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Aaargh, Make It Stop, Please!

Tuesday, 11th March 2008

One of the little aphorisms I like to put forward is the following:

Imports are the things that make us richer. Exports are just the boring shite we do to pay for them.

I was at a political conference last weekend (this one, yes, I am indeed a swivel eyed loonie, if not a fruitcake) and I was trying to explain this to a clearly sceptical MEP. I tried explaining it this way:

While there are those who buy flour and bake their own bread, no one is insane enough to actually try to grow their own wheat, harvest it, thresh it, mill it and then start mixing up the dough. It's obvious even to the meanest intelligence that a pound or two on the bag of flour is vastly cheaper than expending all that effort.

And it did get my point across.

Except, today, I find that someone is indeed that insane.

Baker and organic food campaigner Andrew Whitley believes the answer lies in your back garden and that it's time, as he puts it, to "bake your lawn". He is launching the Real Bread Campaign. "If wheat makes bread why not grow bread just like you grow vegetables. We think of it as being a massive prairie-style enterprise but it is just a plant like anything else. It's like grass. "There are few things that give greater satisfaction than being able to grow something and harvest it and share it with friends and family."

Why not do this? Because time is a scarce resource Andrew, one which we economise on just as much as any other. Indeed, more so than most others, for there are few of us indeed who go into the long dark night complaining of having had too much time here.

And now I've got to waste yet more precious time coming up with an analogy that absolutely everyone agrees does indeed represent entirely absurd behaviour.

Sheesh.