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Community and Credibility

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Carl Bennett

Begbies Traynor are a company which specialises in clearing-up the mess when a company goes bust. According to them and they should know, 50 pubs a week are closing.

Fifty. Every week. According the the British Beer and Pub Association there were 69,000 pubs in the UK in 1980, 52,000 in 2010. Assuming this trend continues, in twenty years there simply won’t be any pubs left.

Once again the eternal elephant in the room, supermarkets aren’t far away when you wonder whatever happened to the local.

“Consumption in pubs was down by 57 million pints and at the same time there was an almost equivalent increase in terms of drinks spending in supermarkets,” Begbies Traynor’s Julie Palmer told Sky News.

Duty on alcohol has played a major part in the decline, but so has the behaviour of the breweries, as well as pub management companies. When a large basa and a pint leaves very little change out of a tenner as it does in one remaining pub in these parts, which would equivalently get you two bottles of acceptable wine at the garage off-licence it’s easy to see why most people self-evidently don’t go to the pub as often as they used to.

Begbies feel that a lot of pubs simply can’t keep up with changes in consumer behaviour such as more at-home drinking by increasingly less affluent young people and students who for better or worse used to keep pubs and bars open.

“The fact that pubs, football and other sports clubs are on their uppers is not simply a matter for economic concern, as these once thriving hubs of community and regional identity are part of the fabric of British society, and once lost can never be replaced,” chairman Ric Traynor said.

“It will change the character of the country as a whole and this should be recognised.”

In response CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, intends to campaign to re-establish the pub as the centre of community life.

And they’re probably wasting their time. The 1980 baseline for the decline of pubs can’t be entirely coincidentally the year after Margaret Thatcher came to power. As she said in her 1987 heyday interview in Woman’s Own, “they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Is this just me trying to turn a discussion about pubs into a political point? Well pubs and social behaviour IS a political point. For thirty years people have been encouraged not to mix and sit in their homes consuming in private. Videos replaced cinemas. Facebook replaces talking to people in the pub. Cheap drinks from supermarkets helped. Does it matter? I think it does.

There is more to going to the pub than having a drink. It’s neutral ground, where people used to mix and learn to mix with strangers and strange opinions, overwhelmingly peacefully and civilly. And clearly, what young person wants to talk to anyone they don’t know, these days?

But the biggest tragedy is the pretence that ‘the community’ will save the pubs. Pubs are in the state they’re in not because they couldn’t cope with the volume of community pouring through the doors every evening, but because the community cares more about being seen to care and trundling off to the supermarket to pile the boot high with wine boxes than going and spending money in the local.

For exactly the same reason that Care In The Community failed and mentally-ill people were suddenly free to roam the streets and refuse the medication they needed in the 1980s (the specious mantra of choice rather than the demand to turn the grounds of mental homes into executive housing estates) my view is the idea of the community saving pubs will fail for the same reason: the community does not care.

There is of course a distinct difference between being seen to care and actually doing something about it. In a nearby coastal village the community gathered together to buy the village shop when it was threatened with closure as usual because the community didn’t actually use it. Perhaps predictably the consortium dissolved before their first agreed and scheduled meeting could sit.

Just a few hundred yards from us a pub that was thriving ten years ago closed its doors two months ago. The asking price is £450,000 and word on the street, or more precisely from a property developer customer is that the deal will go down at three hundred, y’hear what I’m sayin, as Huggy Bear might once have put it. Another customer has just joined a consortium recently set-up to buy it, or allegedly set-up to buy it, anyway. Shareholders have to pledge £50,000.

Oh, we said, didn’t know you wanted to run a pub?

I don’t, said the customer.

But isn’t £50k a bit much to trust to a bunch of people who’ve never run a pub if you’re not going to get involved?

Oh no, said the customer. I’ve got no intention of handing them the money.

Then why, we said, have you joined the consortium?

To hear what’s going on with the pub of course, said the customer. Who I never saw in the pub when it was open anyway.

The depressing thing is maybe Thatcher was right. When it comes to putting its hand in its pocket the community isn’t having it. But it certainly does like people to think it’s helping.

Posted in New Posts | Tagged Begbies, CAMRA, community, pub closures, pubs, rural life | Leave a comment

The insight insights

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Carl Bennett

Radio 4 this morning featured a little article on data mining, or Big Data, as the scratch panel of experts chose to call it. Yet another meaningless buzzword is bad enough, but predictably they coupled it with the big one, ‘insight.’

Essentially the article was about how your transactions, buying something in Tesco, for example, can be matched to other transactions to profile your behaviour in the abstract. So for example, if males buy beer and a copy of Loaded on Friday nights, then it might be a good idea to put the salted peanuts next to the beer as well. For anyone trading online it’s even more useful, because then the virtual store owner can advertise specific beer n’ smut products to you as soon as you log into the website. It saves all that tedious business of talking to the customers and genuinely understanding what they want.

In circumstances like these perhaps it’s not surprising that reading data tables by computer and stuffing the data through a stats programme is now called insight. And my problem with the word is that it in the best modern manner, insight now means anything you want it to mean.

Like any other business, market research, or the insight industry as it’s now called, uses old and new methods, often at the same time. But while some methodologies are arguably more creative than ever, the public image of research is completely confused. The media fixation that one group is all you need to predict the future is bad enough, but when Ed Milliband publicly mourns the man who carried out his focus groups as a “pollster” on Twitter, something is going deeply wrong.

Communication has to use shared references. Using symbols that are not shared is more like reading someone else’s shorthand. You’ll get some of it, but you won’t really know what they meant. When words are interchangeable the user runs the real risk of only being understood by himself. Apart from being smug, ignorant and self-referential it’s extremely rude.

Before computers in the office there were typists. When everyone had to type, typists became secretaries. Secretaries re-branded as PAs. No-one did anything much different but it all sounded a lot nicer. In MR, interviewers became researchers. Researchers became Insight Managers in entire departments full of insights. At the same time any old quote from a group discussion risibly became a “customer insight.”

Like any religious mantra, the drone of insights is relentless. A job ad today “offers ‘in the moment’ responses to surveys…providing you with compelling insights to vital questions.” Well no, it doesn’t. The idea that results are more insightful specifically because of the timing of the questioning is nonsense.

Just come on. If insight means anything at all the process has to be more genuinely insightful.

Before CACI got involved in running Abu Ghraib the company carried-out a massive project for a UK power company’s retail stores. Store turnover, stock, floor space, distance to the nearest competitor, literally anything that could be measured was thrown into a regression model in search of the optimum mix of toasters and fridges and ranked by square inches. The whole exercise was about data. It was modelling. It was expensive. It made lots of people look busy. And it was a waste of time. It might have been retail history but it certainly wasn’t insight. But these days, I think that’s exactly what this kind of deep-dive data manipulation would be called.

It isn’t as if there’s no such thing as insight. On the biggest global project I ever worked on it looked as if the biggest thing blocking sales was the location where the client’s product was installed. The snag, or insight, depending on where you stand, was that there weren’t any questions about that in the entire survey. A little like locating a black hole in space, real insight means using the data you have to define the answer you don’t.

Tony Blair and Humpty Dumpty both maintained: “when I use a word it means just what I want it to mean.” But throwing around words that mean anything you want doesn’t seem the most direct way to build trust with clients or present a professional image. Given that outside the industry the image of a researcher is someone walking round a shop with a clipboard then I can see why the i-word is so attractive these days. But if they want to convince an increasingly sceptical market that research is worth doing at all then researchers can’t afford to use words without meaning. But who really wants to schlep up the A6 and sit in a cold village hall to consult the customers, after all?

Posted in New Posts | Tagged beer, CACI, data-mining, Nuts, profiling, retail research | Leave a comment

The Quality Option

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Carl Bennett

If you’ve ever wondered how come processed food is so cheap, one of the reasons is they use cheap labour to make it.

Of course, quality is never compromised because as everyone knows, cheap staff always work like people who are motivated and paid a fair wage for their skills.

Just how highly food processing staff are valued was shown in this job ad that was put out today. I promise I haven’t altered a single word of this.

My client is the market leader in their field, they produce high quality products-underpinned by a real focus on quality, customer service and employee development. As they continue to develop, they are now seeking a QA Auditor to support the continued growth of this organisation.

As a Quality Auditor you will be responsible for operating within the HACCP function, thus ensuring products are manufactured safely and to customer specification. Other duties will include quality audits, sample collection and quality management system maintenance. However, training will be given.
This company likes to grow organically within, by promoting and encouraging anyone with the correct skills, ambition and passion towards the food industry.

Quality, customer service, a QM system, ambition, passion – it sounds like the kind of job you couldn’t turn down, doesn’t it? Until you look at what they’re prepared to pay for this full-time, expert-level, committed, integral member of the company.

Sixteen grand. Seventeen negotiable.

It’s not a joke. Apart from the fact it is.

Maybe that’s the going rate for passion these days.

Posted in Living food | Tagged food processing, HAACP, wages | Leave a comment

Falling On Deaf Ears

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Carl Bennett

“Hello.”

Silence.

“What can we do for you?” said slightly louder.

Silence.

At this point one of three things happen.

Either the person coming into the post-office deli-cafe says “Money,” which in this village smacks of Ronald Coleman-style layers of charm if it isn’t an actual robbery in progress. Or they might just say “Er” and wave an envelope at you, from which you’re supposed to guess whether they want to post it, do something with whatever is in it or explain the concept to them in case they’ve just never seen one before. Either way, you go behind the post office counter and wait until they can make some more words.

Old people can be forgetful and when they’ve never needed to communicate with people who don’t already know their every thought and whim then perhaps the habit of language is one you fall out of. Like using false teeth when you need to.

Showing the depths to which your life can sink without you really noticing, you actually get used to those. But worst are the cafe customers who act as if you’d slapped them instead of asking how you can help them.

Are the words difficult to understand? I don’t think so. And after eighteen months of talking to the old, the deaf and the difficult then you learn to enunciate loudly and clearly.

If people don’t want to say anything then that’s their choice and it’s not really anything to do with anyone else. But flat, empty silence makes customer service not difficult but impossible. I know no-one talks to you when you go into a supermarket. Or a McDonalds. Maybe the majority of people have only ever gone there and they don’t know what to do when an unaccompanied stranger says hello to them and offers them the possibility of something nice. But this morning’s episodes remain baffling.

“I’d like to send this registered post.”

There is no such thing as registered post. I don’t know when there was. There’s Recorded, where the person you’re sending it to has to sign for it and Special Delivery, where you can track it if it goes missing.

“Will it go missing?”

I don’t know. What do you think will happen in the future? Statistically not.

“That’s right then. Registered.”

Minutes later an oh-so-rib-crackingly funny request for ‘Pigeon Post First Class.’ Sometimes it’s hard to remember that these are adults who presumably want their letter to actually go somewhere.

But the last was the best.

“Hello.”

Silence.

“What can we do for you?”

Silence.

“Good morning!” Maybe that was a little loud, considering, but I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a zombie invasion just starting.

“Do you have local maps?” It’s a well-known retail fact that you don’t need to say please or thank-you to anyone who is so crap that they actually work in a shop.

We don’t. There aren’t any. There are large scale maps in the garage, turn left at the end of the road. It’s a mile. But there aren’t any local maps except street directories.

Silence.

And more silence.

And a bit more.

“Oh.” Then more silence. Eventually he wandered towards the door. ‘Bye.

Silence.

What is actually wrong with saying something to a stranger when they ask you what you want?

It’s not all customers by any stretch of the imagination. Most people are nice. And generalisations come back to haunt you. But the rude, the difficult and the rude and difficult are the ones you remember. Or maybe that’s just me.

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A Bit of a Punt

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Carl Bennett

Radio 4 was working itself into a lather about betting shops this morning. It’s Grand National Day. Coincidentally there is a review of planning regulations going on so someone has done a survey that in Radio 4′s opinion conclusively proved that “the community” has deserted the High Street in almost every English town and village because of the kind of shops that are there.

In particular the presenter seemed most incensed about sex shops and betting shops and the way they clustered together. Decent folk obviously wouldn’t go to that part of town, so these places were the reason small shops are going bust. What people preferred, he said, was independent bookshops, butchers and bakers.

It sounded as if he’d snoozed off on the sofa watching Notting Hill last night and started speaking before he knew he was really awake.

We had a sex shop planning scandal here a few years ago. The idea of sex itself is not something that comes readily to mind in a place where the average age is claimed to be high 40s but almost everyone you see in the street can comfortably add twenty years onto that. Some libido-fuelled optimist wanted to open a sex shop in a nearby village that boasts three estate agents, a Co-Op, two restaurants, a tool shop, a butcher’s, a chip shop, the dentist, the Post Office, two cafes and a newsagents. A pretty big place, by rural Suffolk standards.

There’s also the seamy side of town in some people’s opinion, although not the kind of place Raymond Chandler would have recognised. There’s a lingerie shop I’ve never seen anyone go into on the north side of Market Square. Maybe they have a secret door down a medieval alleyway, the kind of joint where you have to knock a special way and ask for La Perla. Then there’s the single pub remaining where there were very obviously three or four. So far as seeminess goes, that’s it. The pub looks rubbish, but there’s no law that says you have to go in. Not a chance of opening a sex shop there, but it turned out they wanted to open it on an industrial estate nearby.

Obviously in a world I don’t recognise nothing says “romance” so much as being next to the Tyre Warehouse. Outrage and uproar still though, because clearly the good burghers of the town wanted to protect their children from the threat of people interested in sex at all. It wasn’t as if children would be passing by, or could see in the windows, because there weren’t any. It didn’t happen. And people still don’t have sex in Suffolk.

But none of this is the point. I’ve put bets on a horse about four times in my life. I don’t even do it on Grand National Day, because I don’t know anything about horses, let alone their jockeys, trainers or race courses.

But even if every sex shop and betting shop was closed tomorrow the High Street would still be in the state it’s in. There are hardly any independent bookshops left to move in. Hugh Grant doesn’t really work in one and certainly not in Notting Hill. Independent butchers and bakers are about as widespread as wallabies in England. Yes, there are a few and some people have even seen them, but they aren’t exactly commonplace for the same good reason.

No independent shop or any other shop, nor any High Street, ever shut because it had too many customers. People deserted the High Street and every shop in it for the same reason: they wanted cheap stuff piled high in supermarkets instead.

People still love to talk about how much they support the High Street but that’s all they mean. They are not prepared to do the only thing the High Street needs, going and spending money there in independent stores.

Every attempt to address the issue misses this basic point, from Mary Portas’s report to today’s idea that if Ladbrooks was run out of town the kind of bookshop you only see in episodes of Midsomer Murders will spring up overnight. It won’t, because people want to go to the little bookshop, ask about books, get some recommendations, then go home and buy them cheaper from Amazon.

In the same way, for all that people want to talk about supporting local food producers, it isn’t in Tesco or Waitrose where there’s nobody through the tills in three-quarters of an hour.

It’s a wall of hypocritical nonsense. High Streets fail because people say they want things they are not prepared to pay for. Until customers face-up to the fact that if you only pay for rubbish then rubbish is all you’ll get nothing is going to change except people’s waistlines and the incidence of Type Two diabetes.

Actions have consequences. For all the Del Boy hype that passed for the basis of the economy for twenty years you really can’t get something for nothing. And when the last indepedents close because people preferred to give verbal support to them and financial support to multi-nationals, no amount of made-for-TV celebrity retail investigations will ever get them back.

Posted in New Posts | Tagged betting shops, High Streets, independent traders, Mary Portas | Leave a comment

Sophie’s Choice

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Carl Bennett

I stopped at Waitrose on the way in to work this morning, to pick-up some bread. I don’t know if it’s the same in every Waitrose, but in this one the shelf space for plastic wrapped bread outnumbers the space for what passes for decent bread, stuff you actually need teeth to eat it, by roughly three to one.

The Straight From The Oven bread is pretty good. I haven’t checked whether it’s baked in-store or just warmed up there but that’s not really what this is about. It tastes good, you need to chew it and it’s filling, the way bread that’s not just paste and puffed air should be. I read the bag in the queue for the till.

“There’s our Pain Levain,” it gushed, “prepared with a traditional type of starter dough called….”

