FPAWC

Last week’s after work pints went so well that we decided to make it a regular thing. On Thursday, so as to broaden the scope of the attendees, I’d written the following notice…

Very Important Notice!
The next meeting of the Friday Pint After Work Club* will take place on Friday 23rd January at the Lass O’Gowrie from half past four onwards
ALL WELCOME

*The Friday Pint After Work Club has no membership fee, constitution, rules or aim, other than encouraging people to have a social pint or two after work on a Friday. There’s no need to book, and no form to fill in. Just come to the pub.

…and I’d stuck it up in a few strategic locations around the building. When I arrived today, there had been a few mumbles about it. One person had put up another notice by mine that said, “Who are you? Do I need to wear a red rose in my lapel?” Someone else had complained about the inherent sexism of asking somebody to come out for a manly pint rather than a gender neutral drink. Seriously. The same complainant had, it turned out, moaned about how much notice was given, and had said that it would “never last,” until her team were free to attend. Imagine living with such a negative worldview! I felt quite sorry for them.

Dr Jim breezed into the Lass, looking very well. We had a couple more beers then headed out towards the Winter Ales Festival. The queue was enormous, over an hour, said the warden. No thanks! To Sinclairs! To the Wellington! To a 16oz Aberdeen Angus Burger for a tenner! And then home, listening in rapt silence to a Radio 4 documentary about the American Civil War in the back of the cab.

Letter to Women’s Hour this morning

Listening to Radio 4 at my desk, I smiled -

"We’ve just had this letter in..."

I’ve noticed that you have had technical problems at the start of your show again. Perhaps you should get a man in to fix them?

[Sound of paper being scrunched up.]

"...pah!"

Radio Highlights

Here are some highlights from things I’ve listened to on Radio 4 this week.

Woman’s Hour

Woman’s Hour offers interesting and varied programming through the week. There’s a female slant on most of the programming, but it isn’t the vacuous dribble that fills up the lunchtime real-life scandal magazines. I’m a culture snob, so for me it was a feast. I heard a fascinating piece about the sacred concubines of Hindu temples, the Devadesi, whose lives are changing, indeed - ever shortening, because of HIV.

Daunt and Dervish by Guy Meredith

Daunt and Dervish is a brilliant comedy drama series about two former World War Two spies, Josephine Daunt and Susan Dervish, who met up after the war and decided to form a lady detective agency. I enjoyed my first episode, serialised over the week on Women’s Hour. It’s set in 1953 at the time of the Coronation, and involves Russians, spies, film stars and scandal. There’s a full summary here, from which here are a few highlights…

“A scream comes from Belinda's dressing room. The door is locked shut and Susan Dervish charges it. Is Belinda dead...?”

“He thinks that her suicide was a set up though so that the director could pick up the insurance…”

“By the bank of the Thames, Bill sees a floating body...”

“Is he working for the Russians?…”

High melodrama, cloak and dagger, smoke and shadows – delicious distractions at my desk. Splendid stuff.

I love Hugh FW

I watch very little television, partly because my irregular weekly routine means I can’t guarantee that I’ll be in on a particular day to see the next episode of a series, and partly because I’m a culture snob who thinks most telly is pants. An exception, for me, is the wonderful Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who never fails to make me smile. I’ve really enjoyed watching his recent series, Hugh’s Chicken Run, in which he tries to change the nation’s attitudes about cheap chicken. Baffled that two chickens can be purchased from Tesco for a fiver, he tries to find out the detail of why they’re so cheap. Of course, they’re battery hens, and intensively farmed, which is why they cost so little. But what does that actually mean?

All of the supermarkets refuse to appear in a filmed interview about chicken. No intensive farm will let him film inside one of their sheds. To understand chicken production, Hugh sets up three different chicken farms: one smallholder-style, on an allotment with a single coop; one larger free-range farm, and; one intensive factory-style farm. Both the free-range and the intensive farms had been set up according to poultry industry guidelines. There isn’t a smallholder industry to speak of, and so no official guidelines exist, but Hugh’s probably the nearest thing there is to an authority on smallholding. The central point is this: all three farms were set up to be as close as was possible to the normal conditions of farms around the country.

I suspect that Hugh’s example of a factory farm was less horrific than its larger cousins. Nonetheless, it was still grim. The floor was rammed with fat birds, waddling a few steps forward to feed, then a few back to sit down again in their own effluent. The hens have nothing to do all day except eat. And worse yet, the lights are left on for twenty-three-and-a-half hours at a time - if the birds think that it’s ‘daytime’ they’ll eat and eat and eat. I think Hugh’s made a difficult moral choice in deciding to publicly undertake a practice that he finds abhorrent in order to expose it. I think he’s made the right choice.

And will it change the eating habits of Axminster or the rest of the wider TV watching audience? I don’t know. But I’ll be buying free-range hereafter. One down…



The Lie of the Land was also superb.

EDIT: Here are some links to feedback from HFW's TV series. It made me angry when Hugh was driven to swearing in the last episode of the ...Chicken Run. He's so nice that anything that makes him swear must be really infuriating.

Manchester Evening News.

Hugh's Chicken Out Campaign Page

BBC Farmers' World Feedback Podcast

I think the following things are interesting

Old buildings and history

Learning things - new ideas

How things work (gadgets and everyday things)

Making things happen

Scandal and relationships, gossip (not me)

Doing things with friends, dancing

Exploring places, old and new

Cooking new things, like soup

Games, competitions and projects

Arts: music, flm, plays, art, books, gigs

Getting out of breath, sport, walking or otherwise

Vocabulary expansion