After a slightly hyperactive start to the show the guys settle in to talk about the Land use framework, licencing issues, the impact of energy prices on rural life and agricultural production, hunting traditions and respect in the UK and Europe, and Asbestos Wormhouses.
CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside.You can contact us by email on: contact@countryslide.co.uk
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The Hosts
Richard Negus website
Callum McInerney-Riley website
Richard Prideaux website
Edited and Produced by Amy Green for Rural and Outdoor.
Richard N: It's my special T-shirt with the Iceni on there, just because we are celebrating today being Suffolk.
Richard P: Richard Negus, I can see your nipples through that shirt.
Richard N: Well, it's a very cheap shirt.
Richard P: They're very low down as well. They're sort of low and out to the side. Are you sure they're yours? You didn't have them grafted on afterwards?
Richard N: It's because it is the end of the hedge-laying season. At this point, I have a masculine, large chest and broad shoulders. So my nipples now face at about quarter to 10, and come August time, they'll be at 6:30.
Richard P: Your body sort of experiences longshore drift between now and August.
Callum M-R: Fly south for the summer.
Richard N: Very much so. You aren't supposed to do fitness the way my job makes you fit, where you go from being completely sedentary in August to suddenly going full tilt on September 1st.
Callum M-R: You must get the aches. That first week must be brutal.
Richard N: I definitely do. I start to feel my age, but Claire persuaded me to start taking some supplements. Richard will probably tell me I'm just being stupid and it's a placebo, but I take those mushroom gummy things, magnesium, Vitamin D, and some other horse tablet. Because I am in my mid-50s, she said I really ought to help myself out. And I have to say, my recovery rate has improved. We totted up exactly how much hedge we have laid and planted this year—over 5 kilometres—and I do not feel as wrecked as I did last year. So, Richard, do the mushroom gummies work?
Richard P: Well, it depends which mushrooms. Are we talking Turkey Tail and Lion's Mane, or are we talking about those strange ones that grow in the field behind the church in the autumn? Have you actually been hedge laying, or have you just been going to a roundabout on the A14 waving a chainsaw about? People don't go to Bungay anymore because of it.
Richard N: Come on, Bungay is one of the jewels of Suffolk. I think you'd like Bungay. You've been, haven't you Callum?
Callum M-R: Yeah, home of the Bungay butter.
Richard P: There's liquid butters that you get. That's milk, surely?
Richard N: Isn't that ghee?
Callum M-R: My Indian friend got me some, and I said, "I love your Indian butter." She said, "It's ghee." I said, "Thanks for clarifying."
Richard N: Jesus Christ. Oh dear.
Callum M-R: You can have that one. I was also going to say I take magnesium procrastinate. Well, actually I don't, but I'm going to.
Richard P: For the listeners at home who can't see this video call, Callum has put his display name as "Asbestos Wormhouse." Why?
Callum M-R: It's a great tale. I got an email from Amazon reaching out about a kids' toy I bought, which is effectively a plastic ant farm thing with coloured sand. They said, "The government have been in touch, and the sand used in your worm house is actually full of asbestos. There is an urgent product recall."
Richard N: What about the worms? Do they not get a say in this? Did you actually unpack it? Because you are an anarchist when it comes to rules.
Callum M-R: I'm going to re-gift it. I'm just going to blow it into the faces of people that never paid their invoices. Pocket sand.
Richard N: To raise funds to keep Countryslide going, we ought to have a monthly raffle. All the stuff you two influencers get given that doesn't fit or leaks, and things Callum has bought on Amazon that turn out to be deadly, can go into it. I'll throw in a few random sticks and claim they're carefully whittled shepherd's crooks. "The Countryslide Mystery Box."
Richard P: You don't know what it could be! It could be a shovel in 3XL, or it could be a dead sanderling.
Callum M-R: If I ever write under a pseudonym for Scribehound, I've got it sorted. Asbestos Wormhouse.
Richard N: The Asbestos-Wormhouses are a fine old family! You've got Colonel Hugo Asbestos-Wormhouse and his adoring wife, who's actually shagging the gardener. They are delighted to announce the engagement of their daughter to Captain Chinless-Twat of the Light Dragoons. I'm sure they removed the 'von' in 1914.
