Farming

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere. And Sophie and the children feel the same. We borrow the old cottage in the Moravian Sudetenland from which to explore a landscape wiped away by war.

The section of the A83 that runs between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in western Scotland is known as the Rest and Be Thankful. It would be better described as the Get the Hell out of Here. For this, as far as I can tell, is the British trunk road most afflicted by landslips. The soil on the brae above the road is highly unstable. There have been six major slips since 2007, which have shut the road for a total of 34 days. The cost of these closures is estimated at about £290,000 a year. It’s a minor miracle that no one has yet been killed. The Scottish government has spent millions on clearing the road and building culverts and barriers. It’s about to launch a new engineering project, at a cost of £10 million, which it hopes will reduce the frequency of these disasters.

What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps.

David Frum offers a useful caution politicians might heed. Amidst the stupidity and vanity of politics it's occasionally worth remembering that government is an impossible business. It is much like George Kennan's description of the hazards faced by even weekend farmers: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbour comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens.

David Cameron came into power promising to deliver the greenest government ever and this week the government published its Natural Environment White Paper. In his article on this site, Richard Benyon – Defra Minister and long-time supporter of rural affairs – explains where he believes this White Paper will make a difference. From provisions to increase outside learning for school children, to recognising the hard work that rural businesses are already doing; there is much to be commended.    ‘The Natural Choice’ promises to repair the damage that has been done to the environment in the recent past and encourage greater involvement in helping nature prosper – the ‘Big Society’ in action.