Ellie’s life is closing in on her. Everyone she knows is eating their pets. And I have to admit I’m beginning to lose my own appetite for meat.
It’s a long road from Brighton to Planet Countryside. When we moved from the buzz of the seaside to the lazy plains of Bloomsburyshire three years ago, my plan to leave Sainsbury’s to the townies and go local was little more than a social experiment. Since then my shopping philosophy has gone through politics and health and out the other side until, inspired by the adventures of our fellow city resisters who moved from Preston Park to pig farming down the road, we are perched on the verge of small-holding ourselves.
By the time you read this, we will have moved from our community of snow-balling school-bunkers with its veg plots and poly tunnel, horses, chickens and co-housing philosophy and will be knee deep in pig poo. After dipping our toes in country life, we’re going in. Deep.
Well, deepish. The house we’re moving to is not only a cycle ride away but is part of a 21 acre estate with sheep, pigs and chickens roaming freely like something out of a Disney story. The boundaries were supposed to be set in stone - three acres for us and 18 for the vendor’s animals, but when I looked past the duck pond to the fields next door a vision of my childhood, my parents’ and grandparents’ and a fantasy I could impose upon my own children’s pulled suddenly into sharp focus. A quick word with the farmer, and the deal was done.
Co-farming, we shall call it. He pays the bills and sells the meat and we feed, coo, clean and gambol with the animals. The kids’ lives will be transformed; it will have taken three years to pull them away from the TV to paddle in streams and make dens in the woods, but perhaps Wii will finally become something that we clean out of the chicken coop, and Friends will refer to our (almost) own lambs and piglets.
The sniff of a life in farming started for us here in this community of 22 families who moved from London and Brighton with a vague interest in self sufficiency and co-owning a lot of animals. It’s been fun spending the last three years feeding the chickens and gathering up the eggs on our chicken day, sitting in meetings discussing whether to get goats or llamas to chomp through our 25 acres in the interest of both Peak Oil and Climate Change. And I dare say when food security leaps off the pages of the Guardian and into its back yard, the community will realise its true Good Life potential. In fact, as we move the last of our boxes out, they will be voting on the idea of raising chickens for eating for the first time.
For Ellie, that means it’s time to go. The country air has permeated her soul, but not quite as I might have imagined; where once she might have been thrilled to hear that baby chicks would be reared under hot lamps outside her mate Zoe’s house, her activist’s face is set. “They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?” And she stomps off to pack another box.
I have tried to tell her about the pigs in the new place. And the sheep. Happily, she and her sister are still so excited about the colour of their new bedrooms and the 35 year-old horse in the garden that they have managed to put the reality of our new life on hold. Grandpa, tickled by the idea of our vegetarian daughter facing the truth of the land, couldn’t resist when we last went to visit. “This time next year” he said as he looked out at the first snowdrops peeking from beneath their wintry carpet, “you’ll be slapping on your rubber gloves for the lambing”. As the children looked at me to explain his crude impersonation of a country mid-wife, I quickly spun the conversation back to the story of Granny’s chicks.
“My father hatched them in my bedroom”, she explained. “They were our Christmas treat.”
“Ah, how sweet,” said Loulou, wide-eyed at the thought of her ten-year-old granny playing with a clutch of fluffy chicks in her doll’s house, before cuddling up with them in bed. Ellie’s eyes narrowed.
“You ate them, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” laughed Granny. “They tasted so much better than the ones from the market”.
Even Dave and Vicky, our newly countrified pals from Brighton who seemed so kind, so warm, are thumbing through their recipe books as spring calmly and certainly beckons their pigs to the abattoir. Luckily, Mother Nature, with a sweep of her magic wand, manages to turn the cutest of piglets into huge, snorting and slightly alarming beasts just before slaughter but even so, I'm beginning to worry about how I’m going to manage with the happy meat story when they’re my own. When Vicky’s escaped pigs tried to climb inside her car the other night, I knew that they weren’t trying to eat her as she suspected, but that they were heading straight for the key to the larder. These are some of the most intelligent animals in the world and they know that if Vicky is late for dinner, the world really could be over. The fact that it will be in a couple of months is, I increasingly find, not worth thinking about.
As we pile the last sofa into the back of the car, I frantically redefine my foodie philosophy. The way I see it is that our local butcher needs our business and it is our solemn duty to support all those local farmers by plying our trade in the proper manner. And while our chickens lay plentifully, their lives are not in danger. It’s a good eighteen months or so until we have to face the future of our lambs. They’re not even born yet, for God’s sake. No, as we head into a brave new world of small-holding, we’ll take it literally, holding small, sweet, squeaky things, bottle feeding the lambs and playing chess with the pigs.
What’s wrong with bee-keeping anyway?
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