Richard P: That's just broken a memory. In the town next to where we live, there's a row of not-quite-council houses. For some reason, someone had redone the outside of one of them to look exactly like a Bavarian hunting lodge. Half-timbered, shields, antlers around the outside. I had to go back and look at it twice.
Callum M-R: Speaking of which, I have been stalking deer this weekend with people from all over Europe, observing their hunting traditions. They've got far more ritual around hunting than we ever have. It feels a bit spiritual. They take a stick from the tree near where the animal was shot, put it to the heart, then into the blood, then to the mouth, and then into your hat.
Richard N: It makes those stupid pink garters that get handed out over here look ridiculous. Our way of showing "respect" is to put a tie on and wear silly coloured socks. Over there, they lay the quarry out in a tableau.
Callum M-R: I bumped into a German lady influencer this weekend called Miss Artemis. I asked her what she does, and her answers were really good. I told her the problem with influencers here is the "grip and grin" kill shot, but she said she wants to show people how to prepare the food and the whole process behind it. She also mentioned that in Germany, if a wild boar destroys a farmer's crops, the hunter pays for the damage because it's their fault for not staying on top of the management. Imagine that in the UK!
Richard N: That would most definitely not fly. We treated the roe deer as vermin in this country until Richard Prior, the deer expert, single-handedly raised its profile as a sporting animal. Before that, all our tradition and pageantry went into hunting on horseback with hounds. Have you ever heard a shooting song? In Germany and Austria, they sing songs about the deer or boar they've dispatched. What do we do? Drink beer, fall out the pub, and that's it.
Richard P: There's a parallel here with the folk music episode we did about Show of Hands. We don't sing folk songs anymore. A lot of those European hunting tableaus are basically pre-Christian pagan rituals that survived. We lost a lot of that in the last 150 years when the countryside just became a place to demonstrate which bit of land you owned, and our "traditional" rural culture is largely a late-Victorian revivalist cosplay.
Richard N: Do you think this new Land Use Framework strategy from DEFRA is essentially the government trying to realign that? Trying to shape it into this new Starmer Doomsday project?
Richard P: It's a shiny new document from DEFRA dictating how we're going to use the land over the next 10 years.
Richard N: They have set percentages for how much must be turned over to renewable energy and amenity. DEFRA will tell farmers how to farm, which is bizarre considering they just had to pay the GWCT £650,000 to teach them about farming. It's pretty much the death knell of shooting as we know it. There will be hefty licensing coming into action, and we won't be able to put birds down in Breckland. Plus, they did a U-turn on the Right to Roam, basically saying if land has an SFI option on it, the public should have access.
Richard P: The framework assumes that all the "green bit" is there for everyone in the country, and the people who actually live there just have to go along with it. Do I get a vote on what happens in Brixton? Can I decide the speed limits on Callum's road?
Callum M-R: The Patrick Galbraith episode delved into this exceptionally well. Wildlife specifically really doesn't like people and dogs off leads around it. If you can stop people trampling through nature reserves with a yappy labradoodle during nesting season, it's a net positive. But who is deciding these game licenses? Natural England?
Richard N: Well, considering Tony Juniper doesn't even know what an alder tree is, the rot sets in from the top. I actually think the idea of licensing has merit because there are excesses, and we have failed at self-regulation. If you think back to the Hunting Act, Tony Blair sent Lembit Öpik to the hunting fraternity offering a middle way: get licensed and carry on. The Countryside Alliance said, "No, thin end of the wedge!" and refused. Now trail hunting is going to get banned. Shooting should take note.
Richard P: My libertarian take is that we used to write laws with definite lines. But modern Whitehall legislation is drafted with so much subjective wiggle room that it's open to abuse. Just look at the general license in Wales. Thanks to Iolo Williams and Chris Packham, we can no longer control magpies on a general license because they deemed numbers were declining. You can apply for a special license to protect your lambs, but Natural Resources Wales just tells farmers to stop sending in photos of lambs with their eyes pecked out because it "upsets the people in the office." That is my worry with licensing—there's no firm threshold.
