A pin-up for Scottish pensioners

‘I’m a pin-up for Scottish pensioners’

Mary Wakefield

05 September 2007

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Clarissa Dickson Wright speaks her mind

No one could accuse Clarissa of selling out — though brought up a city girl, she fights for the countryside as if she were born there. ‘It’s a great passion,’ she says. ‘It has been since I first visited a school friend in the South Downs. I thought it was heaven, and it needs protecting from New Labour, who appear to hate it.’ So what are your particular bugbears at the moment? I ask, and suddenly we’re off at full gallop, Clarissa with the bit between her teeth, laying into Section 36 of the Trade Descriptions Act. ‘It says you may describe a product as being of the country where something was last done to it. So you get Chilean salmon, probably genetically modified, smoked in Italy, shipped to Scotland and sliced, then called Scottish smoked salmon. You get Third World chickens, fed on human excrement then sent to the UK to be taken off the bone, and called British chickens.’ Clarissa’s voice echoes around the shelves of sun-dried tomatoes, and cuts across the chit-chat of the ladies from Dalkeith sipping Fairtrade Earl Grey tea. ‘I don’t know why we don’t all kick up more fuss,’ she says. I’m sure you will, I say, and she laughs.

Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright is published by Hodder & Stoughton.