This was really emotive writing. You could feel the pain of Sophie in Marketing having painted herself into a corner with this one, and sense the anguish of her despairing cry of, “Sod it Giles, I’m just going to have to put it in and hope no-one reads this, “…..a levain.”

‘Steady on old girl,’ Assistant Bread Products Relationships Manager Giles murmured. ‘I’ll get you some coffee.’

But it was too late. Sophie’s nerves were shot. She tried to rally and ploughed on with the final sentence.

“It’s not the easiest way to make bread,” Yah, well tell me about it,’ she thought, ‘this isn’t the easiest way to make a living,’ “or the quickest, but we think good bread is worth the effort.”

Altogether she thought it was ok as pack copy went. She sipped her espresso gratefully.

Giles wondered whether Sophie really had meant to say that as Waitrose sells three times more white sliced package bread than the Straight From The Oven artisanal-type product she was making a sly dig at the fact that clearly, bad bread isn’t worth the effort, by the intrinsic logic of the sentence.

Which was true, he thought, being a tad overly fond of the odd bakery-fresh brioche himself. The snag was, obviously, if bad bread isn’t worth the effort, why do we stock it? And what on earth are people buying it for?

Giles thought of home, as he so often did these days. Even Ma’s chickens didn’t like white sliced much, so it’s not as if people buy it to feed it to their hens, he mused.

“Soph, you only got one reference to ‘stonebaked’ in that.” He tried to encourage her. Just one last push and the tills would be ringing 24×7. “Just try to make it a bit more artisanal next time. A bit more, you know, hand-made. Less as if it’s made in you know, a big factory. Or something. But don’t get them thinking about whether there’s any point buying the processed stuff. We’re here to sell it. Not taste it. Thank God.”

Posted in New Posts | Tagged real bread, Waitrose, white sliced | Leave a comment

Banking on Recovery

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Carl Bennett

Unlike the joke about the man in a balloon asking three economists where he was and getting three different opinions (I know, so funny) every time I talk to anyone else in business I get the same opinion. Where everyone feels they are is stuffed by the banks who caused the economic situation in the first place.

Just to remind everyone, it was not small businesses who caused the recession. It was very large businesses gambling and/or buying things they did not understand because the financial products had been designed that way. Many of these companies were what we call “banks.”

Another fact that seems to escape the government and most mainstream media is that we, the taxpayers, are paying for the failed banks’s continued existence. Many of these same banks are paying senior staff huge bonuses in the millions.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this third point, because it is important. It was not lending to small businesses that caused the recession. It was greed, arrogance and stupidity. Which apparently has to be rewarded otherwise all the talent will go somewhere else.

At the same time as all this is happening we’ve had five, yes five different Business Relationship Managers for our account with Barclays. Some people might say that if a relationship actually needs a manager there is something deeply wrong with it, but even the most generous interpretation seems to argue that any business which rotates Relationship Managers that quickly doesn’t really do relationships.

Today’s problem was fairly predictable. I had money coming into one account. I actually wrote an old fashioned letter so it wouldn’t get lost, saying when the money comes in, please move it to my other account to pay some bills. Now for the moment, let’s ignore the fact that the reason the money needs moving is the last two Business Relationship Manager forgot that I might bizarrely actually want to get money out of the bank as well as in, so I had to sign a special form saying that actually Barclays, it isn’t a one-way gift. As I said, let’s ignore that.

I got a letter back, which I expect to be billed for, saying there isn’t any money in the account so Barclays can’t move it. Now actually, I knew that, which is why I asked for the money to be moved when it came in, not before.

Totally unsurprisingly, the money was still in the account having come in when Barclays billed me for an unauthorised overdraft and started bouncing payments. At £39 a time, obviously. Plus the cost of the letter telling me they were doing it.

I emailed my Relationship Manager to sort this out. A day later I got an email back saying he’s off sick. Until the 10th April, which is a very precise illness, it struck me. He isn’t my Relationship Manager any more. The girl with the tongue piercing is. Call me a tad old-fashioned, but the phrases tongue-piercing and Business Relationship Manager cause me if not actual physical pain then at least what we used to call cognitive dissonance, when anyone gave a stuff what customers thought about anything.

Oh and just by the way, the email ended, when he’s back from his time-specific illness he might not be able to do anything about my issue. Meanwhile, Ms Tongue-Hole will get in touch on Monday. Not Friday, the day the email was sent, obviously, but daily interest rates don;t pay themselves, do they?

It’s now the end of Tuesday. Ms Tongue-Hole has not contacted me. So far as I can see Barclays bank are still charging me for the overdraft they have created and more to the point, they do not care.

This is not a Business Relationship. This is micky-taking. This is uselessness. This is a total lack of competition because going to any other bank will, I know, produce exactly the same thing. This is businesses and individuals paying for the banks who have messed everyone about in the first place.

When is this one-way relationship going to change? Because frankly, if I’m going to be told we’re having a relationship and I get treated like this, kept waiting and it starts costing me money for the pleasure then I’d like to point out I didn’t agree to queue on the stairs and I want it to be a lot more pleasurable and exotic than this.

And that aside, I’m not convinced and nor are a lot of people that ther will be many businesses left to manage. Maybe that’s why Barclays has given me five Relationship Managers in two years. Because small businesses are a pain, aren’t they? They’re not worth the disproportionate effort. Ignore them and they’ll go away.

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Posted in New Posts | Tagged 99%, banks, finance, recession | Leave a comment

Eco Driving

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Carl Bennett

Get hip to the jive, daddio. Eco-driving! Light on fuel use, light on the causes of fuel use. The new buzzword that means taxing the life out of the countryside.

You like eco stuff, right? Fields, they’re great, aren’t they? Cows, they’re pretty groovy too! Big views of open landscapes, fab! And what you don’t see in that list is the people who live there. Funnily enough, nor does the government. Any government.

Just a few years ago, the car industry noted a trend for drivers to switch cars, from petrol to diesel. Suddenly, diesels had changed from being farmers’s Landrovers or London taxis and started being quiet and giving what seemed like astonishing numbers of miles per gallon. Spurred on by this, petrol engines too got a lot more efficient and where Terry and June might boast of 30 mpg, their grandchildren reasonably expect 50 or even 60 mpg from a lot of small cars today.

So get with it, baby! Spend £15,000 on a new car with money you don’t have to get 10 more miles to the gallon. Sorry, 2 more miles per litre. That doesn’t sound quite so good, does it? Let’s use gallons then. Unless we’re talking about the cost of fuel, but we certainly don’t want people who can just about remember £1.50 a gallon suddenly noticing it’s gone through £10 per gallon at the pumps.

Imperial gallons or metric litres the real measurement is this. It’s nine miles from where I live to the shop. That’s eighteen miles a day. In a week that’s 108 miles. In a month that’s getting on for 500 miles. And that’s a minimum of over £100 in the 4×4 we got on a three-year lease when we were hauling three tonnes of the Fabulous Cheese Trailer to fairs and markets and countryside events. Usually it’s more like £150 a month. So there has to be £300 of sales to get to work. There isn’t an option. It takes over 45 minutes to cycle each way and longer to avoid the A12, where bikes don’t really mix happily with lorries pulling 65 mph, and two feeder rat-runs where there aren’t even pavements to cycle on to illegally get out of the way of the traffic.

The result is over £3,500 that disappears every year, just in fuel. Not counting things like insurance, road tax, servicing and of course, the cost of the vehicle in the first place. Factor that in and it’s much more like £1,000 of revenue a month needed to spend on travel that goes nowhere. Someone has to pay it. You, me, customers, buyers, sellers. Half the average national wage isn’t a level of cost that can be absorbed. The worst thing is it isn’t a level of cost that is necessary. Fuel doesn’t cost that much, or it wouldn’t without so much tax on it. And while taxes are grudgingly necessary, they’re supposed to be fair and equal.

No-one can seriously pretend that where one group of people have transport alternatives and another group doesn’t, that makes things equal. In the countryside there obviously are no Tube trains. But there also aren’t busses, or not ones that will get you where you need to be and back the same day. At this level transport isn’t about choice, except for the obvious choice of choosing not to live outside towns. Which isn’t the road I wanted to go down today, apparently unlike every government over the past thirty years.

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Posted in New Posts | Tagged 4x4, alternative, Chelsea Tractor, countryside, driving, Eco, fuel prices, Green, rural | Leave a comment

When the Animals Speak

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Carl Bennett

The village where I live reached its tipping point years ago. Every shop has gone because people stopped shopping there. Four of the eight houses I call my immediate neighbours are only used at weekends, and not every weekend at that.

The pub was bought by people who told anyone who came in that they’d bought it for the land it came with so they could build four houses and sell them, so they didn’t need any customers. They got the second part of their wish but as the land included the village pond the planning permission never happened. If you like quiet pubs you’d like this one. There is still a garage in the village, selling petrol at 5p a litre more than anywhere else in fuel-hungry and expensive Suffolk, because there aren’t many customers.

The bus to the nearest town runs twice a day and a trip to Woodbridge and back, just eighteen miles, would take over three and a half hours. True, the garage also sells a surprisingly large range of porn DVDs, especially odd considering the age of most of residents. The 1980s hairstyles on the covers probably give a guide to the date of the Last Big One in the village. In years to come maybe a post-apocalyptic Time Team presenter will sift through piles of twisted plastic in a field. Hold up “Fantastic Ferrari Babes” to the camera. Say “According to Carina, the Farah Flick motion this actress does with her hair dates this artefact to summer 1980. This is really exciting! Not (pause while thick-sounding-but-hugely-qualified-academic-archeologist guffaws in background on cue) because of the content! (laughter). We can now date this site to within a few years.”

But that might be all in the future. Last night I got home from visiting friends in time to go along to the midnight service on Christmas Eve. I stopped watching Holiday Inn, put down my drink and pulled a coat on at ten to twelve. I put the last few Christmas cards through the doors of the neighbours who were there and walked up the unlit street. We have massive Council Tax bills but we don’t have street lights here.

The church was unlit and empty. Then I remembered a couple of years ago the last time I went to church we’d had a note in the village newsletter saying that the midnight service was bit late for the old people who were the only ones who used the church, so maybe the Midnight Carols would be better at say just after teatime, no later than half past six.

It’s never going to go back to being a living village. No-one is going to open a shop or provide any jobs or raise many children here. Whatever happens in the future in rural East Suffolk, none of that will be part of it. It’s over.

I turned and walked alone along the road from the church and turned down the medieval alley that leads to my house, went through the gate and across the lawn for one last check of the Chicken Tree. We have eleven chickens most days and twelve when the old hen reappears. Where she goes we never know.

Ten of the chickens lead by the cunning Light Sussex hen who hatched them and the tiny Polish cockerel who guarded them while they grew to four times his size decamped from the old coop and decided to live in a tree. The leylandii they chose looks a bit the worse for wear now, especially since the chickens have been joined by a flock of wild doves.

We have a story in my family. My mother and father visited my uncle Ken’s farm one Christmas before I was born. Just before midnight they went to the barn to see if the old tale was true, that the animals speak at midnight, remembering the stable they shared in Bethlehem.

I shone a torch on the chickens I could see. You can never see all ten of them in the tree, but they’re there. Some of them had their heads curled under their wings but most looked steadily back at the torch beam, eyes wide open and unblinking.

I shone the beam away so as not to dazzle them but one or two began to shuffle on the branches they were perched on. One or two others began a curious clicking sound. Or something did. It wasn’t a noise I’ve ever heard chickens make before. Then one of the cockerels woke up properly, raised his head and crowed, just a few minutes into Christmas morning.

When I went to feed them at eight there was my Christmas gift under the tree, two small eggs for breakfast. Do the animals speak on Christmas night? What sort of question is that? Of course they do. No-one ever said they have to speak with a human voice.

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Mary Portas: Jeder Sollte Sich

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Mary Portas recently did a study of the state of the High Street for David Cameron. Quite how she was selected to do this I don’t know and surely it must have been on more than the strength of her being on TV.

This was the first part of one comment on her website, completely un-altered by me.

The High street retailers need to be keeping up with internet prices. My young brother wanted a particular Lego set and he pointed it out from the Argos book and it was £25.99, I researched on the internet and found it for £18. Now that saved me a lot of much needed cash at this time of year and I don’t regret it. I know that high street retailers have rent to pay etc but during this recession everyone should be looking after themselves and being savvy with shopping.

Working harder doesn't always set you free.

Everyone Should Be Looking After Themselves might as well be made into a sign and stuck up above the gates of every shopping centre. In fact, it would probably be as well to go the whole pre-packaged hog (Warning: May contain traces of pig) and do it in German as Jeder sollte sich, the same way the slogan Work Makes You Free was bolted to the gates of Auschwitz.

Normal Coffee For Normal People

This was a long comment too, which encapsulated a lot of things wrong with the traditional High Street. One of the issues seems to be that there is not enough choice and too much choice, at exactly the same time:

There are too many coffee shops of which I cannot afford to eat/drink in, bring back cafes with normal coffee!

Obviously normal means normal for England around about say, 1980, when Gold Blend granules was the most impossibly sophisticated coffee certainly our house had ever seen. As Jamie Oliver would put it, them big boys were well tasty. Talk about a shindig when the jar came out.
The comment went on though, without any apparent irony whatsoever.

It is really sad to see the state of the high street with all the shutters/boards up, it looks depressing. The magic has been lost.

Before you even have time to wonder how people so retarded find partners to breed with the commentator made a plea to the independent retailer, who now as well as undercutting internet box-shifters has to provide customer training as well. But obviously in a non-threatening manner.

People should be educated with regards to high street shops. For example, I have never been into a butchers shop to buy meat, I wouldn’t know how to ask for things, my maths is not great, I can’t visualise how much a particular quantity is and I feel slightly intimidated to walk into a male environment, perhaps butchers could do something like have people go into the street with samples?

I’ve always found the best way to ask for things is to ask for them, and here’s the science, have what we call “a conversation.” But what do I know? I’m only a man, a retail phallocrat, someone unintimidated by hanging-out down the butchers, in my macho all-male blue and white striped pinny environment. When I see a shopping bag I undress it with my eyes. And if I say I don’t it’s because you can’t trust men anyway. We rape you with our laws. And our butchers shops. In an L-shaped shopping centre, probably.

Ultimately I can’t work out whether independent retailers need to be helping with pop-up High Street maths classes, starting meat visualisation workshops or just giving stuff away free in the street, as well as undercutting Amazon.com. And also ultimately, it really doesn’t matter. In less than five years my prediction is there won’t be any independent retailers in any High Street in the UK. And if that won’t be intimidating, it certainly won’t be free. Let’s see how everyone looks after themselves then.

Posted in New Posts | Tagged butchers, Gold Blend, High Streets, Jamie Oliver, Mary Portas, shopping, shopping butchers | Leave a comment

Books, Chickens & Publicists

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Lucy Mangan was on Radio 4 when I was driving home today. She writes things for the Guardian, usually accompanied like every serious writer these days by a picture of her in case the reader needs to know what she looks like. Like you do.

She was talking, somewhat tetchily I thought given she’d been given what used to be called the oxygen of publicity, indirectly about the collapse of the net book agreement some time ago, and the effect this had on big discounters like Amazon.com, bookshops and the High Street.

Long long ago before the internet was even a tiny electron in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, booksellers all had an agreement. Books would cost the same whoever sold them. After a time, generally if they were crap, they’d be sold off cheap or find their way to the discount book shops, where you could buy those massive picture books called things like 100 Fighting Ducks Of The World.

Then in 1997, in one of those sterling Last Days In The Bunker acts of Conservative government or folly depending on your point of view, a court decided that the agreement that books should cost the same whoever sold them was against the public interest. And astonishingly, over 500 small booksellers went out of business while the biggest and deepest-pocketed sellers, the supermarkets and later the online traders did very nicely out of it thank-you very much, as nobody at all could have predicted.

So far so nothing to do with food. Enter Lucy Mangan. She didn’t mention the fact that Jordan’s books, the ones even she doesn’t claim to have read let alone written, might perhaps not have been elevated to the status of literature if anyone had been forced to go into a bookshop to buy them instead of dumping them into a supermarket trolley with their loo rolls. Hindered by not having her picture available on the radio Lucy chuntered off accurately enough about how people went into small shops to have a look in the book then if they liked it pissed off home to order it as cheap as they could find it and why wouldn’t they?