Richard N: Well, on that cheerless note, today is an auspicious day for me. It is the last day of the hedge-laying season! I am hanging up my billhook, giving it a quick sharpen, coating it in chainsaw oil, wrapping it in an old Jack Pike fleece, and putting it away until September 1st. I'm an author again now.
Callum M-R: If I were you, I'd save that oil. It'll be worth a fortune next year.
Richard N: It's true. Red diesel has gone up 500%, and we no longer produce fertilizer here because of carbon policies. So we rely on petrochemicals to create nitrogen. With livestock farming pushed to the West and arable in the East, we don't have farmyard manure to put on the fields. I have a nasty feeling we are not going to have great yields this year, and food prices are going to skyrocket. It's all a bit doomsday.
Richard P: It is. I'm not a full-on prepper, but I'm buying stuff.
Richard N: I went to the Suffolk Showground yesterday where Nigel Farage was having a rally. He was talking about re-industrializing Britain. A friend of mine who works in oil and gas says there is still a massive amount of oil and gas in the North Sea. When Ed Miliband says it's all worn out, he is speaking with a forked tongue. Reform's policy is basically "drill, baby, drill."
Callum M-R: I just want trains that don't cost 40 quid to get into London.
Richard N: People ask how Reform will pay for things. June Mummery, the former Brexit Party MEP from Lowestoft, gave a great example. Suffolk County Council spent £60,000 to paint a couple of hundred metres of double yellow lines. The actual painting cost £950. The rest went to consultations, lawyers, and surveys. If you go in with a fine-tooth comb and cut that waste out, you might actually be able to get affordable trains back.
Callum M-R: The shithousery runs deep, doesn't it?
Richard P: We're not going to resolve this now. But what I love about recording with you two is that we have three very different political opinions, but we always find room to talk. Callum is sitting somewhere like a young Corbynite who doesn't know who Corbyn is. Richard attends rallies that will later feature on documentaries with the tagline "A Warning From History." And I'm most likely to be gradually modifying a Komatsu D355A bulldozer in Granby, Colorado with a tinfoil hat on.
Callum M-R: All we need is someone featured in a Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary to make this a mad four combo.
Richard N: I'll just call Claire in and insult her.
Richard P: We should just get Goldie to become a Manosphere influencer. Spend a day with Goldie and he'll teach you how to be a man!
Richard P: Richard Negus, I can see your nipples through that shirt.
Richard N: Well, it's a very cheap shirt.
Richard P: They're very low down as well. They're sort of low and out to the side. Are you sure they're yours? You didn't have them grafted on afterwards?
Richard N: It's because it is the end of the hedge-laying season. At this point, I have a masculine, large chest and broad shoulders. So my nipples now face at about quarter to 10, and come August time, they'll be at 6:30.
Richard P: Your body sort of experiences longshore drift between now and August.
Callum M-R: Fly south for the summer.
Richard N: Very much so. You aren't supposed to do fitness the way my job makes you fit, where you go from being completely sedentary in August to suddenly going full tilt on September 1st.
Callum M-R: You must get the aches. That first week must be brutal.
Richard N: I definitely do. I start to feel my age, but Claire persuaded me to start taking some supplements. Richard will probably tell me I'm just being stupid and it's a placebo, but I take those mushroom gummy things, magnesium, Vitamin D, and some other horse tablet. Because I am in my mid-50s, she said I really ought to help myself out. And I have to say, my recovery rate has improved. We totted up exactly how much hedge we have laid and planted this year—over 5 kilometres—and I do not feel as wrecked as I did last year. So, Richard, do the mushroom gummies work?
Richard P: Well, it depends which mushrooms. Are we talking Turkey Tail and Lion's Mane, or are we talking about those strange ones that grow in the field behind the church in the autumn? Have you actually been hedge laying, or have you just been going to a roundabout on the A14 waving a chainsaw about? People don't go to Bungay anymore because of it.
Richard N: Come on, Bungay is one of the jewels of Suffolk. I think you'd like Bungay. You've been, haven't you Callum?
Callum M-R: Yeah, home of the Bungay butter.
