I might stop going to the pub sometime soon. It isn’t as if I have any soulmates up there and the idea that it is a meeting place for the community gets thinner by the day. Two of the regulars are members of the Conservative Party and still proud of having voted for Boris Johnson. They voted for Liz Truss too. Then there’s ‘Bob’, a farmer who owns a massive slice of two parishes, bought partly with the subsidies which taxpayers give to rich landowners. There’s another farmer, really called Bob, who is too ill to come down now, which is a pity because we got on very well. But I persist in the crazy notion that in the countryside one should try to get on in some fashion with the neighbours, even if that means that one cannot take part in the democratic process by, say, making a comment on a planning application, without being ostracised. The way it works is, either you take part in these democratic processes, or you are a member of the ‘community’. And only just sometimes, when the village gangs up on some development they don’t want in their back yard, and that isn’t the plan of a rich farmer, you can do both.
I was up there the other night, talking to someone who owns the land on which his house is built, and so is by the skin of his teeth a landowner, about trespassing and the right to roam. His attitude was, ‘If anyone comes on my bloody land I’ll bloody shoot them!’
I wasn’t getting anywhere with my arguments. I talked of Sweden, a country I know well, where you can walk where you like in the countryside so long as you observe their version of the Countryside Code; and you can pick berries and mushrooms in the woods wherever you wish. It works well, of course, and it does not occur to Swedish farmers that there is a problem. Nor do they scheme, like UK farmers, to get paid for it.
He didn’t like the sound of Right to Roam. I suggested that under that system he would be free to walk anywhere he wanted. I was lyrical about all the beautiful places where he could walk without fear of confrontation with farmers and gamekeepers. But I knew I was wasting my time when he explained that he only ever walked to the pub, and only then because some do-gooders had made driving back from the pub illegal.
I tried suggesting that, had I ordered a bowl of strawberries, he might have wanted to share them with me, but strawberries, like trespassers, he said, brought him out in a rash. But then my bowl of chips arrived on the bar. As I laipsed them with ketchup and vinegar I saw him eyeing them hungrily – he comes down the pub while his wife is cooking his tea. Knowing that a free-born Englishman, denied the right to walk about the landscape of his village, still has one common right left – the right to nick your chips – his hand moved stealthily towards my chips, but not so stealthily that I didn’t spot it, and rap him sharply on the knuckles with my knife.
‘What sort of world would you prefer?’ I asked him. ‘One where I freely shared my chips with a hungry neighbour or one where I smacked him with my knife for even thinking of it?’
I felt at last I was getting somewhere., but the test will be next time I’m there and he orders a basket of chips. The argument would not work with ‘Bob’. We are all sharing our chips with him already, every time he gets another subsidy payment. He might buy me a drink though, just to show himself who the boss is.
I think you have written a piece that expertly displays 'community' in action! Community is not a choir of perfect harmony, everyone singing like soulmates. It's a collection of odd bods (yes, even you!) who choose to get along together most of the time by agreeing to differ for the sake of picking up gossip and for the pleasure of a chat. Buying each other drinks and sharing the chips is an important part of setting up trust. Men have been doing this since the ale house was invented....