Leaving aside the obvious, that if they did that too often they wouldn’t be able to go and have a look in the bookshop because not even the supermarkets stay open by not selling things, Ms Mangan stretched the analogy. Times are hard, she said. It’s like farmers markets and that. We all know we should buy free-range organic chickens, but the other stuff’s cheaper. So sod them if five of them have to live in the same shoe-box. We’ve all got a right to two chickens for a fiver and if they don’t like it they should have evolved bigger and more vicious.

Actually, Lucy Mangan didn’t really say the last bit. But what she was doing was even more stupid, which isn’t something she obviously is unless Cambridge University has changed its admissions policy dramatically. Essentially the argument ran: A book is a book, if it’s got the same title and the same words in it then you might as well buy it from the person selling it cheapest.

Which is fairly obviously true if you’re just talking about buying it and not looking at whether you can actually leaf through the pages first when Amazon even let’s you do that a bit with some books on its website. Where that argument is so retarded it shouldn’t be let out on its own is when it’s stretched to food.

The two chickens for a fiver deal in the supermarket is not the same as two chickens at the farmer’s market. The supermarket ones won’t taste of much because they never developed any muscle tone because they never went outside. They might be bright yellow, but its more likely because they’ve been dyed than because they ate lots and lots of corn. And they will have lived in hell for the few weeks they shared the planet.

Still, it’s all the same, isn’t it? They’re only chickens. Just another commodity, the same as books or Coke-Cola or identical cars in different garages. Sorry, online car sales websites. Get it as cheap as you can. If the High Street is just a line of boarded-up windows and charity shops, it’s market forces, know what I mean? The recession and that. As Bruce Springsteen said, it’s on account of the economy. Nothing you can do about it. You worry too much, me old mate.

I’m probably getting old, but I remember when people writing in The Guardian didn’t have quite the same attitude. But that was back when Posy Simmonds’s Silent Three was cutting social commentary and this is a brave new commoditised world, where anything that stands in the way of consumption for its own end is just a tedious and old-fashioned irrelevance.

We’ve all been told this over and again for the past thirty years. Because it works. As Aldous Huxley said in Chapter One of the original Brave New World: ”At last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made-up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions. Suggestions from the State.”

Welcome. As Lorriane Chase, another 1980′s survivor currently up the Ant & Dec jungle used to say, nice ‘ere, innit?

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Local Food: the broken chain

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Everyone is this picture died donkeys' years ago. There's no going back.

The East Anglian Daily Times (EADT) ran a special farming feature on Saturday December 3^rd. Local food campaigner Lady Caroline Cranbrook had her own special feature, looking at the importance of the local food chain.

Almost every paragraph was pumped full of “facts” that were no more than assertions, contradictions, assumptions or non-sequiturs, right from the start. She means well, but this kind of over-fed boosterism isn’t helping anyone.

She might have a farm at Great Glemham, but where Lady Cranbrook got the information that the Aldeburgh Food & Drink festival “generated over £1 million spend in the area” is anyone’s guess. In fact, the only place I’ve ever heard that level of guesstimate quoted before is from a local PR company with several food clients. None of the stall holders at the festival I talked to came up with that kind of figure. In fact, one of them complained about one of the celebrity chefs demanding food for free when he wanted to use it as part of his cookery demonstration.

Certainly the woman I spoke to from Aldeburgh who had had a lovely time at the show hadn’t spent even a fraction of £1 million. Apart from paying to get in she had trouble thinking she’d spent a tenner. It was wonderful, she said. She and her husband had gone around all the stalls eating the free samples of savoury things which made them a bit thirsty, so they went around all the stalls providing drinks and drank the free samples of those. Then they went around all the stalls doing sweet food samples for dessert. Such fun! But unlikely to sustain a viable local economy.

It wasn’t even as if every pub and hotel in the area was full to bursting with all the festival goers either. Certainly the Blaxall Ship wasn’t full, a mile away, nor was the Golden Key in Snape, half a mile in the other direction. Driving past that afternoon I remember the Crown at Snape, less than 400 yards from the festival was shut by mid-afternoon. But the Plough & Sail at Snape Maltings where the festival was held was open as it always is. Maybe the bar there took a million.

Moving on from un-sourced statistics the local food chain was held to provide Suffolk and East Anglia with “a security of food supply when our existing sources may no longer become available.” But even in the very first sentence East Suffolk was credited with supplying just 50% of the UK’s potatoes for only part of the year. Given how long they can be stored though, if they confiscated all the produce grown here the people of East Suffolk should be self-sufficient in onions, parsnips, sugar beet and lawns. Turf is one of the biggest products in my agriculturally bleak part of the coastal strip but it didn’t get a single mention in this pastoral eulogy.

Then Lady Cranbrook’s imagination really took off. “The local food chain is an employment multiplier,” she brooded inscrutably. ”Farmers, producers, processors, retailers, all provide new jobs.” Farms are not hiring anyone at this time of year unless you count beaters to scare-up pheasants for the guns. Far from providing new jobs, just five days ago in the very same EADT British Sugar announced they were thinking of cutting sixteen jobs at their Bury plant, one of the biggest food-industry employers in East Anglia. Wishful thinking is one thing, but flat untruths are another. So it seems is investigative journalism. To be fair, the EADT reported a major announcement with 300 new jobs being announced on December 1st. In Norwich. At Asda, synonymous with fair employment practices and worker satisfaction, if not so much with local food chains.

Farm shops, village shops and delis were held to be important as well. Grange Farm Shop in Hasketon was said to employ 20 people and the Suffolk Food Hall another 63. These, said Lady C., were just two examples among the other 40-plus farm shops in Suffolk, “so the contribution they make providing jobs in difficult times is substantial.” Most farm shops I’ve ever seen anywhere have staffing levels closer to four people than forty. With the best will in the world it wouldn’t take more than a half-dozen busses to transport an entire Suffolk farm-shop industry works outing. It’s obviously better if a couple of hundred people have jobs instead of not having them, but to pretend this is a substantial number of people crosses the border between fanciful and deluded.

The local food chain supports the environment, the readers were told. “Cattle and sheep travel shorter distances to slaughter.” The obvious question “shorter distances than what?” remained unasked, let alone unanswered. There are no more village slaughterhouses than there are village witch-finders anywhere in England, let alone in agri-business heavy Suffolk.

Over and again the self-proclaimed food campaigner flatly contradicted herself, often within the same paragraph. “There is a definite trend for farmers to sell produce locally,” she started off on page two before ending the paragraph with news of a family-owned poultry business near Haughley which sells to “50 butchers in 17 counties including London.” Counting Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Essex and Herts, that makes six counties that could be sensibly called local with a very generous definition of East Anglia. County definitions aside, selling Suffolk produce in London cannot possibly involve a “local food chain.”

Sounding a note of warning, Lady Cranbrook claimed that “long distance supply chains and centralised distribution systems devised by the supermarkets” are “threatened by rising fuel costs.” The shopper’s purse might be threatened, but supermarkets will either pass on any rising transport costs to the buyer or more likely, demand that the food producer pays for transportation in the same way they already demand that supermarket promotions are paid for by the producer. Saying “we are nine meals from chaos, meaning that there are only three days of food supply in the system” would have more impact if this was not seen as a fabulously brilliant logistical achievement by the people who created it. Warehouses mean stock, stock means tied-up cash, tied-up cash means lower shareholder dividends and CEO bonuses. Not exactly a difficult choice in any City boardroom. It might also help if most household larders held more than a cake mix with a pre-decimal price sticker, four kinds of old jam, half a packet of cornflakes and a sachet of microwave basmati rice.

Whatever Lady Cranbrook might like to believe, food shopping is not going to change because shoppers don’t want it to. For all the talk about sustainability and buying local, 85% of all the food bought in the UK is bought in supermarkets. Around 30% of the fresh food bought is thrown away, after the supermarkets have forced farmers to plough back under anything that doesn’t look the same way as the picture on the buyer’s colour chart. Ask most teenagers if it’s safer to eat a raw apple off a tree or bread one day past its labelled sell-by date and both ideas will be met with incredulous horror.

For all the fashionable chefs and food shows on TV, what people want more and more are ready meals, judging by every set of retail food sales figures published. Preferably as cheap as possible. Food shops that don’t sell TV sets, mobile phones, own-brand life insurance and 100 different kinds of wine are struggling and no amount of pretending people really prefer to go to farm shops alters the fact. They might prefer to, but they don’t actually do it often enough, or spend money when they get there. One local farmer here on the coast was told to his face that if his farm shop didn’t sell food cheaper than Tesco then “the village” would not be “supporting” it, losing sight of the fact that he hadn’t proposed to support the village either.

When it comes to real choice, shoppers choose cheap. While they may say they care about provenance even those who know it isn’t in the south of France still happily buy Peruvian asparagus.

Anyone who has ever tasted Suffolk asparagus in the few weeks in May when it’s ready knows what the real thing tastes like. But for most it doesn’t matter. John Cousins, a farmer who unlike some food champions doesn’t have a Grade One listed Elizabethan manor house and who is also chair of promotional body Tastes Of Anglia has a more realistic view of what food producers and small retailers are really up against.

“We seem not to care about how or where our food is produced. Gone are the days when asparagus was consumed for a short season in the early summer. Look at the vegetable racks in the big four supermarkets and you will find Peruvian asparagus flown in from the other side of the world. It is produced on land in the Ica Valley in a totally unsustainable manner. In one of the driest areas of the world where the crop requires continuous irrigation, the water table was dropped by 8 metres.”

Hardly anyone buying the thousands of tonnes of imported asparagus knows this, although they could find out easily enough in ten minutes on Google. And no-one really cares. Gordon Ramsey usually has a lot to say on TV but he shares the silence of the lambs on this.

Toby Pound, an Ipswich solicitor, also reflected on the uncertain future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the East Anglian and how this affected farmers. He skimmed straight over the oddity that when people in tower blocks are paid not to work they’re labelled benefits scroungers, while people owning a thousand acres of farmland who pay someone to find ways of being paid not to plant crops are called the bastions of the rural community. And long may it continue, was the sentiment in Ipswich. “The principle of capping payments would not be good news for East Anglian farmers, many of whom have increased their holdings to achieve economies of scale and who as a result are among the most efficient food producers in Europe.” Heaven forbid that these staunch Conservative voters should ever be exposed to something as rabidly socialist and nanny-state expectation-laden as a free and open market for food and their benefits, sorry, I meant grants being cut.

The message seems clear: think local and buy the farm next door. And the one next door to that as well. Keep on going and as Lady Cranbrook would have it, even London will be a local market because your farm holdings will stretch all the way from Snape Bridge to the M25, unless Borsetshire Land gets their bid in first.

One currently outrageous suggestion from the EU is that “only active farmers will be able to receive payments.” Obviously it would be hard to find a clearer example of the fallacy of the European project. Toby warns sagely that this could create a huge extra layer of bureaucracy demanding to be shown that the CAP grant applicant was “in occupation of the land for farming purposes” and “in close management of the farming operation.” Suddenly the stark reality of how Brussels interferes with the very fabric of rural life is laid bare.

The entire local foods campaign – or at least the EADT’s promotional piece – seems to be a random collection of self-interest and self-delusion. The biggest irony of all came this week, when the winner of the Market Towns Initiative prize draw was announced, again in the EADT. Designed to help at least slow the decline of traditional High Streets, the three small Suffolk coastal towns of Leiston, Aldeburgh and Saxmundham had banded together and attracted sponsorship to promote themselves. The prize was certainly worth winning in the form of a hefty £500 voucher. The only drawback in the scheme neatly summarised the tragedy behind the slow, remorseless and in many cases self-inflicted decline of rural areas.

The prize was exactly what people wanted. The £500 voucher was from John Lewis, whose nearest store was over twenty miles from the closest of the market towns involved. By design, not a single penny of the prize money would ever be seen in any local shop.

Will local food chains be the future? It would be nice to think so, but a dose of reality would help. And as Pink Floyd used to put it, some shelter from pigs on the wing.

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False Hopes & Seemings

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Carl Bennett

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Saturday Brunch Club

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Times are tough but you’ve still got to do Saturday. Here’s how we can help:

Between 9 am and 10:30am on Saturdays

Choose from:

Scrambled eggs & smoked salmon

The Yoxford Breakfast

(bacon, mushrooms, toast, tomatoes, scrambled eggs)

Mushrooms (nice ones) & poached egg on toast

WITH

Tea or coffee or local Suffolk apple juice

AND

A selection of newspapers to browse and fulminate over at the table

PLUS

The YoFoCo topical news review

All for a thrifty £6.50 per person.

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Armistice Day

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Officially the last shot of WW1. The gun was fired only when the photographer was ready.

Today at 11 am, on the 1th day of the 11th month in 1918 the guns fell silent along the entire Western Front that stretched across Belgium and France.

They started again in Europe in 1939, then stopped in 1945 again. But really, they never stop. We pretend it’s all for country, if not for King. We pretend to admire Our Brave Boys as they embark for the wars, dignifying our bloodlust that if you actually talk to them very few soldiers seem to share. We also like to pretend that every mission to depose a nation’s ruler is as noble, as vital, as wholly essential as the genuine threat to our way of life posed by Germany in the First and the Second World War.

Both of those wars changed the fabric of Britain. Even as they filled the churchyards they emptied the churches. They emptied the countryside, the very horses conscripted to haul artillery around the smashed fields in Flanders, the horses we unhooked from ploughs and farm carts, branded them with the War Office markings, put on a ship and sent into barrages of shells, clouds of phosgene and chlorine and mustard gas and machine gun bullets. We called them brave and we still pretend they were, packing theWest End of London in the theatre production of War Horse, when really, like the conscripts of both World Wars, they had no choice, no say in whether they went or not, no say in whether they lived or died.

For all the posturing around the Cenotaph, from the nonsense of Michael Foot’s fatuous beatnik donkey jacket to Thatcher’s evident delight at being there, from Blair’s blatant boredom at the whole time-wasting nonsense of the idea that actions have consequences to this years’ crocodile tears as once again, we’re being primed to believe that yet another country must be attacked in the name of peace, it never changes. For all the ceremony we do not remember. We do forget. We wave the troops away and ignore them once they’re back.

And it’s always been this way, probably since the Trojan wars, but certainly since 1918.

James Edward Connolly, Corporal, FA, RD, Allen County, Indiana. Who remembers him?

“Corporal James Edward Connolly, should by right to be placed on the Goldstar list, having contracted the ailments which resulted in his death while in service at training camps. He came home with a health impairment and resumed his employment at the knitting Mills for a few weeks, but soon resigned and sought less confining employment, which he found at the Square Deal Garage as a repair man. He broke down completely in March (1919), and was under treatment from that time on and through about the first of August, when he was admitted to Irene Byron Hospital, this (Allen) county where he died, September 29, 1919 of tubercular complications.”

We still talk about the war to end all wars with a straight face. We claim to honour the dead and listen to the special solemn November voices on the BBC, but it’s always clear that some dead are more honoured than others. Somewhere around 56,000 Americans died in Vietnam, as we know from film after TV series after angsty Nam Vet Taxi Driver/Full Metal Jacket/Apocalypse Now psycho-drama. And we forget the 57,000 casualties in the British Army alone on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. You read that right. The first day. By the end of the battle the British Army had lost 420,000 men.

Probably the most reviled Old Etonian in history, General Haig wrote in his diary:

North of the Ancre, VIII Corps said they began well, but as the day progressed, their troops were forced back in to the German front line, except two battalions which occupied Serre Village, and were, it is said, cut off. I am inclined to believe from further reports that few of VIII Corps left their trenches.

"If any question why we died Tell them, because our fathers lied." Rudyard Kipling.

We lie now as he lied then. Nor do we remember the 54,896 bodies commemorated on the Menin Gate, a record only of the Allied dead at the Battle of Ypres. Not all of the dead, but only the men who now had no face to put to their names, whose bodies were so comprehensively obliterated that no-one could come forward and say “this was my friend.”

