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Do we need new and tighter rules to govern the visits of children to “petting farms”?
Following the infection of 57 children with E.coli and the closure of four such farms, you can see why some think it might be a good idea.
It's funny how this seems to mark a shift in our collective psyche. Ever since pastoral was first conceived of, the countryside has been linked with an imaginary Arcadia: a place of prelapsarian wholesomeness in which swain sports timelessly with nymph and sheep know nothing of the abattoir.
The archetypal city was, by contrast, miasmic, morally and politically corrupt. It was lousy with pickpockets and grifters, prostitutes and politicians, while raw sewage tumbled from upstairs windows and churned through the watercourses, catching plague was to be expected and a sulphurous fug of industrial effluent thickened the air.
We celebrated only recently the anniversary of the evacuation of a generation of London children to the countryside: the smog may have improved by then, but London had become a bit bomby. Still, the countryside was the safe place.
Not any more. “Petting farms” (a phenomenon I have found creepy, personally, ever since someone explained to me what the “no petting” sign at the swimming pool meant) are supposed to give deprived urban tots a flavour of what they're missing. What they're missing turns out to be E.coli.
“Look, Timmy. Stroke the guinea-pig. Look at the ickle baa-lamb. Aarggh! Infected!
Infected!” “Sorry, ma'am. Please step away from the child. We're going to have to take him away.”
The countryside, rather than the city, has now become the locus of our collective anxieties and fears. It is the home of swine flu, foot and mouth, dangerous mushrooms, unbalanced farming folk, drunk drivers, murderous cows, carcinogenic crop spraying, exploited immigrants labouring in polytunnels, paedophile-infested hedgerows, E.coli outbreaks, dial-up internet connections and Liz Jones.
And once you're there, it's hard to leave. Even assuming you haven't been quarantined for something or other, the likelihood of being able to afford the train fare up to town gets smaller for most country dwellers every day. And kiss goodbye to any hope of “upshifting” back to London, what with property prices in freefall and the collapsing rural economy.
London, on the other hand, has made the transformation from big smoke to shining city on the hill. It is a place of uplifting architecture, abundant post offices, clean and agreeable 24-hour shops, and reassuring proximity to medical care.
Its green lungs — the parks and heaths — are tended by park wardens, so the condoms and crisp packets and empty rubber-duckies of cider, hazards of a country stroll, are discreetly removed.
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I.” Not any more. The bee is on its way to going extinct, almost certainly as a direct result of where it sucked. I shall stick to slurping on my McMilkshake, and Chalk Farm is the only farm I'd advise you to go anywhere near.
The dulcet tones of an image refit
It is hard to be cynical when confronted with the ingenuous face and sweet voice of the singer Katherine Jenkins. But we must, nevertheless, try. Nine months ago, hitherto squeaky-clean Miss Jenkins telephoned Piers Morgan to confess to having taken ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.
She “foolishly allowed herself to be videoed using the drugs”, so you might see all this as pre-emptive damage limitation. But now she gives a huge interview, repeating her drug confessions and posing for photographs in rock-chick style.
Especially since she's just sacked the manager who presided over her clean-cut image, it looks more like an image refit than a cri-de-coeur.
Certainly, her calling drugs “my greatest regret” occasions hyena-like laughter rather than a face of sympathetic sadness.
Can't George Osborne do the stealth tax sums?
“Labour's secret spending plans, which Gordon Brown never wanted to make public, appear to reveal an income tax bombshell,” squawks the shadow chancellor, “exposing” Labour's plans to raise another £50billion in income tax by 2013-14.
Within a couple of hours the PM's attack dogs, or counterattack dogs, have a response: these plans aren't secret. They were published in the budget last spring: didn't you get your copy?
That half covers it. It's possible that the plans were both secret and in the Budget. One of Gordon Brown's great clevernesses is to hide his tax plans in plain sight, using complicated sums. He is a stealth taxer of Olympic prowess, a ball‑and-cups shuffler to put Oxford Street hustlers to shame.
Putting tax plans in the budget is quite adequate to render them invisible to the likes of you and me, mind, but you'd rather have hoped the shadow chancellor would be better with his pocket calculator.
The best bits of Dan Brown's new novel
The race is on to find the best bits in the new Dan Brown. Is it the woman whose voice rasps “like that of a dying man with strep throat”?
Or the villain whose tattoo suggests he has four nipples: “A massive double-headed Phoenix on his chest glared at her through nipple eyes like some kind of ravenous vulture, patiently waiting for her death.”? The nipple eyes have it, I think.
Genius. Send me your own favourites. I'm thinking of starting an informal archive.
Reader views (1)
On a very light note, this made me laugh out loud. That the list of countryside nasties should end with LJ herself is an asolute hoot! A great observation.
- Nicky Morgan, Exeter, Devon, 21/09/2009 16:53
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