seems all the big farmers had received theirs, but once the total number of sheep in the UK allowed for quota had been reached, they arbitrarily threw out the small people, probably on the basis that it would not be financially justified for them to fight their case.

We noted it, and perhaps asked for our holding number to be removed. We decided to have nothing to do with the Ministry ever again.

However, by this time, Mad Cow, and the allegedly associated human illness vCJD, was an issue. All cattle had to be ear-tagged and registered - the "holding number" was part of the system.

We intended to get a house cow and, of course, recognised the need to co-operate fully, so we kept the "holding number."

We did notice that the use of a holding number encouraged the Ministry to consider us a commercial farm rather then a private household. 

This was disconcerting. They had a habit of sending extremely rude letters of doubtful legality insisting on compliance with regulations, that even if they existed, did not apply to a private home. There was usually a threat of criminal prosecution, if we failed to comply promptly.

We are honest law abiding people, we don't knowingly break the law and we don't like being threatened.

The demands were fairly harmless in effect, most merely seeking statistics. How many chickens did we have? How many hectares of cabbages? Also, more significantly, how many pigs and sheep?

We completed these forms faithfully, even if irritated.

.

We bought our Jersey, Gladys, for 10 Pounds as a calf.

Mrs. P taught her to drink from a bucket.

The regulations require a numbered tag on both ears, to enable tracing in the event of BSE.

Reasonable enough in the circumstances. The ear-tags on this COW play an important part in the story of Swine Fever.

Vera - the healthy pig at the centre of the storm.

Swine Fever or CSF, also called pig cholera in the US, was discovered on a farm some miles away on August 8th, 2000. 

More cases followed in the days and weeks that followed.

The quiet country lanes quickly came to resemble a battlefield, cars full of officials rushed to and fro. Periodically, one would stop. "Do you have pigs?" would come the demand.

Once, twice, even three times a day. The requests were sometimes polite, sometimes demanding. There was a strange air about some of these sometimes peculiar people. They were hyped up, enthusiastic as if enjoying their moment of glory - or power - of authority.

Sometimes they were just lost, sometimes threatening, sometimes nervous. It was all very odd. We were sympathetic to our pig owning neighbours as the killing began. 

Do you have pigs? We want to inspect that building.

Even pensioners that had no pigs were not exempt.

Theft from the taxpayer on a massive scale.

Please check my facts, you are not going to be asked to take much on trust. You can do most of it from your computer.

You can check about the writer's career from many sources - feel free, and if anyone has any queries, I will be pleased to fill in any gaps.

You can find out something about the Swine Fever Epidemic and pig health from http://www.pighealth.com/csf.htm  The author Dr Mike Meredith is a rather unconventional expert on pig health, but nobody has ever doubted  the accuracy of his site.

You can find the best site on Foot and Mouth at http://www.warmwell.com/  Mary Critchley, the author, is a quite extraordinary lady. Praised in many publications from "The Daily Telegraph" to "Country Life", where she was the subject of a recent flattering editorial. We will have more to say about Mary's famous determination to get to the truth later.

Neither would wish to be associated with every opinion of mine, nor I with theirs, but both have chronicled successive disasters with selflessness, integrity and intelligence. 

Both are more reliable than Britain's discredited official sources.

That information seems to remain a State secret to this day - under whose authority, and what legality, we really wonder.

This site may well be closed down because I have disclosed it.

We all know who it was of course. We now know of the then Chairman's friendship with the Prince of Wales - Prince Charles. We know of his family's past association with Britain's Special Forces. We know of the wealth, the presence and dignity on both sides of the Atlantic. We know of the honours, the vast charitable giving, the massive power, influence and wealth.

However, we also know of the criminal prosecution, the previous involvement with the origins of Mad Cow disease, the allegations of animal cruelty. We know of the Court case, the records of which have been removed from the internet.

We know of other missing newspaper reports, the recruitment of ex-army heavies. We now know most of what there is to know.

We know of the ruined lives, the farmers that had to sell up. The unfair contracts, the lies, the cheating, the bullying. The pigs that are still sick. The secret on-farm burials. The EU investigation. The sale of big companies within 24 hours for no money. The sale of infected meat for human consumption.

We know about the money stolen from the taxpayer. We also know about the estimated 400,000 pigs slaughtered in the most unpleasant way. Then the ultimate disaster of foot and mouth disease.

We knew nothing of this at the time, of course. Little did we know that we were about to help set in train a Constitutional Crisis on a scale not seen since the abdication of Edward VIII over his plans to marry Mrs Simpson.

We just sat and watched in complete amazement as this cavalcade of officialdom stamped their feet on the face of England. 

We sat and waited, innocent of the disaster that was about to shame Britain. The rape of the countryside. Blood in the lanes and hedgerows - literally.

Exaggeration? Wait until I have finished. This is a story that crosses the Atlantic several times and runs from the Great Plains in the US, backwards and forwards into Canada. It crosses to Ireland and impacts on the Southern Hemisphere. It runs from rural China to South Africa. 

Just like animal disease, there are no boundaries and borders.

Backwards and forwards on a timeline into the history of the US and Britain, it has much to do with basic freedom too.

The story is continued on Stop the World - Part Two.

more to come later

from

 the appropriately  named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.