We do not remember. We will not remember. It does not suit us to.

Posted in New Posts | Tagged Armistice Day, countryside, November | Leave a comment

Christmas Papier-Mache Workshops

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Bored of getting and giving second-hand presents? Nothing says you’ve thought about someone more than making their present yourself. But how?

To show you, we’re hosting two papier-mache workshops on the last two Wednesdays in November at our Post Office cafe-deli-shop papier-mache studio in Yoxford High Street.

Beachhuts, chickens, dogs - you can make all these.

Everyone is welcome – previous papier-mache students have ranged from six to over 70 years old. If you have some old newspapers, bring them along, otherwise all materials are provided. But you might want to bring an apron.

Email anneckennedy(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)yahoo.co.uk or call us on 01728 668520.

Save these dates:

23rd November 2pm to 4pm

30th November 2pm to 4pm

This is our papier-mache lady in the window. Keep at it.

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False Hopes & Seemings

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Market Hill, Woodbridge. Busy, isn't it?

Shop Local

As the East Anglia Daily Times put it on November 26th, “our independent traders, so important to the vitality of our towns and villages, have never needed people’s support more.”

But will they get it? The newspaper is currently running a Shop Local campaign, promoting towns and smaller retail outlets in the face of the juggernaut of supermarket town cloning. It kicked off with an interview by the self-appointed rural champion Lady Caroline Cranbrook, who said “You can find some wonderful bargains in the independent shops and a far greater variety of things than you will ever find in the supermarkets.”

Fiona Wright from promotional group Ipswich Central agreed, saying that independent shops helped distinguish towns and Bill Bulstrode, chair of Framlingham Business Association chipped in with some telling points about the relative cost of shopping locally or spending an extra £10 on diesel to drive to a supermarket to save 10p on a tin of baked beans. He avoided mentioning the feeling you get after visiting people in Tijuana who you shouldn’t have and the overwhelming sense of walking if not with the undead then certainly with the lardy walking-wounded of consumerism, guts proudly propped on their shopping trolleys, that mega-supermarkets seem to feel is the right mood to put their customers in.

“People want a little bit of service and civility, which the small, independent shops can provide,” he said.

Generalisations on that scale can be dangerous, especially when practically everyone can remember a small shop where they got neither but plenty of chippy attitude and incompetence. But it’s odd that people hardly ever comment about getting the same thing in supermarkets, where the staff not only regularly know next to nothing about the things they sell but clearly aren’t even expected to.

I remember a trip to PC World in Ipswich where I listened patiently to a long speech from one of the sales staff about how they didn’t stock Apple computers, how there wasn’t any demand for them. Maybe I should try somewhere more specialist. London, perhaps. They went in for that sort of thing there. After he strode off to get back to his PC game of Call of Duty XVII I walked into the next aisle in the shop and found the fifty-plus Apple machines PC World didn’t stock. Except they did. The difference is no-one is surprised by this. And they go back again and again.

Exactly when Treat Them Mean To Keep Them Keen became accepted by shoppers everywhere is unclear, but if there is a retail celestial recorder in heaven the date will go down in history as the day the independent trader music died.

No independent traders were invited to comment on the customers who seem to think that combining service with civility to produce a little bit of servility would be a welcome addition to the retail package, provided it’s only in small shops. Not just here in the village we’ve noticed for a long time what seems like a direct inverse correlation – the bigger the shop the more sheep-like the customer. And distressingly conversely, the smaller the shop the more arsey and downright in-your-face aggressive a very few customers are when they realise there is no possible way they can be escorted to the Manager’s office when Tanya on the till pages Big Darren from Security.

Mark Cordell, chief executive of Bid4Bury, summarised the issue neatly: ” If local people want Bury to continue to prosper then they have to support it.”

The important word is “if.” It’s like being a politician – aside from Ian Paisley no-one ever got anywhere standing against the church. You might as well campaign against motherhood, or Our Brave Boys. The snag is that for all Lady Cranbrook’s very vocal support of local businesses, she isn’t exactly well-known for spending a lot in local shops like so many people who like to be known as rural community supporters. Maybe she just doesn’t like cheese much. Or coffee.

The EADT’s Shop Local article also celebrated actor James Bolam’s ceremonial switching-on of the Christmas lights in Southwold on December 2nd, encapsulating one of the central problems of the entire Suffolk Coast. There’s nothing wrong with James Bolam. He was really funny forty years ago. And it’s not that James Bolam is an incomer, famous for retaining his Geordie accent through being lairy Geordie Terry in the Likely Lads, a sickly Geordie in hospital in Only When I Laugh and yet another grumpy old and only coincidentally Geordie copper in New Tricks. He’s probably got a house in Southwold, after all. But it’s not as if you bump into him every time you go for a pint of milk.

Most people who have houses in Southwold don’t live there, with over six out of ten houses only lived-in part time. It’s a weekend and holiday place, where young people with even an average amount of ambition have to leave if they’re unlikely enough to be born there, which they generally are not because there are relatively few people of child-bearing age living in many places in the Suffolk Coastal region to begin with.

For all the talk about community and loving the area because it’s just the way things used to be (which it isn’t, as any casual glance at Google Earth’s 1945 map overlay will show at a glance) pensioners and weekenders with a Volvo boot-full of groceries from St Albans retail park (probably the best shopping on the M25 before you hit the A12 for the coast) don’t make a community that anyone could describe as thriving now, back in the big imaginary then or in the future, which isn’t exactly a fashionable conversational topic in rural areas.

And Aldeburgh’s contribution to the Shop Local campaign said more than any satirist would have dared. Naomi Tarry, chair of the Aldeburgh Business Association dug deep into Santa’s bag of thriftily-priced platitudes to promise that “the town will be ablaze with festive cheer. The atmosphere is magical in our seaside town.” But she didn’t dwell long on whether the “us” she meant was people involved in local communities or people who like to talk about being part of them.

Do they want small shops? High Streets? Small independent, characterful small outlets offering individual, unusual things? Yes. So long as they’re provided preferably free-of-charge, they way they were when Mummy and Daddy took you to the friendly shops, or if they’re cheaper than the supermarket. Not really otherwise.

Does mega-retail’s face look bothered? If it does, it doesn’t need to be. Aldeburgh, along with Leiston and Saxmundham are all taking part in the Where’s Rudolf treasure hunt, part of their Christmas fairs. Funded by the Heritage Coast Market Towns initiative, shoppers can follow a trail of clues to win a hefty £500 prize. In John Lewis vouchers.

The nearest John Lewis store is in Ipswich, over 20 miles away. But of course, the winner could always shop at John Lewis online, despite rural Suffolk broadband speeds that stretch an hour-long TV show over ninety minutes. Either way, not a penny of that £500 will be going anywhere near independent retailers in rural towns.

Whoever said people in the countryside don’t do irony?

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Post Office Under Threat Again

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Carl Bennett

The only way is up, baby. As we used to say.

Once upon a time in the 1980s, when women wore big hair and shoulder pads and men wore Raybans and red braces, Suffolk Coastal Planning department gave planning permission to Yoxford Post Office to open a cafe in the shop part of the premises. Probably the council offices at Melton were not exactly rocking-out to the sound of Hipsway and the Fine Young Cannibals, but bear with me.

This place looked like a shop, but in fact hardly anyone ever bought anything there. The half-price Dead Bread freezer was quite popular and the former owner claimed everyone bought mountains of porridge oats but they looked more like individual-sized molehills to me.

Back in March this year we got a Rural Redevelopment grant from Suffolk Council who agreed we needed to buy some tables and chairs and rearrange the shop so more people could sit down and have a cup of coffee.

About a month ago someone sporting a name badge was peering through the windows from the street but refused to come in. When I went out to tell him not to be shy he said nothing, turned and went away.

A few days after that we had a letter saying that Suffolk Coastal had now decided that while there was already planning permission for a cafe we needed more planning permission for a cafe. And they needed £335. Oh, and they might not grant planning permission anyway.

For them the situation is straight-forward. It is for us too. Without the cafe the shop and the post office will shut within three months. It’s that simple. The post office is financially supported by the shop, not the other way around.

So if you’d like to help keep this small village community hub open, sign our online petition of support below by leaving a comment and your name.

Meanwhile I’ll make a proper petition form.

Thank-you.

Posted in New Posts, News | Tagged 1980s' planning permission, grants, Suffolk Coastal | 1 Comment

The Festival Is Only Once a Year

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Carl Bennett

More years ago than I want to think about on this bright morning a man called John Otway sang a song called Josephine. Playing his usual English troubled troubadour role, the song is about a carnival queen, how she spent the night before the carnival in a little market town and the singer’s screamingly obvious wish it had been with him. True to form Otway was once voted Britain’s Seventh Most Favourite Lyricist.

English country towns are a bit like the 1960s. If you can remember how it was, you weren’t really there. But somewhere I was last weekend was at our own Aldeburgh Food Festival, a rather less libidinous affair in keeping with the local age profile.

As an event it was a huge attraction and judging by the quarter-mile tailback to get in and the equally big stream of cars coming out at closing time a massive number of people made their pilgrimage to good food.

The celebrity chef demonstrations kicked off with an display from Adam Palmer, showing what can be done with food from Marks & Spencer. I don’t know Adam, who used to be head chef at Champneys. But I do know Cholesbury, the nearest village to Champneys, which the spa had absolutely nothing to do with whatsoever, at any time, so far as I could ever see. They didn’t even turn out for the Boxing Day hunt meeting on the Common.

Next up was Angela Hartnett MBE, as the programme was carful to point out, cooking partridge which might have been local with beetroot and “autumn slaw.” I’m all for local foods, but I’m not sure however local Autumn is that even someone as talented as Ms Hartnett can actually cook and eat it. She served it all up with braised rabbit and heaven knows we’re not short of them around here, alongside hand-rolled papadelias. Again, unless there is a part of Suffolk that broke off from Orford Ness and floated to the Aegean, I’m not sure exactly how local a papadelias is. Or even what it is, frankly. Even Google doesn’t seem able to help.

Brett Graham, owner of The Ledbury in Notting Hill, the furthest part of West Suffolk, cooked some “native lobster” next, pulled freshly from the Suffolk lobster beds which do not exist, along with broccoli, brown sugar and Indian spices.

Someone from Bath did some bread-making and Henry Harris from Knightsbridge (South-West Suffolk) produced a “Suffolk Surprise” from local produce. One local supplier told me about a Suffolk surprise he had from a celebrity chef. It went like this:

“Love the way that looks. Can I have it for my demonstration this morning?”

“Certainly, that’ll be £18.50.”

“It’s for my demonstration, you see?”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

In case you missed it, this means “so I want it free of charge.”

Keeping-up the comedy theme Sheila Dillon presented a Conference Question Time session called “An Appetite for Change, Suffolk & The Sea.” This scored on two fronts simultaneously. Last I heard the change is that the sea defences are too expensive, a bit demonstrably marginal and a long way from Westminster, so the latest plan is to abandon them and let the free market sort out where the coastline should be which will be a lot further inland than it is now within a very short space of Big Societal time. And I have never yet come across any appetite for change in Suffolk, a place where almost every editorial runs “It’s lovely the way it is, that’s why we moved here for the weekends.”

After Fergus Henderson’s demo – his restaurant is in Islington – we saw the first vaguely local item, Marriage’s Bakery competition at 3:00pm, only five hours into the event. Marriages are a good old-fashioned millers making flour and their staff I met at the show knew what they were talking about as well as being interested in baking as well. If you’ve been to many shows you already know how astonishingly rare it is to find someone on an exhibition stand who wasn’t primarily hired for their willingness to work the weekend. Marriages are based on Chlemsford, Essex. You see their mill from the Lowestoft to Liverpool Street train, after about two hours. It’s on the right. Where Fergus’s “parsley possibilities” stand is unknown other than in a file marked “Fey.” I’m not knocking him or parsley. I like them both. But really.

I am not trying to knock the festival. I love festivals, food, people who know what they are talking about – and these chefs clearly did – and local food in particular. But for me, this is what was also wrong with the festival. There are no Suffolk lobsters. They like cold deep water. We have the muddy fished-out North Sea. There aren’t even any scallops in Suffolk, apart from one not exactly top-rate old scallop bed, according to a commercial fisherman I know. M&S, one of the prime sponsors, are still a supermarket when all is said and done.

I went to one of the Fringe Food events and by coincidence, met two people who’d been to the Festival as well. Of course, that’s not that big a coincidence in the scale of probabilities.

We had a lovely time, it was a wonderful Festival, said the first lady of a certain age. First we went round all the stall that had savoury things and had all the samples for that. Then we went round and had the free drinks. Then we went around again and had the free sweet things. She didn’t add “Such fun,” but she didn’t really need to.

Another visitor had asked one of the celebrity chefs where he got the local foods he was championing. Not here. But where could she get them, she asked? Um, we really haven’t got time to go into details now, but speak to me at the end she was told. And got no opportunity to do anything of the sort.

This isn’t a list of complaints about the Festival. There are good things and bad things about any festival, from Goodwood’s Festival of Speed (too many motoring Hoorays) to Glastonbury (too many middle-aged people embarrassing their children). But I still can’t help wondering what the Aldeburgh Food Festival is actually for. It isn’t to sell lots of local produce at the show because lots does not get sold, according to everyone I’ve known who has sold there. It isn’t to tell people where local food can be bought, because some of the celebrity chefs simply don’t know.

I like the idea of it, but I’m not sure what the idea of it actually is. As so often, it seems as if the main purpose of the festival is for people to come and stare at food as if it had landed from another planet, hear all about free-range chicken and new possibilities with herbage and then jump in their cars and head obediently back to the supermarket. There’s a huge Tesco on the A12 on the way home to London after all. And if they don’t want that, there must be another M&S still open.

For the historically-minded:

John Otway – Josephine

Get ready for the festival
For the festival is only once a year
Raise your glasses in the air
And fill the barrels full of beer
Mother nature wave a wand
Over this lady’s hand
May her reign mean a good year on our land.

Posted in Living food, What's On | Tagged Aldeburgh Food Festival | Leave a comment

C is for Customer

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Over the past few years I’ve noticed a new trend in customer behaviour. New to me, anyway. It’s a specialised demand for customer service, but with a twist. The smaller the outlet, the bigger, more unreasonable and more aggressive the demand. On the contrary, the bigger the outlet, the more timid, mouse-like and compliant the customers seem to be.

This exchange happened this week.

Customer, which along with some other words, is what C will represent: I’d like some tea please. With lemon. Oh and actually, no tea.

Me: Do you mean hot water with lemon, or nothing at all?

C: Hot water with lemon please. (Customer is served). And a glass of tap water. This tea is too hot. (Customer is brought tap water, free of charge. Customer resumes wandering around the entire shop, doing the”ooh, what a nice shop, do you have macadamia nuts? (Would you like some? “No” routine).

C: I’d like some apple juice please. (Customer is served apple juice). This is like cider vinegar. Taste it!

Me: (Tastes apple juice. Perfectly normal, tart, dry apple juice from a local producer). This is medium dry apple juice.

C: What do you mean?

Me: There is sweet, medium and dry apple juice.

C: (Looks totally blank. Obviously this is a totally new concept.) Um, I’d like some sweet apple juice instead.

Me: (Pours a small glass this time). Try this madam.

C: This is watery.

Me: There is no water added to this apple juice. At all.

C: Well, thats an interesting attitude! I won’t have any! (Having had a glass and a half already).

Would it happen in a supermarket? No, of course it never would, because no-one at the Tesco or Waitrose cafe is going to be offered a selection of apple juices to taste without paying for any of them.

As I said, C is for Customer.

Posted in Customer Tales | Tagged customer service, The C-Word | Leave a comment

Falling fruit

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Can you eat them? Where do you find-out?

This village used to be called the Garden of Suffolk. The soil here is fantastic, dark, loamy fine, produced by the little stream at the bottom of everyone’s garden this side of the road winding about the flood plain it’s made since the last Ice Age.

Anywhere you walk here you’ll step on fallen fruit of some kind, berries, apples, plums and as they say down home in the USA, I don’t know what-all. Which is what bothers me. I don’t.

