Agriculture

My phone buzzed and rang while I was doing the horses until I thought, fine, I’ll call the Defence Secretary back. I sat down on a picnic chair by the muck heap and dialled. He was extremely courteous. He just wanted to point out that he really didn’t want to be Prime Minister. The profile I had written of him was very good, he said, but the one thing he wanted to put me straight on was, well, the whole premise of the article. He didn’t want the top job, no matter what I had heard. I told him my sources were impeccable. He didn’t need to be so modest.

‘Do you care about the woodland? Do you care about the wildlife?’ shouted the bearded Woodland Trust volunteer from his table of tree-hugging paraphernalia set up outside Waitrose. He had pitched his camp – a trestle table covered in leaflets and bedecked with pictures of foxes and badgers – so close to the supermarket entrance on Cobham High Street that it was impossible for customers to get through the doors without running the gauntlet of his leaflets. No doubt these leaflets explained that the Woodland Trust is the largest woodland conservation charity in the United Kingdom and is concerned with the creation, protection and restoration of our native woodland heritage.

Easter is heavily associated with lamb in Britain. The paschal lamb’s sacrifice is a gift to all but that is not the only link, the last few weeks of lent also mark the beginning of the spring lambing season in agricultural communities. This has fed through in recent decades to the consumer. This Sunday, while the churches stand empty and a great many of us are separated from our family, millions of us nonetheless will sit down to a meal of lamb. If you live in Britain though, this is actually quite an odd phenomenon when you think about it. Lamb is not really in season. New season lamb has