Clarkson's Farm made a working man in his seventies the most beloved figure on British television, and it did it without anybody understanding a word he says. Gerald Cooper took thirty-seven sessions of radiotherapy for prostate cancer and then went back to building a wall by hand, stone by stone. He has run combines for over fifty years and walls the way his corner of the Cotswolds has always walled. No mortar, nothing but the eye and the weight of the stone, on ground he was working long before anybody pointed a camera at it. His screen credit is Head of Security. The running joke is that the subtitles are doing heavy lifting. Then in series three Clarkson takes a phone call and turns to the crew. Gerald's got cancer. He went. The wall stopped. The programme carried on being funny around a Gerald-shaped hole, and the country discovered it minded a great deal more than it expected to about a man it had mostly been laughing at. The all-clear came in 2024. He did not go quiet afterwards. Over £25,000 raised for Prostate Cancer UK, and a racing syndicate to keep it coming, selling shares in a gelding named The Mullet after his own haircut. It went for £28,500. Those of you who know my own Gerald will have worked out by now that a Hereford bull in Herefordshire did not get that name by accident. Nothing is being sold in Gerald. No brand, no opinions, no second career waiting in the wings. He turns up, does a thing with his hands that takes forty years to learn and cannot be hurried or automated, and goes home. The wall he builds will outlive everyone reading this, and it was made from stone already lying in that field. Every county in Britain had a hundred of him and now has a handful. We found that out by making one of them famous. He is not the comic relief on that show. He is the only person on it doing something that was already being done there four hundred years ago.

Waitrose sold 193 percent more thick-cut British sirloin after the fourth series of Clarkson's Farm went out. Jersey Royals up 89 percent. Red Leicester up 50. Cox apples up 52, Gala up 30, British asparagus up 25. One television programme about a man losing money in a field moved the meat counter of a national supermarket chain by figures no marketing budget in this country has ever bought. Then look at what happened at the shop itself. Diddly Squat opened its farm shop in 2020 and people drove across counties to stand in a queue in a field for it. Traffic backed down the lane. Clarkson admitted in front of the village that the place had been swamped, while pointing out that the village shop, the village cafe and the village pub were all taking more money than before. That is the demand. Now the paperwork. The shop's planning permission legally caps what it may sell: produce from the holding, or from producers inside a 16 mile radius, or whatever else the council will agree to in writing. His agents asked for 30 miles and were given 16. In January 2022 the restaurant was refused, on the grounds that a farm building on a farm was out of keeping with the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In August that year the council issued an enforcement notice, describing the operation as unsustainable and incompatible with its countryside location, and ordered the dining areas shut. The appeal in June 2023 saved the shop, the cafe and the car park for three years. The restaurant was refused again, and the inspector ruled that six weeks was ample time to put the land back the way it had been. Six weeks to undo a farm building. Two years to get permission for one. Now sit with the shape of this. Every government of the past twenty years has stood up and said the words food security, shorten the supply chain, support British farming, buy British. A man then built the shortest food chain in England, forty yards from the field to the till with nobody taking a cut in between, and the machinery of the state spent three years making it smaller. Meanwhile the country answered the question nobody actually asked it. Acceptances onto agricultural degree courses rose 8 percent in 2024 and are up around 20 percent since 2019. Britain has roughly 1,580 farm retailers employing 25,000 people, and the Farm Retail Association reckons the tax changes could shut as many as half of them. Nobody in this country needs persuading to buy food from a farmer. They queue for two hours in a field for the privilege, in the rain, in a place with one road in. The queue formed on its own. It took three years, two appeals and a planning inspectorate to make it shorter.

>Be leather >Made from cattle hide since humans first domesticated cattle >10,000 years of continuous use >Durable: a well-made leather boot lasts 20-30 years with basic care >Biodegradable: returns to the earth at end of life >Breathable: your foot doesn't marinate in its own moisture >Ages beautifully: develops patina, softens, moulds to the foot >Repairable: a cobbler can rebuild a leather shoe indefinitely >Be leather, 2010s >Activists declare you unethical >Brands pivot to "vegan leather" >Vegan leather is PVC or polyurethane >PVC is polyvinyl chloride: a petroleum-derived plastic >Releases phthalates and dioxins during production >Cracks within 2-3 years >Cannot be repaired >Shed microplastics with every flex >Ends up in landfill, where it does not biodegrade >Ever >The plastic remains for 500+ years >Be leather >Made from a byproduct of food production >The hide was going to exist regardless >You just made it useful instead of waste >Now considered unethical >The plastic alternative is considered sustainable >Nobody is asking who funded the campaign that made this happen >A petroleum company would really like you to stop buying leather >A petroleum company is very invested in you buying plastic instead