When I was a boy in Wiltshire most people had at least mint and rhubarb, even if all they had else was a drab bit of lawn. People just did. But I also remember kicking puffballs, not to see them explode but because of the nonsense we’d been told that they were poisonous. We were told practically everything you might see on a walk was poisonous, apart from blackberries. Rose hips weren’t, and you could easily recognise them from the picture on bottles of rose-hip syrup, but you only eat a rose-hip once. It’s like eating acid-flavoured hard string.

A friend’s grandmother used to know exactly which funghi were edible and which weren’t for the simple reason that with way too many brothers and sisters, they ate them when they were children instead of going hungry. Another friend’s grandfather used to go on seaside walks and dig-up razor clams and eat them raw. Not because he had to now, but I think because he used to have to, once.

And I think it might be a useful thing to know now, but I don’t know how to find-out. Sure, I bought Food For Free years ago and some mushroom books, but the mushroom books always say “ask an expert” and I don’t know one and the foraging books are always still on the kitchen shelf while I’m in a field four miles away. It’s like the old adage that the best knife is the one you have with you; it doesn’t help.

It’s a waste. One of the saddest things about Autumn is the sheer scale of the waste of food just dropped from trees, all of it sitting there free, so much so that you end-up just kicking it off the pavement so you don’t get plum juice on your shoes on the way to Tesco to buy the four varieties of apple we’re officially allowed to eat. We’ve been palmed-off with the utterly safe and predictable, the Cox’s, the New Zealand Braeburns and South African Granny Smiths, until we genuinely think those hideous pithy American apples things the size of a softball are exotic. There used to be literally hundreds of apple varieties in the UK, the Aldermans, the Beauties of Bath, the Broxwood Foxwhelp, the Charles Ross, all the things that multiple consumer-units mindlessly going along with a sell-by date-stamped food mono-culture seem to think are somehow “unsafe” because they don’t come in a plastic wrapper. The foods we literally are not allowed to eat. Supermarkets aren’t actually as keen on choice and product range as they like you to think.

But I just don’t know. Some apples look like berries. Some berries will treat heart disease. Some you can turn into drinks, some you can grind-up with dried deer meat to make the pemmican beloved of Swallows & Amazons and North American Indians. And others will kill you. Like many people now I think, I’d like to know more about this. And I just don’t know where to start.

An Autumn orchard in Suffolk. I don't know if any of this fruit will ever be picked.

Posted in Living food | Tagged apples, autumn, waste | Leave a comment

Autumn Menu – Game On

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Carl Bennett

“How sweet a thought,How strange a deed,To house such glory in a seed. A berry, shining rufously, Like scarlet coral in the sea! A berry, rounder than a ring, So round, it harbours everything; So red, that all the blood of menCould never paint it so again. And, as I hold it in my hand, A fragrance steals across the land, Rich, on the wintry heaven, I see A white, immortal hawthorn-tree.”Mary Webb.

It’s Autumn. The wind’s still warm, but she’s a’blowin hard. The quinces are down from the tree and the chickens are going to bed early. I know, this is sounding a bit like Fotherington-Thomas’s Sunday letter home in Michaelmas Term, but for me, Autumn is forever new term, new shoes, new coat and the promise of winter. And my birthday, dark evenings and special Latin O-Level revision with Wendy Sedgewick. Not like that.

To keep the cold out, we’ve added to our menu. Not berries, not least because somewhat shamefully I don’t actually know what these berries are, but game. I adore game, and so did my old cat. His eyes went odd when he ate pheasant and he got a special “game-eating” face on which looked half funny and half feral.

So as times are not exactly flush for most folk we’ve put a fixed-price option on our menu. Soup, made by us from whatever good things we can find locally. Could be leek and potato, as it is this week, could be sweet potato and peppers, which is very special too. Followed by game stew.

Game covers a multitude of wonderfully heraldic animals and birds such as partridge, pheasant, rabbit, hare and pigeon. It all lives wild, running or flying about until it is shot. In case you don’t know, these creatures are shot with a shotgun, which doesn’t fire bullets like the ones you see on the news, but three to four hundred tiny balls of shot, about 2.5mm diameter in each cartridge, hence the name.

These days shot isn’t made of lead, but it will not do your teeth much good if you chew it. So if while you’re eating game you think there’s something suspiciously round in your food, (a) there probably is and (b) do not chew down on it, or you’ll probably lose a tooth and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The days of measuring someone’s Sloan-liness by how smashed-up their teeth were are long gone. Luckily, deliciously natural game is still on the menu, at least at our place.

Posted in Living food, What's On, Yoxford Post Office | Tagged Autumn menu, game, pheasant, rabbit, stew | Leave a comment

Supporting the village shop

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Customer: “Have you got my organic shampoo?”

Us: “All the shampoo we have is on the shelf, madam.”

Customer: “Well, it isn’t there.”

Us: “Then it doesn’t look as if we have it, madam.”

Customer: “But I always buy it here.”

This part clearly was not true, whatever the customer said. We’ve never had it. We took over on November the first last year. So it hasn’t been here since then, at least. As I said. And clearly, I was wrong, because as the customer said, ”I buy it every year, for my husband’s birthday.”

Sadly, none of this conversation is made-up and it’s not unique. We get at least one of these Monty Python exchanges every month, involving everything from Blue Corn quinoa chips to candles, washing tablets, sponge fingers and any other amount of rubbish that one person bought once when they were on holiday and the person who had the shop before us decided he’d better stock up on for the non-existent rush of customers who queued-up to take the Micky. There is a big difference between customer service and rolling over and asking the customer to tickle your tummy. They won’t. Why should they?

Another customer visited last week. We’d never seen her before so again, she had not been to the shop since 1/11/10. Her opening line was: “Are you running down the deli side of it?”

After I said hello I wondered what exactly she meant, given there hadn’t actually been any deli side of it at all, just a collection of vaguely Good-Life-meets-Glasto tat masquerading as health food.

No, I said evenly, we aren’t “running down” the deli.

“Good. Then I’ll have some semi-skimmed soya milk.”

No madam, you won’t, because we don’t stock it, deli or no deli.

This village still has two shops, but that’s only a pale reflection of the number that used to be here even say, ten years ago, when there was a clothes shop and a useful junk shop, a furniture shop and a bookshop. Before that there were butchers, a wool shop and even a department store. Times change and people’s attitudes change more. Which is the nub of it: Village shops close because people stop shopping in them.

Villages do not “lose” their shops, as the saying goes in these parts. I’ve lost count of the number of wistful matrons who last did doe-eyed properly about the same time Bambi’s mum got shot who visit and tell me about their village, which has always sadly “lost” its shop as if it’s been unaccountably misplaced behind a small hill or slipped behind the cricket pavilion one full moon and never came back again.

I’ve also talked to one of the former shop keepers in a little village near Halesworth, who faced the opening of the Co-Op in the town a few years before. They had speech after speech from their customers about how it wouldn’t make any difference, they’d always come to the village shop first, it was so much more convenient, they didn’t have to drive and petrol being so expensive these days, after that ghastly Suez business. They were loyal you see and that means something in a village. OK, I made that last bit about Suez up, but only to check you were still reading.

The weekend after Halesworth Co-Op opened, the village shop shut. Because, the owners told me, they had not had a single customer all week. They decided not to go bankrupt fulfilling a cheapskate hypocritical fantasy of rural life, providing more and more for less and less. They shut the shop while they still had a roof over their heads.

Which is more than some customers feel some shops should have. They want the shops, don’t get me wrong. They make the village so much more desirable in the estate agents’ particulars, after all. But they don’t want to pay for anything there, if they can possibly help it.

If you think that’s made-up or cynical, try this true story. The day we took over here two things happened. First, the shop was crowded wall to wall with a sea of grey and white-haired folk wishing the former incumbent farewell. He was “retiring” and had a clearly labelled retirement collection box all his own, which didn’t explain why he started work in a nearby village the next Monday, but that’s another story altogether. I think possibly five of the fifty-odd people who showed up to get their picture in the newspaper’s farewell picture have ever bought anything at all in the shop since the former owner left. And the second thing that happened that day told us why.

At the back of the shop sat a huge old freezer, half-full of bread. We had no idea what it was there for, it got in the way and dead bread was not exactly the image we were aiming for. We’d been told it was for half-price bread, reduced after it went past its sell-by date.

It was. And it was a well-recognised and acknowledged scam, organised by the people who liked it to be known they were “supporting” the shop and post office.

It worked like this. You order bread, the fancier the better. Five-seed organic twist loaves, for example, that cost wholesale about £2.65. When you come in for the bread the first few times you make a fuss about the price, so you get it reduced to £2.45. Good old village shop. But that wasn’t enough of a scam. So the next week, you’re “really busy” as a pensioner and you can’t get there. You turn up three days later and noisily demand “your” bread. Obviously, you haven’t paid for it, but it’s yours by right. It’s a village, d’you see?

As it isn’t now fit for even the more fastidious chicken, you ask if there is anything that can be done, as you’re a trifle elderly and can’t always park your £30,000 car quite close enough to the door, or on the pavement. Yes, said former shopkeeper, next time I’ll put it in the freezer. Where of course, it’s half price.

So on it goes. It isn’t enough to get your bread at less than wholesale. You get it at half of less than wholesale because you deliberately don’t come in to collect it until you know it’s in the dead bread freezer.

The dead bread freezer went in the nearest certified recycling facility. The outraged pensioners don’t come in. This whole process was known as variously, “supporting the shop,” “saving the village” and “keeping the post office open.”

I call it a scam. Maybe other people have other words for it. Nowhere near every customer behaves like that. But a depressing number could not see anything even vaguely wrong with it and genuinely believed that they were supporting the shop when in fact, they were simply being subsidised by it.

It doesn’t need government initiatives or redevelopment schemes, expect in people’s heads. No village loses its shop if people keep shopping there. The only support rural shops need is customers coming in the door and buying things. Everything else is just hot air.

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Jeremiah 8:20

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Posted in Living food | Tagged Hunter Thomson, Jeremiah 8:20 | Leave a comment

Full English Breakfasts

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Last week we had a complaint. The Yoxford Breakfast wasn’t a “Full English.” The first issue we had to face was what a Full English actually is.

Some people think it’s like the pile of rubbish in this picture. It’s taken from a blog called The Socialist Way, which may go some way towards explaining why old-skool Socialism died around the same time people realised what a waste of time people like Derek Hatton actually were.

As Roy Harper put it, a plate of grease and a pile of crap.

Cheap food, processed grease, saturated fats, industrial production and less than no skill in cooking anything. Is that really all the masses deserve? I’ve never understood the lowest-common denominator argument, but that probably makes me elitist, if I remember my Sociology course properly. Maybe I don’t.

Let’s look at it sensibly. The eggs have been mashed, not fried. If you can’t do a fried egg without breaking it then for heaven’s sake serve them as scrambled. The difference between good cooks’ and/or chefs’s mistakes is they have the sense not to let other people see them. They certainly don’t expect other people to pay for them when they’re insulted with them on a plate.

Baked beans. Oh sure, they’re very English. Derived from Boston baked beans, which didn’t originate in Boston, Lincolnshire. Preferably, we’ve often been told, made by Heinz, that well-known English company that comes from America. And the quintessentially English hash browns. Quite when this roadside attraction staple became English is equally beyond me. Probably about the same time everyone started saying “we’re playing catch-up” when they meant they were trying to catch-up instead of goofing-off with a hacky-sack (Remember them? Gnarly, dude!!) and wearing baseball hats on backwards, or even at all. As ever, Englishness seems to be claimed most by people whose England seems to be somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. They should visit.

The bacon isn’t cooked properly, but the sausages are the very, very worst thing in this entire menu of atrocities masquerading as food. It was a very long time ago they ever saw the inside of a pig. They’re straight. They’re an even orange tan, much like the bits of Jordan you usually see in Hello magazine and for all I know the rest of her too. And the best or worst bit is this: Either whoever it was stupid enough to pay for this rubbish waited twenty minutes for the sausages to cook, because that’s how long it takes, or they were done first thing in the morning then stuck under a heat lamp until some mug punter came along and got them offloaded onto his plate.

I deliberately didn’t say bought them, because it pains me to believe that anyone would willingly part with money for any of this. Maybe I should say again, this is not one of our plates. And it never will be.

Last weekend our local regional paper, the East Anglian Daily Times ran a feature on the perfect Full English. Once again, English food included hash browns but this vision of perfection included fried bread. We do this occasionally too, but never the way the East Anglian described it, with fat oozing out when the knife settled into it. What they were describing was white slice, Mother’s Pride, which is enough to explain the riots on its own if the title is true.

It has to be me, doesn’t it? What’s wrong with cheap, disgusting, badly cooked food, using rubbish ingredients, so long as you get a big fat plate of it and a sick, heavy feeling when you’ve eaten it? Roy Harper, for our younger readers, is a musician who, rather than ripping-off other people’s music and sticking a studio beat over it was tributed (yes, actually it is a word now, but thank-you for asking) by bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, The Nice, Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, who when they weren’t queueing-up to play on his recordings wrote songs for him to sing on theirs. The food reference and relevance comes from the album Bullinamingvase, from the track Watford Gap, which had to be dropped from some versions of the album. Harper was signed to EMI, one of their directors was also a director of Blue Boar. Blue Boar owned the Watford Gap service station. And having eaten there and followed in his toothmarks I can tell you Roy Harper was right. They have a heat lamp too.

Anyone who can tell me why food like that is good please don’t come to try our breakfast. You won’t like locally-sourced smoked back bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, free-range small flock local scrambled eggs and sourdough toast at all. Promise.

And someone, anyone, promise me they’ll play One Of Those Days In England at my funeral. But skip the bit about Linda Lovelace if my mother’s there.

Posted in Living food | Tagged Full English, local food, Roy Harper, sausages | Leave a comment

TB, Badgers & Bullshit

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Carl Bennett

"If they shoot you I'm moving. And I'm taking the TB with me."

This week the government announced the start of a final solution to the badger problem. It’s going to start killing them, to stop them giving TB to cows. I grew up in Wiltshire, what most people think of as the countryside, but I didn’t see a live badger until I was about 15. Dead ones at the side of the road now and then yes, but not one moving about. One of the reasons is that they mostly only come out at night and that was when I saw my first one, scurrying along a B-road on the Mendips.

About six years later I was a passenger in a car in Cornwall when something jumped out of the hedge and the car hit it and lurched up into the air as if a bomb had gone off. I still don’t know if that was a pig or a badger. I saw another one late one night crossing the road in Kings Langley, a smug suburban pretend village split between very comfortably-off people in 1920s Metroland houses and Hemel Hempstead’s car-boot sale crowd, the kind of place where ladies still imagine being married is a career in itself and many women aren’t ladies. The badger, which is what this is supposed to be about, looked like a small Afghan hound in the headlights.

Over the years I’ve had cats scared to go out in the garden some nights, and large scrape marks and soft piles of animal droppings in the garden. OK, I’m so obviously not Daktari, but both of those things say “badger” to me.

Wiltshire was and to some extent still is a place where milk comes from. In my last year of primary school I had to cycle from Trowbridge to Southwick every day, past the oldest heard of Freisians in the country, or so the board in the field said back then. And everyone knew badgers had TB and gave it to the cows when they drank their milk. Depressingly, I believed into my ’30s that badgers drank the milk that leaked from cows’s udders. Maybe they even do, now and then, but I think the most plausible contaminant route would be form their urine.

One of the funniest things about the craze for bison-grass vodka is there’s no such thing as bison grass. It’s not a species. It’s grass that bison like to eat. And being bison, they wee on it as well, while they’re standing there munching it. That’s what gives it its special taste. Yummy, no?

But the trouble with the badgers-give-cows-TB story, like the oh-so-special bison wee flavouring, is it’s rubbish. Way back in 1996 MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food decided to investigate bovine TB and badgers, under the chairmanship of Professor John Krebs, Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council.

Five reasons were later given for the initiation of the review: (a) the link between badgers and bovine TB remained unproven; (b) the only reliable method for showing that badgers have bovine TB involved killing them first as the blood test on live badgers was insufficiently sensitive; (c) there was still little sign of a successful vaccine against bovine TB in badgers which had long been seen as the solution; (d) the effectiveness of badger culling remained doubtful; and (e) bovine TB was spreading.