Richard P: There's liquid butters that you get. That's milk, surely?
Richard N: Isn't that ghee?
Callum M-R: My Indian friend got me some, and I said, "I love your Indian butter." She said, "It's ghee." I said, "Thanks for clarifying."
Richard N: Jesus Christ. Oh dear.
Callum M-R: You can have that one. I was also going to say I take magnesium procrastinate. Well, actually I don't, but I'm going to.
Richard P: For the listeners at home who can't see this video call, Callum has put his display name as "Asbestos Wormhouse." Why?
Callum M-R: It's a great tale. I got an email from Amazon reaching out about a kids' toy I bought, which is effectively a plastic ant farm thing with coloured sand. They said, "The government have been in touch, and the sand used in your worm house is actually full of asbestos. There is an urgent product recall."
Richard N: What about the worms? Do they not get a say in this? Did you actually unpack it? Because you are an anarchist when it comes to rules.
Callum M-R: I'm going to re-gift it. I'm just going to blow it into the faces of people that never paid their invoices. Pocket sand.
Richard N: To raise funds to keep Countryslide going, we ought to have a monthly raffle. All the stuff you two influencers get given that doesn't fit or leaks, and things Callum has bought on Amazon that turn out to be deadly, can go into it. I'll throw in a few random sticks and claim they're carefully whittled shepherd's crooks. "The Countryslide Mystery Box."
Richard P: You don't know what it could be! It could be a shovel in 3XL, or it could be a dead sanderling.
Callum M-R: If I ever write under a pseudonym for Scribehound, I've got it sorted. Asbestos Wormhouse.
Richard N: The Asbestos-Wormhouses are a fine old family! You've got Colonel Hugo Asbestos-Wormhouse and his adoring wife, who's actually shagging the gardener. They are delighted to announce the engagement of their daughter to Captain Chinless-Twat of the Light Dragoons. I'm sure they removed the 'von' in 1914.
Richard P: That's just broken a memory. In the town next to where we live, there's a row of not-quite-council houses. For some reason, someone had redone the outside of one of them to look exactly like a Bavarian hunting lodge. Half-timbered, shields, antlers around the outside. I had to go back and look at it twice.
Callum M-R: Speaking of which, I have been stalking deer this weekend with people from all over Europe, observing their hunting traditions. They've got far more ritual around hunting than we ever have. It feels a bit spiritual. They take a stick from the tree near where the animal was shot, put it to the heart, then into the blood, then to the mouth, and then into your hat.
Richard N: It makes those stupid pink garters that get handed out over here look ridiculous. Our way of showing "respect" is to put a tie on and wear silly coloured socks. Over there, they lay the quarry out in a tableau.
Callum M-R: I bumped into a German lady influencer this weekend called Miss Artemis. I asked her what she does, and her answers were really good. I told her the problem with influencers here is the "grip and grin" kill shot, but she said she wants to show people how to prepare the food and the whole process behind it. She also mentioned that in Germany, if a wild boar destroys a farmer's crops, the hunter pays for the damage because it's their fault for not staying on top of the management. Imagine that in the UK!
Richard N: That would most definitely not fly. We treated the roe deer as vermin in this country until Richard Prior, the deer expert, single-handedly raised its profile as a sporting animal. Before that, all our tradition and pageantry went into hunting on horseback with hounds. Have you ever heard a shooting song? In Germany and Austria, they sing songs about the deer or boar they've dispatched. What do we do? Drink beer, fall out the pub, and that's it.
Richard P: There's a parallel here with the folk music episode we did about Show of Hands. We don't sing folk songs anymore. A lot of those European hunting tableaus are basically pre-Christian pagan rituals that survived. We lost a lot of that in the last 150 years when the countryside just became a place to demonstrate which bit of land you owned, and our "traditional" rural culture is largely a late-Victorian revivalist cosplay.
Richard N: Do you think this new Land Use Framework strategy from DEFRA is essentially the government trying to realign that? Trying to shape it into this new Starmer Doomsday project?
Richard P: It's a shiny new document from DEFRA dictating how we're going to use the land over the next 10 years.
