To appear on page three, even fully clothed, many a young fame-obsessed glamour aspirant would give her…..well, I’m not sure what. Yet here is boring, old, pedestrian, blackamoor blogger, obsessed only with wanting to be left alone, finding himself on that very page three. Next stop the Murdoch press and some much needed ready!
Somebody must think it newsworthy.
And we should be grateful that James Whitworth has made a pretty decent job, and has written with some journalistic skill not often found in the local press. I would perhaps have wished that a sub editor had not picked up on my throwaway comment about disneyish highland cattle for his quote of the week but I can’t deny I said it . Still, all in all it does, I think, reflect as well as a local paper could, values for landscape beyond the mere utilitarian.
The defence from SWT is less effective than I would have expected. The idea of the on site worker, as against farmification and fencing, is once more distorted in SWT’s case. It would not need a full time commitment. In fact young trees could be cleared in a more focused way by a well motivated worker in only a few days each year. It is, as I keep returning to, about management. To organise a fence and grazing regime you need a 'manager' paid with manager’s salary, a desk job with all that goes with it. To have an on site worker you are into maintenance, a different, leaner kind of work undervalued in the present day but more satisfying and more fitting to what is needed here. It’s a bit like the difference between hand-made and machine-made goods. One is a craft performed by a human being, the other is semi-robotic, all about planning and organisation and management. How heretical this must seem!
And we should be grateful that James Whitworth has made a pretty decent job, and has written with some journalistic skill not often found in the local press. I would perhaps have wished that a sub editor had not picked up on my throwaway comment about disneyish highland cattle for his quote of the week but I can’t deny I said it . Still, all in all it does, I think, reflect as well as a local paper could, values for landscape beyond the mere utilitarian.
The defence from SWT is less effective than I would have expected. The idea of the on site worker, as against farmification and fencing, is once more distorted in SWT’s case. It would not need a full time commitment. In fact young trees could be cleared in a more focused way by a well motivated worker in only a few days each year. It is, as I keep returning to, about management. To organise a fence and grazing regime you need a 'manager' paid with manager’s salary, a desk job with all that goes with it. To have an on site worker you are into maintenance, a different, leaner kind of work undervalued in the present day but more satisfying and more fitting to what is needed here. It’s a bit like the difference between hand-made and machine-made goods. One is a craft performed by a human being, the other is semi-robotic, all about planning and organisation and management. How heretical this must seem!