The report was published, Mr Krebs became Lord Krebs, this week the government announced that they’d like to start killing badgers to eradicate TB and way out of line, Lord Krebs went on Radio 4 and said he’d never said anything of the sort was a good idea and that the government had no business using his report to justify what they clearly didn’t understand.

I hadn’t exactly been following the plot closely over the previous 15 years but I thought, along with probably a lot of people, badgers good, TB bad, killing badgers probably not the solution. And astonishingly, Lord Krebs seemed to have come to much the same conclusion.

The more I’ve looked at this the more surprising it is that Mr Krebs got a title out of it. The House of Commons summary of it makes surprising reading and I’ve set-out some key points here:

It concentrates on evidence of TB in badgers and the transmission of M. bovis from badgers to cattle but, which can’t have made him that popular, it goes “beyond the terms of reference” to “highlight the other possible contributory factors to the TB problem – including other wildlife, climate and poor animal husbandry”.[85] Of its many conclusions, the one which was frequently repeated in evidence to the House of Commons was that: “The sum of evidence strongly supports the view that, in Britain, badgers are a significant source of infection in cattle”.[86]

Lord Krebs went on to state that “Most of this evidence is indirect, consisting of correlations rather than demonstrations of cause and effect; but in total the available evidence, including the effects of completely removing badgers from certain areas, is compelling”. He added two caveats: “it is not, however, possible to state quantitatively what contribution badgers make to cattle infection.” Which can’t have been what the honourable members wanted to hear.

Nor he said, was “it… possible to compare the effectiveness of [previous policies for killing badgers]; nor is it possible to compare any of them with the impact of not killing badgers at all, because there have been no proper experiments”.[87] His primary conclusion was that “The control of TB in cattle is a complex problem and there is no single solution. We recommend a combination of approaches on different timescales.” Frankly, if I’d worked at MAFF I would have been a lot less than pleased with that.

Complex problems are not what politicians like at all and single solutions are the single thing that sustains the whole system of despatch-box saloon bar slanging matchery that Prime Minister’s Questions – the most publicly-accessible part of Parliament – is based on. Start talking about complex issues, proportionate blame and on the one hand this and on the other hand that and the whole facade of dynamic leadership and empowered democracy crumbles like vampires at daybreak.

MAFF came up with four basic conclusions to the Kreb’s Report, none of which somewhat surprisingly involved Mr Krebs’s notes being stolen, his house being burgled and him falling under a Tube train or handily being found dead in a field or a flat in Watford, as the current fashion for whistle-blowers seems to be.

MAFF summarised the main recommendations as:

1. The development of a cattle vaccine, considered to be the best long term option to control TB;

2. Major research initiatives aimed at achieving a better understanding of the causes of TB, and developing improved strategies to reduce outbreaks;

3. A randomised culling trial to test the effectiveness of different strategies and to provide unambiguous evidence of the role of badgers in cattle TB, the trial to be overseen by an expert group; and

4. That the Government should work with the farming industry to improve husbandry methods to minimise contact between cattle and badgers. [90]

As of now, a vacine is still as far away as ever. Improved strategies still seem to involve walking around a field at night with a big torch and a gun. The randomised culling happened, but it didn’t prove much. Lord Krebs seemed to feel it was’t actually that random, and as he also pointed-out, badgers not being stupid, when some of them get killed the others leg it pretty sharpish. If they’ve already got TB, which logic says they would have as it’s communicated chiefly through mucus, spittle and snot, then all that killing some of them does is spread TB along with the surviving badgers who’ve moved as far and as fast as they can.

Posted in Cows, Sheep & Goats, Living food, New Posts | Tagged badgers. MAFF, Krebs | Leave a comment

Alde & Ore Futures

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Not another derivatives scheme, but a plan by the Suffolk Coast Market Towns initiative to reinvigorate the area we live in, the Ore and Alde river littoral zones. The Alde runs down from the dam at Snape, past Aldeburgh and changes its name to the Ore just above Orford before it goes out into the sea at Shingle Street. Bleak, strangely beautiful country famous for bird-life, the maybe Nazi raid in 1940 and largely empty of people.

As they say, the Alde & Ore Futures project has produced three inter-related documents for a conversation with the wider community (Managing the Coastal Environment, Thriving and Viable Communities and Building the Local Economy). These are now available from the website:

http://www.suffolkcoastal.gov.uk/yourdistrict/coast/aldeore/haveyoursay/default.htm and and are also available in hard copy. They will also shortly be available on disc (please let me know if you would like a hard or disc sent to you).

Each of these documents identifies key issues in the area and highlights case studies where people from the local area have been working to find solutions to a range of problems faced by the community.

Which is all very well, except it’s a dead link. Aside from that, it will be interesting to see how they can create a plan to build a thriving community from an area comprising huge numbers of retired people and second homes, which are necessarily either rented-out or empty. Walk through the empty streets of Southwold at dusk on a September evening and see how thriving it is.

I don’t want to knock what the Market Towns initiative is trying to do; I would love to think they could do it. But it’s a critical mass issue. Once you have enough of something – in this case people – to achieve critical mass then the situation changes rapidly. You get a chain reaction. Until then, you’re just banging your head against the wall.

If they can find a way to bring more economically active people into the area I’m all for it. Putting the plans on how to do that behind a dead web link doesn’t fill me with confidence though.

Posted in Living food, New Posts | Tagged Ore & Alde, tourism | Leave a comment

Doing the Dunwich Dynamo

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Carl Bennett

I’m not doing the Dynamo this year. Instead, we thought of a way of making it easier for everyone else to do it. You cycle to Dunwich. We pick you up and bring you to breakfast.

Free shuttle service to the best food and coffee between Dunwich and Darsham Station and theA12. Actually, it’s the best breakfast for miles.

Espresso & cappuccino coffee, full English breakfast, free-range scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, eggy bread with local bacon and maple syrup, crusty bread, organic cereal,filled rolls, cold fruit drinks, tea and biscuits and more.

All this and free Wifi.

Cycle-friendly free shuttle for up to 4 riders & bikes at a time, every half hour from 08:00, pickup at Dunwich Beach Car Park.

It doesn't have to mean making do.

Posted in Things To Do | Tagged breakfast, cycling, Dunwich Dynamo | Leave a comment

The Inalienable Human Right to Stuff Your Face

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Carl Bennett

22 stone and not counting.

A 22-stone man called Thomas Condiff is going to the Court of Appeal today, arguing that his local health authority’s refusal to pay for a gastric band infringes his human rights. This assertion needs thinking about.

Thomas Condiff is clearly very uncomfortable. He has Type 2 diabetes. If he does not lose weight then he is probably going to die an uncomfortable, painful and undignified death within the short-term forseeable future.

Type 2 diabetes is sometimes known as late-onset diabetes. Diabetes, as any doctor will tell you, can really mess you up big stylee, as the young people say. Despite this it is usually entirely treatable, by the patient. The best, most immediate, long term treatment is getting weight off by changing the amount of food eaten. It is as simple as that. If you smoke too much and if you drink too much you are also quite likely to get Type 2 diabetes and the remedy is exactly the same: stop doing those things.

Mr Condiff claims that without the gastric band, fitted by the NHS and paid for by people who did not choose to eat until any normal person would be sick, over and over again, for months and years, he will die. This is not true. The gastric band will not save his life; eating less will.

One possible argument runs that people like Mr Condiff don’t have the willpower to eat less. Unfortunately, what this means is that as soon as the gastric band comes out again he will start piling on the stones until he’s back as fat as he is now and all his weight-related problems will return.

Refugees in Kenya today. Apparently they don't have quite as many human rights.

There are several issues here: the human right to food and water or the right to have a gastric band. BOGOF-offers, or maybe BOGOF-and-die deals. Consumption and status and the fallacy of choice. The fallacy starts with having the “right” to fill supermarket trolleys with thousands of foods our grandparents had never even heard of (star anise, anyone?). It extends to apparently not being able to choose to stop cramming food into your mouth. It’s about responsibility, and how much responsibility everyone else should have when individuals refuse to exercise their own.

Obviously Thomas Condiff and his lawyer have guts and no-one is asking him to solve world hunger, or end the draught in Eritrea. But maybe, just maybe, he could just shut his mouth while people are dying.

Posted in Living food, New Posts | Tagged gastric bands, Obesity | Leave a comment

All it takes is a word

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Gordon Ramsey’s film debut took a massive £121 on its opening weekend. That’s not per minute. That’s for the whole weekend. Even we took more than that.

"**** me," said Gordon, "my film's total rubbish. What am I playing at?" Actually, he's not allowed to say that.

It might seem hard to believe ( I know, I even went home early on Saturday) but Love’s Kitchen bombed, according to ever-reliable star-PR Yahoo pretendy news. (“All the news you need to bother your retarded little head about”).

It’s been a week of utter crap, yet more pretend- pretend about food, with everyone and anyone pretending to be a chef this week. I don’t like Gordon Ramsey. I don’t like his posturing. I don’t like the utter predictability of his TV series. I don’t like the hypocrisy, the lying (where do you want to start? To his wife, or about the football team he was scouted for who can’t actually remember him playing for them when he said he did?), the attitude to food, the Botox, the expression of constant surprise that predates the Botox. I don’t like pretty much all of his TV persona. And frankly, I don’t care about what he’s like when he’s not on TV because I’ve never met him and his TV persona is the one he wants most people to see.

But at least he’s a chef. He did his chef training in a kitchen, working for other chefs. He can take ingredients and think-up new ways to cook them and present a meal that people want to eat. Unlike the “chefs” at KFC and Nigella Lawson.

According to KFC’s previous TV ads, the best thing about working there and eating there is the chicken’s brought in fresh each day. I mean, wow! Nothing about where it came from. How it was reared. Whether it had any exercise. What it ate. No, Dave brung it off the truck right early. What else do you need to know? Well now, according to the ad team, you need to know that “chefs” dusted the chicken bits with breadcrumbs.

You see, it’s not just people who trained for years in kitchens who are chefs. Anyone who can shake some chicken legs in a bowl of pre-packed bread and seasoning (from another packet, naturally) is a chef now.

And according to Yahoo yesterday, Nigella Lawson is a chef too. She’s not a journalist, a TV presenter, someone who used to work under Naim Attallah doing whatever the chain of young women he helped on their way actually did. Although if you click here you’ll see that he’s another one of the new crowd of people who are called one thing and don’t actually do any of it. Mr Attalah didn’t write the things he said he did. Nigella’s had no more chef training and commercial kitchen burns than anyone else who’s Daddy was very rich indeed.

It doesn’t matter, does it? IT’s all completely pretend. No-one really gives a stuff about food, except as a way to sell something else. Nigella’s a chef, the boys at KFC are chefs, I’m a chef, anyone who watches Come Dine With Me is a chef too, now. Words these days mean anything you want them to.

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Customer Service

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Striking the balance with customer service, like anything else worth doing properly, isn’t always easy. Especially when so many people in the last decade have confused the expectation of good customer service with playing up like a spoiled six year-old.

Today, for example, three old ladies came in. Before you start, they’d be the first to describe themselves that way. They didn’t move particularly briskly but they ordered coffee while they were still coming through the door. By the time they’d got themselves settled – and it took some time – the coffee was cold. Oh, and some cake, young man.

I made them more coffee. Hot. I charged them for three coffees, although they’d had six. And I didn’t charge for the cake, because customers have a right to expect hot coffee.

I think that’s the way it should go.

But some people disagree. Someone last week came in and wanted cheese. There’s a cheese platter on the menu, a selection of different cheeses and some leaves and crusty bread and we’re more than happy to offer different cheeses, not just our choice of what needs shifting, as we’ve heard can be the case at some places.

The customer didn’t want that. They wanted some cheese. Any cheese. They didn’t know what. They didn’t want to taste any, or discuss it. Just cheese. And biscuits. What kind of biscuits?

“Ordinary biscuits.”

This was clearly someone who not only wasn’t really very interested in their food, which is their choice and only affects them, but someone who was also becoming either stupid or plain rude as well, which is their choice and it affects us. Which is a different country altogether.

Cheese and biscuits isn’t on the menu. We sell biscuits by the packet. If the customer had been even half-way interested in talking about it we’d almost certainly have opened a packet, given them some biscuits and eaten the rest ourselves. But they weren’t.

So we explained there was a cheese option on the menu, showed them the menu, explained what the cheese option was and after they’d decided (“Any cheese”) brought it to them. They paid. They left. Then told someone it was all a lot of money for cheese and biscuits which we didn’t have and they won’t be back.

And frankly, good. One of the really irritating things about all this is that the same people won’t ever dare try this on in the supermarket cafe where they prefer the prices. They sit on their plastic seats there, get what they’re given and pay up like good little lambs. It’s only where they’re actually offered some real service that kind of customer starts getting really arsy.

So you do what you can.

As we did today when a delivery driver in a hurry came bursting through the doors asking if we did food? We do sir. What would sir like to eat?

Scrambled egg. To take away.

So perhaps sir would prefer an egg roll?

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Posted in Customer Tales, New Posts | Tagged arsiness, customer service, egg rolls | Leave a comment

Latitude Festy

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Grace Slick, from the days when festys really WERE festys, with Hells Angels, bad trip warnings, stabbings an' all. Aye, them were the days, lad. We'll not see the like again, 'appen..

Latitude Festival is on next week, from Thursday 14th to Sunday 17th July.

We’re the nearest place you can get good food, from a full breakfast to smoked salmon and freshly-grown salad or just a bowl of organic cereal, from 9am to 5:30pm, along with lots of different kinds of tea and cake and great coffee, to eat in or not, as you choose.

And we’ve got free WiFi.

We’re just a mile from Darsham station. Turn right when you come out, go down the hill, turn right at the little cottage, keep to the left hand side of the track, go left at the fork and come out at Horner’s shop. Turn right and keep going 200 yards until you see the Post Office sign. That’s us.

Call us on the Latitude Festy Food Helpline – 01728 668861.

Click the link here.

Posted in News, Things To Do, What's On | Tagged Grace Slick, Henham, Latitude Festival | Leave a comment

Tesco’s Hearing Difficulties

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Carl Bennett

I went to the public meeting in Leiston last night, to listen to Tesco telling the town why it was so great, to just relax, that everywhere’s a little nervous the first time, that honestly, it would still respect it in the morning and anyway baby, if it didn’t then it would just tell everywhere else it had anyway.

Tesco's idea of outstanding natural beauty. No fat people slumped over their trolley or a plastic bag blowing around anywhere in sight.

Tesco opened the batting and set the comedy bar pretty high right at the start. “Dead-end jobs at Tesco?” their spokeswoman exclaimed. “My career has been fantastic!” It was going to be a long night.

Tesco rolled some extremely iffy statistics out next. Salaries would be between £3,000 p.a. and £40,000 p.a. No indication of where most of them would be, and it was pretty clear you were supposed to think “ah, ok, then the average is about £18,500, mid-way between the two.” Is it though? No-one was saying.

If they got planning permission, the new Tesco store would be “not big in terms of a supermarket.” Tesco said this again and again. It may not be, but we aren’t talking about a big town here. In fact, the new Tesco as Tesco want it will be double the size of the existing Co-Op supermarket PLUS every other retailer in the town. The childish “but that’s not very big” Tesco kept trotting-out missed the point to the point of imbecility. They wanted 20,000 square feet. That’s a football pitch of space, chopped in half down the long side. It sounds pretty big to me.

“Supermarkets are windows of town centres,” was up next, an enigmatic statement verging on the inscrutable. Then Tesco trotted out something everyone could agree with. “There’s £318 of petrol wasted per family each year, driving to Tesco in Martlesham. One million miles. £164,000 in this town per year. “ Well yes, I’d solidly agree that 1p spent driving to Tesco is wasted.

Anyway they said, referring to their independently commissioned telephone survey, 40% of what’s spent by people in Leiston is spent elsewhere. So why not spend it in Tesco in Leiston, ran the argument, profoundly missing the point that the new Tesco, if there is one, isn’t going to be in Leiston at all, but perched right on the edge of it, nearest to the turning to Sizewell if it could be called near anywhere.