Richard N: They have set percentages for how much must be turned over to renewable energy and amenity. DEFRA will tell farmers how to farm, which is bizarre considering they just had to pay the GWCT £650,000 to teach them about farming. It's pretty much the death knell of shooting as we know it. There will be hefty licensing coming into action, and we won't be able to put birds down in Breckland. Plus, they did a U-turn on the Right to Roam, basically saying if land has an SFI option on it, the public should have access.
Richard P: The framework assumes that all the "green bit" is there for everyone in the country, and the people who actually live there just have to go along with it. Do I get a vote on what happens in Brixton? Can I decide the speed limits on Callum's road?
Callum M-R: The Patrick Galbraith episode delved into this exceptionally well. Wildlife specifically really doesn't like people and dogs off leads around it. If you can stop people trampling through nature reserves with a yappy labradoodle during nesting season, it's a net positive. But who is deciding these game licenses? Natural England?
Richard N: Well, considering Tony Juniper doesn't even know what an alder tree is, the rot sets in from the top. I actually think the idea of licensing has merit because there are excesses, and we have failed at self-regulation. If you think back to the Hunting Act, Tony Blair sent Lembit Öpik to the hunting fraternity offering a middle way: get licensed and carry on. The Countryside Alliance said, "No, thin end of the wedge!" and refused. Now trail hunting is going to get banned. Shooting should take note.
Richard P: My libertarian take is that we used to write laws with definite lines. But modern Whitehall legislation is drafted with so much subjective wiggle room that it's open to abuse. Just look at the general license in Wales. Thanks to Iolo Williams and Chris Packham, we can no longer control magpies on a general license because they deemed numbers were declining. You can apply for a special license to protect your lambs, but Natural Resources Wales just tells farmers to stop sending in photos of lambs with their eyes pecked out because it "upsets the people in the office." That is my worry with licensing—there's no firm threshold.
Richard N: Well, on that cheerless note, today is an auspicious day for me. It is the last day of the hedge-laying season! I am hanging up my billhook, giving it a quick sharpen, coating it in chainsaw oil, wrapping it in an old Jack Pike fleece, and putting it away until September 1st. I'm an author again now.
Callum M-R: If I were you, I'd save that oil. It'll be worth a fortune next year.
Richard N: It's true. Red diesel has gone up 500%, and we no longer produce fertilizer here because of carbon policies. So we rely on petrochemicals to create nitrogen. With livestock farming pushed to the West and arable in the East, we don't have farmyard manure to put on the fields. I have a nasty feeling we are not going to have great yields this year, and food prices are going to skyrocket. It's all a bit doomsday.
Richard P: It is. I'm not a full-on prepper, but I'm buying stuff.
Richard N: I went to the Suffolk Showground yesterday where Nigel Farage was having a rally. He was talking about re-industrializing Britain. A friend of mine who works in oil and gas says there is still a massive amount of oil and gas in the North Sea. When Ed Miliband says it's all worn out, he is speaking with a forked tongue. Reform's policy is basically "drill, baby, drill."
Callum M-R: I just want trains that don't cost 40 quid to get into London.
Richard N: People ask how Reform will pay for things. June Mummery, the former Brexit Party MEP from Lowestoft, gave a great example. Suffolk County Council spent £60,000 to paint a couple of hundred metres of double yellow lines. The actual painting cost £950. The rest went to consultations, lawyers, and surveys. If you go in with a fine-tooth comb and cut that waste out, you might actually be able to get affordable trains back.
Callum M-R: The shithousery runs deep, doesn't it?
Richard P: We're not going to resolve this now. But what I love about recording with you two is that we have three very different political opinions, but we always find room to talk. Callum is sitting somewhere like a young Corbynite who doesn't know who Corbyn is. Richard attends rallies that will later feature on documentaries with the tagline "A Warning From History." And I'm most likely to be gradually modifying a Komatsu D355A bulldozer in Granby, Colorado with a tinfoil hat on.
Callum M-R: All we need is someone featured in a Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary to make this a mad four combo.
Richard N: I'll just call Claire in and insult her.
Richard P: We should just get Goldie to become a Manosphere influencer. Spend a day with Goldie and he'll teach you how to be a man!