Food bills are up, broccoli pickers are in short supply … and I can’t help thinking of our local butcher all those years ago
A funny thing happens when I open a newspaper just lately. Gazing at the headlines, trying not to feel afraid, I sometimes picture a little brown car. As a child, you see, a butcher lived in our street, and he drove a chocolate-coloured Austin Maxi with a fake walnut dashboard: a shiny flourish that spoke not only of his financial success, but of the fact that he knew he, like most butchers then, was a highly regarded member of the community, a stalwart of charity fundraising, PTA committees and local enterprise schemes run by the city hall. I know, I know. I sound like JB Priestley. But this is how it was. Next door to the butcher lived a university professor. His car came with a lot of rust, but no ersatz wood at all.
It is, of course, the much-talked-about (or not-talked-about, if you’re the prime minister) national pig cull that stirs such 1970s-tinged memories. As I write, hundreds of pigs have been slaughtered, their carcasses burnt or buried, and a further 120,000 await the same fate – a situation born of an acute shortage of butchers and slaughterers in post-Brexit Britain (mature pigs are on farms they would ordinarily have left weeks ago for processing). British people, it seems, no longer want to do such work, or not in sufficiently large numbers – though the crisis is hardly exclusive to the world of pork butchery.
Continue reading...