Why couldn’t people go to Saxmundham if they wanted to shop at Tesco, someone asked? Erm, the Samundham to Leiston road is “not brilliant” snapped back Tesco’s “planning consultant.” He was quite interesting, or rather the ambiguity of his role was interesting in itself. It was never made clear whether he was an independent who had been hired by Tesco to help out with their planning or on salary paid for by Tesco. He clarified by saying “I’m not Tesco,” which suggests he’s an independent.

The difference is important. When I was a consultant for clients in similar positions, on one of the global tours we did after a massive research project, for example, I made it very clear to everyone who would listen that I wasn’t the client and their company had nothing to do with me. What I certainly didn’t do was argue their case for them, as this character did. I was asked to more than once and each time I said that I wasn’t doing it, not least because it would make a mockery of hiring an independent and devalue all the research. And stuff my career as an objective, unbiased consultant into the bargain.

Tesco’s consultant seemed to see his role differently. After trotting out the tired old platitude of “sustainable economic growth” which didn’t bring the hollow laughter it might have done after 2007, he named Nichols’s Butchers and Platt’s greengrocers and played what he clearly thought was going to get the trump cards out early. “People won’t desert them if they’re so good,” he smarmed, clearly never having seen or heard Platt’s punchbag that used to hang in the back of the shop and also clearly not counting on going down the alley at the side of the shop any time soon. Naturally, that didn’t explain why Tesco adverts always focus on price instead of service, but never mind.

That one having gone down like the Hindenberg, Tesco’s ambiguous consultant pledged to extend the 165 bus route and to contribute, as he put it, to the town centre. Maybe Leiston would like a Town Centre Manager, he thought, if they had a town centre left after Tesco opened up and if of course, anyone could be hired to do the job on a salary he wasn’t in a position to specify. Or maybe everyone would prefer “improved street furniture”?

Then the consultant reached for the real Alice Through the Looking Glass script, reeling out retail “facts” that sounded like Lewis Carrol on a day he’d particularly punished the laudanum bottle.

Tesco have proved that when they open independents only have oh, about 10% reduction in their turnover. A smaller (Tesco) store would compete more directly with the existing stores in Leiston. And anyway, 31% of the people in Leiston want a big Tesco, according to the independent survey.

The Lay Off Leiston spokesman said directly that the independent survey, or rather the maths behind it, was incompetent nonsense and if you added the figures up properly it wasn’t 31% at, but 18% of the 600-odd people in the survey who wanted a big Tesco. Less than one in five who wanted it then, rather than Tesco’s best claim of two out of three who didn’t. He went further, stating that according to Tesco’s figures only 5% of people in their survey said the thing they didn’t like about Leiston was its lack of a big supermarket.

Again, when I was up on a public podium and someone said the stats behind what I was saying were rubbish I knew I was going to win the point for two reasons. One, I had the microphone. Two, because I’d gone over all the stats again and again until I could absolutely guarantee I knew a lot more about what they said and didn’t say than anyone else in the room. As a consultant, I thought that was my job. So it was interesting to see but not hear that when the Tesco figures were challenged, when the anti-Tesco speakers said the Tesco survey wasn’t even added-up correctly, Tesco’s planning consultant said precisely nothing.

Nothing at all. He either knew the stats were flaky or he didn’t. There isn’t another way out of that. And he certainly didn’t challenge the assertion that the survey maths were totally wrong, which was odd.

Then the Lay Off Leiston speaker really put the boot in. What about the Parliamentary Committ that said Tesco used predatory pricing to destroy local opposition? What about no national price list? What about the 40% off coupons Tesco had given in one store to wipe-out local shops, that was in the High Street Britain report? No comment from Tesco.

What about the fact that the proposed Tesco was going to be not just double the footprint of the never-exactly-crowded Co-Op supermarket, but that size plus the square footage of every other food shop in Leiston? Well, said Ms Tesco with the fantastic career, that doesn’t make it a big store. Which was true, in the same way it didn’t make Leiston a big town either.

So where, asked Lay Off Leiston, where are all the extra customers going to come from, if the new Tesco isn’t going to eviscerate the town?

Ah, said the planning consultant, as if as a planning consultant this was any of his business, Tesco are going to provide jobs. And help people avoid a 40 mile round-trip to Martlesham Tesco. And the 10% figure was wrong anyway. Shops wouldn’t lose 10% of their turnover. Tesco estimated the Co-Op would lose 35% of its turnover. What percentage of their business everyone else in Leiston would lose clearly wasn’t worth mentioning. But in any case, “the additional traffic would be insignificant” said Tesco, so it wasn’t as if the tiny road into the town from the west would be clogged solid or anything.

The central claim seemed to be that this huge new shop would at the same time be practically empty and simultaneously need as much floorspace as the rest of Leiston put together.

Well, said Tesco’s planning consultant, they might build six new business units, “for service industries.” Drawing on Leiston’s manufacturing heritage he slid out what he clearly thought was another trump card. “For people who make things,” he continued. “They wouldn’t be for retail.” Perish the thought.

The fact that Leiston’s large-scale manufacturing heritage died in its sleep about the same time Maggie’s Brave Boys recaptured Goose Green was irrelevant, as was the fact that there isn’t exactly a shortage of vacant non-retail business space in Leiston these days.

Tesco didn’t even bother arguing that while they might well create jobs if the new store was ever built at the same time more jobs would be lost because of it. As Lay Off Leiston kept saying, Tesco’s job creation didn’t offset the nett job losses their store would cause. Again, the planning consultant didn’t even bother arguing the point.

So far as he saw it, he didn’t need to. He’s seen “300 letters” he claimed, all of them supporting the opening of Tesco, and all of them were from people in the town, unlike the ones against Tesco he’d noticed. Oddly, he didn’t say how many other letters there were as well as what we might as well call his, making the statistic meaningless.

Someone helpfully pointed-out from the crowd that when there was a plan to build houses where Tesco wanted their store planing permission was turned down on the grounds the land was contaminated. Thanks to the Garret engine works most of Leiston was, added another Spartacus. Well, we’re not talking about houses, said Tesco. The ground might well be contaminated but it was good enough for food retailing. And anyway, “that needs to be remediated,” whatever that means. For good measure he chucked in, “this is an enabling development.” No-one even bothered to ask what this gibberish meant.

Local suppliers wouldn’t be affected, said Tesco, except um, the distribution centre will be in Peterborough. So local food if it was bought at all would go to Peterborough, about two hours drive away, then come back again instead of being put in the back of someone’s van and dropped off while they did their other shopping. The Tesco planner hit new heights of absurdity now. “Distribution centres are to expand local supplier’s businesses” he wailed. Any idea that maybe Tesco’s distribution centre was to distribute Tesco’s supplies had obviously never been explained to him.

It was like watching a fight between grossly mis-matched boxers. “Beccles…” he gasped, “in Beccles they welcomed us. Well,” he faltered, ” they didn’t welcome us, but…”

Then he explained that Tesco won’t be selling any clothes or white goods, or opening a cafe, which put a bit of a dent in the idea the consultant had been trying to plant that the retail offering in the town would be expanded, broadened and make Leiston a better, fuller, more convenient place to live. Suffolk Coastal had in fact applied a planning condition that specifically said no cafe and to be blunt, we’re not that worried about Tesco’s half-baked cafe anyway, unless people want food made by people who just don’t care.

But the best was saved almost until last. “What about Tesco’s ethical rating?” asked another voice in the crowd. Ethical ratings have been around as an idea since the 1980s and there is a good website explaining the idea here. People judge companies on a range of ethical criteria from whether they use organic products to whether or not they sell weapons to the Taliban and most points in between.

“I don’t know what an ethical rating is,” said Tesco’s planning consultant. He didn’t say “our” or “Tesco’s” ethical rating. The difference seemed to sum up his employers neatly.

Never mind, someone from the crowd usefully helped out. The Co-Op’s was 1, Waitrose’s was 2, Asda was 8 and Tesco was 7, a voice said. I don’t know where those figures came from, but the supermarket part of Gooshing’s website put M&S at number 2.

Luckily at this point the completely unbiased Town Council spokesman intervened to explain that Suffolk Coastal would be making a decision on the matter on 5th July and helpfully added that the debate wasn’t about whether or not people liked Tesco. It was about the technical detail of the planning application. Which didn’t really explain why Tesco wasted their money asking people in thier survey whether they liked Tesco. Or why there was a public meeting at all.

With a final attempt to save face Tesco were allowed to get the last word in, claiming the new store represented significant investment in the town. Except of course, that’s just one of the problems. It isn’t in the town at all.

Outside at half past nine on a July evening a wall of black rain clouds was streaked across the sky and a gusty powerful wind was blowing up. But it took some time to shift the smell of incompetence, rubbish statistics, ignorance, dogma and the sour smell of a done deal.

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Best Deli Awards

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Unbelievably, we’ve been nominated for Suffolk’s Best Deli by the East Anglian Daily Times’s Suffolk magazine.

Who actually becomes best deli is decided by the readers’s votes, so clip the coupon in the new July issue of Suffolk magazine, or go online, you trendsetters, and vote for the Sole Bay Cheese Co. for Best Deli on the website here – http://www.archantsuffolk.net/food-and-drink/voting/?cat-id=Best%20Delicatessen. Thank-you!

Only five other delis have been nominated (we swear we didn’t do it ourselves), including Lawsons in Aldeburgh and Simply Delicious in Leiston, both of them really nearby. We’ve only been open since November and we’ve only been open as a proper deli where you can sit down and eat and drink some of the very best coffee for miles as well as talk about food before you buy it since April-ish. He gushed.

So we’ve got some stiff competition. Lawson’s sell loads more things than we do and that’s just the Aldeburgh one, not the one in Dupont Circle. Actually, if you’re in DC it’s better to just slide around the corner to Kramer Books, where they’ve not only got the bookshop Monica Lewinsky had an account at, but also a bar and a cafe where you can read your books. How cool is that?

Kramer's off Dupont. About as cool as you get in D.C. in January. And that's cool. Trust me.

OK, Kramer’s slogan, “meet you at Kramer’s” doesn’t have quite the same zing as “see you in St Louis, Louis,” but it’ll do. Obviously, that’s Louis as in Louey, not as in Inspector Morse.

"The cheese plank's THIS big at Yoxford Deli-Cafe Lewis. I've left my wallet in the Jaguar."

Simply Delicious bake their own bread as well as doing homeopathic medicines that actually work, at least for my hay fever. And their website’s miles snappier than this one.

But, but, but very odd to see no delis in Southwold were nominated. At all. Nope, not even one. And really, do any of them have the same jolly elan of this stuff? Eh? Well do they?

If that’s the sort of thing that milks your shake, vote for us. Back at the top of all this, in case you’ve forgotten how. Or here, to make it easy for you. Meanwhile, a huge thank-you to whoever nominated us. Before you do vote though, come along and taste some food.

Stay a while. Sit down and talk to us.

Food’s not just for eating.

Posted in New Posts, News | Tagged Best deli, competition, EADT, Inspector Morse, local, Suffolk Magazine | Leave a comment

How To Eat for £1 A Day & Other Fairy Stories

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Your Average Rockstar Cheesemaker.

Alex James used to be the bassist in Blur, the 1990s Indie band who constantly tried to be the Beatles to Oasis’s Rolling Stones. If ever that was a pretend media battle between media-mindful wannabes, then it was only a warm-up for Alex’s latest escapade.

“OUR daunting challenge of spending £1 a day on grub needed precision planning – so Sun foodie Alex James set to work,” said The Soaraway Sun on May 24th. This was the newspaper that lead with the headline “Gotcha” when 323 Argentinian sailors were killed by the Royal Navy. Their own Assistant Editor Roy Greenslade, Assistant Editor called it “xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist.”^[16] but if that’s the kind of attitudes multi-millionaire man of the people celebrity cheese-maker Alex James wants to be associated with then that’s up to him.

Back on the pretend dole-queue, Alex’s precision-planning came into play. Oh and by the way, he used to play a Fender Precision Bass, geddit? I know, that’s probably a bit of an intellectual joke for a Sun reader, but there’s more to come.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to save money on food. It’s even commendable, but the whole article is simple posturing. Strangely, he never once mentioned the Blur hymn to rave culture Chemical World, whose heroine spends most of her time off her face because as she says, “in a chemical world it’s very, very, very cheap.”

“From Asda I got a large whole chicken for £2.39, 1.5kg of plain white flour for 52p, six eggs for 69p and 250g butter for 50p.

“Sainsbury’s was the cheapest for two pints of milk, at 86p. That came to a total of £4.96.

“I was going to need help to make it all stretch so I took my haul, plus a few things from my vegetable patch, to my favourite restaurant, Allium in the Cotswolds, for some advice.

Does it look as if they do food at £1 a day?

You cannot buy a chicken that has had any kind of life for £2.96.

You cannot pay a fair price for milk to farmers at 43p a pint.

Alex James reckons he’s a farmer. He has to know this. Or does he simply not give a toss what the facts are, so long as he gets his picture in the paper?

Oh but wait. As well as owning a real live 200 acre cheese farm in Oxfordshire he now produces award-winning cheeses. Alex James has, to date, produced three cheeses: Blue Monday, Farleigh Wallop and Little Wallop.

Blue Monday was named oh-so-post-modernistically after his favourite New Order song, according to Wikipedia.

And just look, he’s now launching a new range of cheeses called ‘Alex James Presents’ which is due to hit shelves in June, aiming to promote technologically advanced cheeses, re-packaging cheese for the modern world, whatever that means.

But, but, but…..If you look at the Evenlode Partnership website you get a slightly different story to the one you’ve been encouraged to imagine.

I could not have made this up, so I’m just going to cut and paste it direct from the Evenlode website:

Since 1984 I have wanted to create my own cheese but never found the right time or person to make the cheese – until last year, when I met my neighbour, Alex James. Former bass guitarist of Blur, Alex was quoted in the press as wanting to make cheese. Thinking he would give British cheese a new, sexy image, I invited Alex to judge at the 2006 British Cheese Awards.

His boundless curiosity, excellent palate and fascination for cheese blew me away and in his column in the Observer the following week he dubbed cheese “sexy” and “the new rock and roll” and said he wanted to make his own.

Over the next few months, stories appeared about Alex’s cheese but like the Emperor’s new clothes, the cheese did not exist. Then in April 2007 Alex called for help: “Everyone is talking about my cheese and I don’t have one. What can I do?” It was like spontaneous combustion – I found myself spilling out my dreams of all the cheeses I wanted to make and he painted a picture of his plans and aspirations for the farm.Thus the Evenlode Partnership was born.

Thus, as they say, it seems Mr James didn’t even make any cheese when he first judged the British Cheese Awards, but “over the next few months stories emerged about his cheese” which didn’t actually erm, how shall we say, exist.

He didn’t make any until his next door-neighbour talked to him and he won the British Cheese Awards the first time he’d made any, just two years after he’d judged them. It makes you wonder why anyone else bothers really, in the face of talent like that.

Then on to the compulsory ”cheese is the new rock n roll,” it’s “sexy” and a slew of other utter bollocks. The acceptable face of rockstar excess seems to be about as much of a farmer as Marie Antoinette was a humble milkmaid. And naturally, Alex’s first job is going to be getting his new cheeses into supermarkets, the sworn enemies of staff who know anything about how food tastes.

What does it matter? The Sun get their token street cred, Alex James gets a useful plug for his products, a multi-millionaire tells people how to eat on £1 a day and has to be coached through that by going to a restaurant where the idea of doing that would have you shown the door, plus a surcharge for looking at it on your swift exit into the ally next to the bins in car park.

I’m a tad older than Mr James. So my first memory of Blue Monday was the cover version Ronnie Lane and the Slim Chance band did, reeling out the old Fats Domino lyrics over a harmonium and a steel guitar.

“Blue Monday, how I hate blue Monday, have to work like a slave all day…..”

Now THAT'S how you play English country blues.

