Wake up and smell the coffee – part 2

Part 1 of Wake up and smell the coffee was published here yesterday

It’s not all sunshine and roses away elsewhere either.  The farming community is reporting that the harvest this year has not been particularly good.  Many will have forgotten that last autumn and winter, along with early spring, was dire with very heavy rainfall, although most of us have enjoyed dry and hot weather for weeks and weeks during lockdown.  Farmers reported crops struggling and failing and now, as they harvest, yields are down by at least 30% in some areas, with others farmers reporting crops such as peas as reasonable, while winter beans and winter oil seed rape were a total right off.   So, a mixed picture really, but it seems for the farming community results have been mostly, at very best, ordinary.

More support, then, from the taxpayer, under a new agricultural bill winding its way through Parliament which has provisions for productivity payments for farmers.  Farming being a big business these days, I just wonder how many acres will be sold off to property developers in the coming years as planning permission is set to become easier and easier to obtain. Who can blame them? Farming never was an easy option, probably less so now as big money is involved, and farming becomes more and more industrialised.   Like everything else the industry has been at times badly affected by the virus and profitability will have been affected too.  There could be difficult times ahead.

I suppose they could allow their fields to be used for staycationers, rushing out to take advantage of the delights of the countryside. We’ve certainly seen quite a few locals fixing roof boxes and cycle racks to the family 4×4 over the last month or so, as they take advantage of the glorious weather we’ve had of late.   The Prime Minister seems to have had the same idea and got away to Scotland where, according to one newspaper report, he had arranged a hideaway consisting of a ‘bell tent’ with cottage attached which struck me as an interesting way of describing it.

Not that there is anything new under the sun.  Years ago Margaret Becket, one time Foreign Secretary, enjoyed (and presumably still does) hitching up the family caravan.  It’s not recorded what the security team thought about it at the time although it probably made a quiet interlude for them.  Ex-Prime Minister Brown, whether before or after saving the world, I can’t remember, following the last world-wide financial crisis, rushed off to Southwold in Suffolk for his holiday, and ‘call me Dave’ started a new fashion by nipping off to the seaside and then later buying a glamorous and fashionable ‘shepherd’s hut’ for home work.   We’ve even got a couple of residents here in the Wold who live in their own huts too.   Older readers who know nothing of shepherd’s huts may well remember the same thing as a workman’s hut, often towed behind a slow-moving tractor which housed the amenities for workmen who were, in those days, engaged on road repairs.

Anyway Boris Johnson has probably started a new fashion by hiring a ‘bell tent’ which older Scouts will remember as being dark olive green and came with a sort of musty smell included. But not the 21st century ones which come fully equipped, transported and erected, for not huge amounts of money. One very nice-sounding company also has a wonderfully topical company vision statement  reading ‘take only memories and leave nothing but footprints’ which is apparently how ‘that’ farmer found out that Boris had ‘allegedly’ jumped over his fence and walked in his field, which is according to sources allowed in Scotland.  I must say that the mental picture of Prime Minister Johnson climbing or jumping over a fence raised a smile; I wonder if the security detail had to follow.

Why would anyone be remotely interested in where the Prime Minister is staying on his holiday?  Can we look forward to in-depth articles and programmes along the lines of 10 things we know so far about bell tents, or 10 alternative places for cabinet members to holiday?  Nobody is apparently allowed to have a holiday now unless it’s first ‘cleared’ by the media. You can just imagine the morning briefing in the newsrooms across the land:

Anybody got any suggestions? We’ve done covid, boat people, declining employment, Harry and Meghan, started another panic over the kids GCSE and A level results, tried a story about the cabinet falling out, how about a ‘where’s Boris’?  That should be good for a good few thousand click bait. We could run a competition where if you carry a copy of tour newspaper, you could walk up to one of our look-alike Boris reporters and challenge him with the immortal words: “You are Boris Johnson and I claim the prize.”  That will do it then, plus a good story about the children having their futures destroyed by the government’s mismanagement over the covid crisis, the closure of ‘our’ schools, and now the debacle over the exam results, and can somebody write something that will suggest that it’s not over yet and that it’s never going to safe for the schools to reopen next month.

Interesting isn’t it that young people have now become ‘children’ and students have become ‘pupils’ again, the same ‘children’ that have been let down by the government and not by teachers who, in many cases have done next to nothing to keep the education of pupils going during the epidemic, or parents who have not ensured that their offspring has done anything or responded to material or on line material, because ‘it’s too difficult’.  It’s odd too that I’ve not heard of one parent or pupil complaining that against all the odds and despite doing little or no study their results are far too high!  No doubt when places are taken up at universities or employment starts, there will be another media outcry that these students are failing courses or can’t do the job because they are just not up to the required standard, and let’s face it we have been here many times before.

They’re ‘children’ when it makes a good story and adults that still act like they are children.  I’ve lost count of the number of supposed business leaders during this crisis who wanted, as they put it, more advice, support, or clarity from the government.  I find it hard to understand how some public sector official is in a position to advise any business on the way forward.  Maybe it’s the fact that much of the country seems to have become used to working and behaving as if they are part of some vast all-encompassing, bog-standard comprehensive school circa 1990.  It could of course be that that is what happens when everyone is a winner and millions are employed in public sector departments, executive agencies, quangos and the so called third charity sector where everything is so politically correct, risk averse with a common purpose culture and where nothing is quite what it seems.