Steven's Blog - December 2007

The build up to an event can sometimes have a greater impact on the psyche than the event itself. This should not surprise too many of you, unless the event we are talking about is seeing a ghost or finding buried treasure in your sock draw or some other unlikely place. Tell you the truth, finding a matching pair of socks without holes in would be like finding where ‘x’ marks the spot in my current sock collection. A sure sign for me that Santa is fine tuning the flying sleigh, waxing the runners and packing the sacks. The Christmas stocking syndrome is upon us.

For some it is the sight of a beautiful black-as-pitch raven that fills them with the Christmas spirit. For others it is the festive lights in the high street, the first window on the advent calendar or the tinsel on the trees.

Normally this is a time when the majority of our native trees have quit their natural performance. It should by rights, be life in the slow lane for them and my guess is, if our timber were ever to speak they would say at this time “hey people – enough!”

However we want to extend their crowd-pleasing phenomenon for just a few more weeks, or at least until the sales sail on by.

Yes folks we are entering the Christmas period; the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.

I’ve always found this time of year brings out the strangeness of the world, the type that normally lurks just under the surface but it only ever really becomes apparent when a public holiday looms. I don’t know why this one is more exaggerated than others but it just has a surreal feel to it and for that reason I love it more. Imagine receiving a knock on the door one summer evening to find a group of strangers on your door step singing about some wise men and a star of royal beauty bright in the sky, then having to pay them off to disappear. Yet at this time of year, I hear a Christmas carol – those all too human voices ascending to heaven in a harmonic wall of sound and I get ‘goosey’ all over. I become very light in my slippers until gravity falls away.

The abstract other world-liness I feel at this particular time of the year has a lot to do with where we are and what we’re doing. It becomes heightened because of time and place.

Like most human beings I’ve tried to make sense of things, but I like to leave the doors of perception slightly ajar sometimes. Normal life with a mystery chaser is my preferred route.

Yet at times this makes it feel like living in a parallel universe here at River Cottage HQ, and no more so than over the last few weeks.

Hardly a day goes by without me brooding over reality versus mere appearance. It’s part of the job and partly to do with most people’s introduction to River Cottage, which usually occurs via the TV or media, and just recently there has been slight ramping up of this type of activity.

One of the main stipulations of being at Park Farm is that it is a working farm and the courses and events are scheduled to fit in with this maxim. So the pure bred saddleback pigs we rear on site are used to inform our Pig in a Day courses, and the cuts of meat are served at our dinners. The vegetables and herbs from the walled garden are used in the kitchen. We don’t grow any crops, but that’s mostly due to the condition of the land. In fact, when we first moved to Park Farm I managed to track down someone who had spent a good deal of their youth there, and he said that all the land was good for was bears and tigers! Now that certainly would get you to question reality. However the livestock we keep are all really suited to graze on the pasture, and anyway that side of the operation is clear and normal to me.

It’s the other stuff, spinning off from our work at HQ, that has me pinching myself, so much so that I’m in danger of self harming!

The River Cottage Fish book, Hugh’s latest publication co-authored with our resident fish expert Nick Fisher, hit the shelves to great acclaim. My word it is such a handsome book, full of generous insights, facts and recipes with amazing photography by our friend Simon Wheeler. Yet for me and I suspect a few of the other RC Team it provokes a further sensory dimension.

I remember several of the trips out fishing or testing recipes, lugging bits of kit around with Gill our Head Chef to many locations. The amazing BBQ on Cogden Beach, scoffing mackerel sashimi on board Pat Carlyn’s boat looking like we were downing tequila slammers, recognising whose hand it is in a close-up photograph holding a smoked Pollack brandade canapé, as well as the organising and sourcing of ingredients by the rest of the team.

So to me the book is like a pop-up, diary version of the fishing year but it brought about some strange consequences.

Without going into too much repetitive detail, mostly because the review can be read on our current website, we had a press day when Hugh, Nick and several invited journalists were invited on a mini Catch & Cook to promote the new book. Now I’m really quite cool with free interpretation but one of the articles had this ‘Wizard of Oz’ theme to it and described this team of ‘munchkins’ running around and I just wondered whether for a short time the reality barrier had seriously fallen.

Was I looking through spectacles with a rosy Hugh? Maybe the day was too full of strange coincidences that triggered such a response. Perhaps a book on fish co-written by a man called ‘Fisher’ with recipes put together by another man called ‘Gill’ was enough to tip the scales – now I’m doing it myself. It gave us quite a moment of hilarity and an opportunity for a quick reality check. I put it down to the time of year, another glitch in the Christmas matrix.

Something else that proved a little bit ‘other worldly’ was a private function we hosted. Since we’ve got the farmhouse back there have been a few enquiries about holding functions in it, that could run in tandem with our existing calendar. In effect we have gained an alternative venue.

I spent several weeks sleeping in the farmhouse - before it had such luxuries as it does now - for the River Cottage Treatment series. Spending time with, and generally hanging out with our guests, making sure that they remained happy and relaxed but not too comfortable!

One of the first private functions we did was for Aardman Animations. What further proof do you need of a parallel universe? Their world is populated with chickens that talk and trousers that walk. How could we possibly turn Park Farm into a venue for these people to celebrate the end of their year?

Image courtesy Aardman Animations

Well we decided to adapt one of the things that we do best, and hope that the unique atmosphere of the farm would show through. Ray Smith held centre stage with a comic demonstration of preparing a multi-bird roast, with one of the funniest displays of sausage making I’ve seen. I could’ve sworn he was going to produce a poodle when he was linking the sausages. Even the multi-bird roast looked strangely animated as Ray constructed his masterpiece.

The evening was rounded off with a fantastic four course feast and my only disappointment was that Nick Parks didn’t have a dietary requirement of ‘no cheese’!

It was the first occasion of its kind at Park Farm, and it just felt something different was happening. It was like being amongst friends and family that just happened to turn up at the office. But I realise that is a common feeling here, one of strange opposites. Work but not really work. Guests who are really more like friends. Colleagues who are more like family. A TV programme and a working farm.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that this strange duality exists because it is inherent to our surroundings and that Christmas just puts a bit of a strange magnification on it, as if seeing things in the reflection of a bauble decoration.

A very clever mathematician called Alfred Korzybski once said that ‘there is a marked difference between the menu and the meal, or the map and the territory' and I subscribe to that on the whole. However maybe somehow, here at Park Farm, we just might be drawing them closer together? I just don’t know.

Some things are better left alone. Certain things we’re not meant to tamper with or to possess, which is ok because happiness doesn’t come from having things – it comes from being a part of things and although I hope you all receive a present that you appreciate, I hope more that you all feel a part of something.

I look forward to some more regular updates in the New Year which could also be supplemented with a few video blog entries but for now, thanks for reading and your encouragement with this project.

Wishing you a Happy Christmas and New Year.

Steven