Posted in New Posts, Tesco Wars | Tagged Alex James, Blue Monday, Blur, celebs, Evenlode, The Sun | Leave a comment

Sibton Abbey Ruins Open Weekend

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Posted in What's On | Tagged Sibton Abbey | Leave a comment

Say No to Tesco

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Posted in Tesco Wars, What's On | Tagged Lay Off Leiston, Tesco | Leave a comment

Village Mysteries

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Being part of a community means being involved in all sorts of different things. Talking to the people in the village for example. Having a papier-mache workshop. Helping some of the old people in the village clear-up old mysteries from long ago. It’s not that supermarkets couldn’t get involved, but that they simply can’t see the point, because you don’t make any money quickly, which is what they’ve promised their shareholders. They don’t give out loyalty points because they like people; a lot of it’s because that’s the only way they get people coming back, given that they don’t treat them as anything but consumer units.

We helped clear-up a 66 year-old mystery last week, thanks to former USAAF pilot Joe Shea, who was in Yoxford visiting for the Leiston Memorial Service. When we were mentioned in the East Anglian Daily Times in an article explaining how Joe used to be based here one of our older customers came to say hello.

In fact, he did a little more than that. He came to find-out who the medic on the base was who’d helped his brother in 1944. Some time between D-Day and January 1945 two little boys were playing on Westleton Common, where the former Council Houses now stand. They found a little stash of mortar bombs left lying around. As one of them said today, there were no maps of where they were, they were just left in piles. His brother hit the base of one of the mortar bombs which, as he had no idea at the time, is how the fuse is armed. Then he tried to take the top off the bomb itself.

His brother was trying to find-out who it was on Leiston airfield who raced the shattered little boy to the base hospital, desperately trying to save his life after the mortar bomb he was holding went off. Whoever it was he must have known it was hopeless; as his brother said this morning, he was all but blown to pieces.

Was it an abandoned dump of munitions left there out of carelessness when stacks of bombs and explosives and ammunition were piled all over southern England just before D-Day in 1944? Was it a one of the secret Home Guard Auxiliary stashes left over from 1940 that some people in Yoxford still talk about? There’s still supposed to be a forgotten ammunition dump somewhere within a few hundred yards of the High Street, ready for use against the German invaders. Folk remember it was there but they don’t remember it ever being cleared out. Or, unfortunately, exactly where it was.

That old man has hardly ever said a single word since we took over the shop and post office in November. Now he says hello and stops to chat. As he said today, you can’t find out everything, not after all this time you can’t. But you can still try.

It doesn’t take more than a conversation, after all. Unless you’re a supermarket, of course. So perhaps the real question is if every little really helps, why don’t they ever do it?

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New Menus

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Have a look at our new menus – we’re open from 9am to 5:30pm every day except Sunday.

Except this Sunday we’re open from 10, because it’s Yoxford Open Gardens Day.

Come and see us, eat, look at plants, get inspired, plan a new garden over our coffee, have a look at some more gardens, come and have lunch. Have a think about planting, then come back and have afternoon tea. We might and I really do mean might, have some fresh scones. We’ll have to see how you behave.

Posted in New Posts, News, Things To Do, What's On | Tagged Open Gardens | Leave a comment

Hand-roasted coffee

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Carl Bennett

We had an older and at times, slightly irascible American friend staying with us recently. On his very last day here we went to a chi-chi little cafe bakery on the coast. After they’d condescended to let us in before 10am they presented us with what we’d ordered, two coffees and a mocha.

The mocha was made from powder, but there’s nothing wrong with that. What was wrong was the fact that it was full of powder at the bottom of the cup. It takes 30 seconds under the steam wand on a cappuccino machine to turn powder into gorgeous chocolate, but they obviously decided they didn’t have that much time to waste on customers.

That was after we’d heard one of the managers explaining to another that one of the staff wouldn’t be in that day “because he’s got diarrhoea.” It was Sunday morning. If he’d really got diarrhoea he shouldn’t be coming in until three full days after he’s stopped spraying e.coli around his bathroom. Given the day though, I suspect his “food poisoning” was more accurately drink-related. But it’s nonsense, and both those managers should have known it was nonsense.

None of this was what exercised our guest. He read the label on my cup: “Hand-Roasted Coffee.”

He got a bit loud. “Hand-Roasted Coffee? They’re telling me someone’s got hands that warm they can roast coffee with ‘em? It’s just bullshit.”

And frankly, I’d have to agree. Words need meanings.

Posted in Living food | Leave a comment

Dunwich Dynamo

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Carl Bennett

16th-17th July 2011

The famous overnight gonzo courier-inspired Tweed Cycling Club-mentioned 100 mile plus ride from London to Dunwich.

Doing the Dynamo in style. My kind of style, anyway.

Every year I say I’m going to do it. Every year I still think it would be a good idea.

Except…. there’s nowhere to get breakfast except the cafe on Dunwich Beach.

Which is ok, but this year you have a choice. In Yoxford, on the A1120, 200 yards from the A12, on the less manic road, at the Post Office deli.

Call us on 01728 668520.

You can find a link to the Dunwich Dynamo here but remember this is an independent ride. There’s no organiser, there’s no fleet of vans to pick you up if you flop out half-way through and above all, you’re independent too. So pack a spare tube and a pump, at least.

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Lay Off Leiston

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Carl Bennett

There are currently plans to install a Tesco at Southwold, Halesworth, Saxmundham and Leiston, four towns out of four, each within five miles of each other.

The Lay Off Leiston campaign is against the introduction of Tesco to the town, not least because it will be built out of the town centre and there are as usual no plans whatsoever to cope with the increased road traffic this will bring.

More odious is the attitude of Leiston council, which doesn’t feel any discussion is necessary. Leiston Town Council have decided to discuss the issue on 5th July. Rachel Knights, the planning Officer at Suffolk Coastal, has to write her report on objections by 29th June. So next time you vote, remember that Leiston Town Council has no problem with Tesco moving into the town and they also don’t see any need for a genuine discussion-then-action-based democratic process. They apparently prefer a discussion that by definition cannot achieve anything, such as one carried-out after it can’t have any effect. That isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s on the calendar.

If you want to find-out more about the Lay Off Leiston campaign, click here.

Posted in New Posts, Tesco Wars | Tagged Tescopoly | Leave a comment

Lay Off Leiston Contacts

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Carl Bennett

CONTACT DETAILS LEISTON TOWN COUNCILLORS

Cllr D E Bailey,

8 Garrett Crescent, Leiston, IP16 4LB

01728 831032

davidlynnebailey(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)yahoo.co.uk

Cllr R Bailey,

The Longhouse, Haylings Grove, Leiston, IP16 4DX

ronbailey(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com">ronbailey(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com

Cllr Bing Boast

10 Buller Road, Leiston, IP16 4HA

01728 830391

bing(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)boast100.plus.com">bing(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)boast100.plus.com

Cllr A M Cooper Chairman (also on SCDC)

28 King Georges Avenue, Leiston, IP16 4JG

01728 830181or 832755

Cllr R Geater,

Ersanmine, Westward Ho, Leiston, IP16 4HX

01728 832245

richard.geater(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)O2.co.uk">richard.geater(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)O2.co.uk

Cllr Mrs S M Geater

19 Haylings Grove, Leiston, IP16 4DU

Cllr C S Ginger

20 Heath View, Leiston, IP16 4JP

01728 832400

Cllr T J Hawkins (also on SCDC)

78 King Georges Avenue, Leiston, IP16 4JG

01728 830234

Trevor.Hawkins(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)suffolkcoastal.gov.uk">Trevor.Hawkins(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)suffolkcoastal.gov.uk

Cllr T E Hodgson

27 King Georges Avenue, Leiston, IP16 4JX

01728 830917

terry.hodgson(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com">terry.hodgson(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com

Cllr W H Howard

52 Waterloo Avenue, Leiston, IP16 4HE

01728 831455

billhoward52(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)yahoo.co.uk">billhoward52(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)yahoo.co.uk

Cllr John Last

4 Haylings Grove, Leiston, IP16 4DU

01728 831017

john(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)last4.freeserve.co.uk">john(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)last4.freeserve.co.uk

Cllr A J Nunn (also on SCDC)

1 Andrew Close, Leiston, IP16 4LE

01728 830462

andrew.nunn(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com">andrew.nunn(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com

Cllr Ann Nunn

1 Andrew Close, Leiston, IP16 4LE

01728 830462

ann.nunn(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com">ann.nunn(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)btinternet.com

Cllr Nigel Parker

19 Haylings Grove, Leiston, IP16 4DU

01728 833501

Cllr Janet Sparrow

77 Seaward Avenue, Leiston, IP16 4BQ

01728 832652

Posted in New Posts | Leave a comment

Tesco – Lay Off Leiston

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Carl Bennett

If you’d like some music while you read this notice, why not try the old Dexy’s Midnight Runners track, “Burn It Down”?

MONDAY JUNE 6TH at 5.30 pm, meet at Customer Services counter at Leiston Co-op (Solar).

Latest on the campaign

The Application Number is C/11/0988

SCDC officer name to address objections is Rachel Knights,

Planning Dept, Suffolk Coastal District Council, Melton Hill, Woodbridge, IP12 1AU

Please write your objection letter NOW and encourage everyone else to do the same. (Leaflet to help people write their letter has been put together – more discussion on this further down.)

Please keep copies of objection letters, or at least let us know if you have written a letter.

Deadline: Letters of objection need to be in by 16^th June

Next meeting of Leiston Town Council is 7^th June but luckily for Tesco, the council has decided NOT to discuss the Tesco application at this meeting.

Leiston Business Association report must be in by 27^th June

Rachel Knights has to write her report by 29^th June.

Application will go to the Planning Committee 20^th July.

Leiston Town Council won’t be discussing the Planning Application til 5^th July so their comments won’t – can’t – be received by SCDC by the time the planning report has to be in. It was agreed to contact the Chair of LTC, Tony Cooper, and find out why the Town Council is not apparently representing the views of Leiston. Action: Jackie, Chris.

Letters of Objection

More forms for objecting are available from Chris. Using a form is helpful as they are numbered.

Sustainable Communities Act see attachment CONTACT LIL IF YOU CAN’T OPEN ATTACHMENT

Ron Bailey (Independent Councillor on Town Council) has sent, via Marie, a proposal which he plans to put to the Town Council. We all need to read this and each write to the Town Council to say we support his proposal and want them to follow it through. Important: We also each need to write to all our town and district councillors expressing our views on the Tesco issue. Suggest writing to each councillor on the two issues.

List of contact addresses for our local councillors attached. CONTACT LIL IF YOU CAN’T OPEN ATTACHMENT

Please keep copies of letters and please let us know if you have sent letters. Action Everyone!!!!

Village Shops & Parish Councils

Spreading the word to local parishes about the Tesco application, and its likely impact. Sally Barker and Nigel Smith have come from Middleton-cum-Fordley PC and will report back to their local communities. Many people are unaware of the Tesco Application.

Village shops in Yoxford, Middleton and Westleton, and Friday Street Farm Shop all have letters of objection boxes. Action: Geoff to bring Knodishall on board with a box. Lil to add to leaflet to mention this wider impact.

Press

Discussion on publicity, problem of EADT not reporting accurately.

Agreed to take out a full page advert in EADT for Saturday 11^th June.

Action: Kate, Chris and Lil to meet on Friday to draft the advert and bring to next meeting on Monday 6^th.

Leaflet

Needs some rewrites. Action Lil, Chris

To printers this week. Bring for everyone for Monday’s meeting.

Parry could put some in the newspapers.

There are approx 3000 houses in Leiston so print at least 5000.

Volunteers please come forward to help do a leaflet drop in Leiston, and to distribute to the village shops etc of the area.

Minutes of last meeting 16.5.11 approved but those without email do not get the updates so the news of the Application being received by SCDC, objection deadlines etc didn’t reach Andy Dunn and Geoff Platt. Action: Lil

Lay Off Leiston Facebook Short discussion on our page. Need to get more “likes”. Agreed it was useful to keep the FB page, Dani, Shaun and Marie are managing it. Put our FB page links into our other literature. Action: Lil

Search Lay Off Leiston in Facebook to find it. Action: Everyone

Contact details for all the names mentioned here are HERE.

For planning application news, click here.

Posted in New Posts | Leave a comment

French cheddar and wheat-free bread

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Posted in Customer Tales, Living food, New Posts | Tagged iPad, Nutella | Leave a comment

Leiston Airfield Memorial Flypast

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Carl Bennett

2:15 Leiston Airfield Memorial Flypast, Cakes & Ale.

Be there.

Posted in What's On, Yoxford Post Office | Tagged Yoxford Boys | Leave a comment

Vena Hammond, P51 Mustangs and 1940s pinups.

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Where to start? Joe Shea’s been here a week now, and a lot of drink has flowed under the bridge since then. On Sunday we went up to Flixton Museum, and Joe Shea who used to fly out of Leiston had a whale of a time. Someone who had drawn a picture of a Mustang aircraft three years ago came up to him and asked him to interview it for him. Out of all the thousands of P51D Mustangs there were, it was a little odd that the aircraft in the picture had the call-sign P4-D. Lt Joe Shea’s aircraft.

Then we were invited to “the hanger.” Neither of us had a clue what it was or where. Joe was bundled into a wartime Willis Jeep and I followed in my Ford. We swung through twisting back lanes in the middle of absolutely nowhere, then turned onto a concrete track in the middle of a field. We drove past some concrete pre-fab huts newly painted in camouflage paint, then drove up to the side of a long low hut used for chickens, by the smell of it. Then we found the hanger. It’s unreal, like a James Bond film. There must be £5 million-worth of aircraft in there. But the strangest things were not one but two P51 Mustangs. According to Joe, they were in even better condition than the ones he flew with 24×7 maintainence. I’m not making all this up, but it felt as if I was. Have a look at this link.

Odder still was the fact that Joe was telling me about a long-lost girlfriend he knew in Ipswich in 1945, called Vena K. Hammond. The owner of the Mustangs was a man who grew up and learned to fly in Ipswich, called Maurice Hammond. He’s giving Joe his first flight in a P51 since 1945 on Saturday, if the weather holds.

Yesterday we went out to a secret location and recovered some of the pictures the aircrews used to look at while they were killing time waiting for their airplanes to come back home. After 66 years away, locked in a shed in Suffolk, they’re going back home to be displayed in a new museum Joe’s helped set-up in Ida, Louisiana.

Tomorrow, Friday lunchtime, the East Anglian Daily Times are coming over to take some pictures and interview Joe about the recovery project. If you’d like to meet him too, come and see us at Yoxford Post Office. One thing we can promise, the food will be a bit better than on his first trip to England.

Posted in What's On, Yoxford Post Office | Tagged Mustang, P51D, USAAF, whale meat again, Yoxford Boys | Leave a comment

Food, Inc.

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Carl Bennett

More From solebaycheeseco

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Southwold Welcomes Tesco

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Carl Bennett

Very little helps

According to the local newspaper, Southwold welcomes Tesco. Well, considering 60% of the houses in Southwold are second homes and no-one actually lives there, maybe they do.

But if Southwold thinks it won’t change when Tesco comes, they’re utterly deluded. The electrical shop will shut within weeks. So will the bookshop. So will both the greengrocers on the Square. And probably the shoeshop and the bag shop will follow soon after, along with at least one of the chemists, but if most Tesco experiences follow true, then probably both of them will go.

Every little helps, or “it’s always been like this?” Choose whichever inane catchphrase you prefer as a mantra, or do something about it. Or as I suspect a lot of people will do, say you don’t want things to change, do nothing to make that happen, then complain when they do.

Change is inevitable. Tesco isn’t.

Posted in News, Tesco Wars | Tagged Southwold, Tesco | Leave a comment

Fish tales

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Carl Bennett

This happened yesterday. You should know that before we took this shop over it was a post office and a hippy wholefoods shop full of mung beans, lactose free joss-sticks and a heap of other things hardly anyone ever wanted. Except if they were sold below cost, which they often were. However, that’s not the point of this story.

Enter customer: “Three lbs of cod, please.”

SBC: “Sorry, we’re not a fishmonger.”

Customer: “No, no. Anyway, three lbs of cod please.”

SBC: “Sorry, we don’t sell cod. Or any other fish. Except sardines in tins, or smoked salmon.”

Customer: “But you ALWAYS used to sell fish.”

SBC: Explained we didn’t and we don’t.

May 2012
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