I began this video while we were walking up through a field on the public footpath out of the village, heading to the local fruit and veg, gardening and craft festival in the village hall of the next village along.
Behind us you can see the lovely countryside of the Teign Valley, on the edge of Dartmoor. It’s nice, isn’t it? We like living here. What do we like about it? The fresh air, the friendly people, the allotments, the trees and the hills. We’ve got a good deal of all those things around here.
The hills are very good for you, and we certainly get plenty of walking up them. We live halfway up the side of a valley, so we either set off uphill or set off downhill and have to walk back uphill. Whichever way we go, there’s a hill. And if you’re thinking we could just go sideways, well, we can’t, because there are private fields and you can’t just march anywhere you want.
It might seem like I’m flouting that rule, but although it’s not marked, there is a public footpath through this field somewhere, with signposts and everything, but the path itself isn’t marked out or fenced off, so people tend to just head through the middle. Sometimes there are horses here and sometimes not, because there’s a stable next door and they have use of the field as well.
This is glimpse of the produce competitions in this very small but friendly show. Classes such as longest runner bean or best three onions have been hotly contested for generations, and it’s great to see these traditional events still going on, but I fear the show wasn’t as popular as in years gone by.
In our busy modern lives, I wonder how many of us have time to make chutney and jams and tend to our gardens with such care. As a full-time dad I did all three, but now that I’m a self-employed writer, I bake sourdough and make a few cakes now and then, but unless there’s a special occasion, it’s hard to find time for growing produce properly or making pickles and preserves.
Still, there will be a village show next year, so maybe Mrs C and I will be attending as competitors rather than observers.
And you never know, we might even win something in the raffle.
