It’s not all about the Game Fair, and with a shakeup in hosts this week George off of Scribehound and the Guns on Pegs podcast, and Producer Amy are keeping Richard Prideaux company whilst Negus and Callum are playing away.
We discuss drive-by farming, whether there are benefits to being completely stacked as a podcaster, the sights, smells and sounds of the Game Fair and we (almost) launch Game Fair bingo! There’s also a bit more information about “Project X”
Suggestions for the bingo card to – contact@countryslide.co.uk or just mow it into your local Barley field and George can report back on his next drive past….
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 or get in touch on Social Media
Edited and Produced by Amy Green for Rural and Outdoor.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Richard Prideaux: One of us has to speak first.
George Browne: Given that it's your podcast, I assumed that you would do that.
Richard Prideaux: Callum, what do you think?
Amy Green: I'm not allowed to talk.
Richard Prideaux: So things have gone slightly awry for this week's episode of Country Slide in that Richard Negus is off on a fact-finding mission about whether they could dump some extra sand out into the North Sea and reclaim Doggerland to make it an extension of Suffolk out towards the Low Countries. And Callum is unavailable because he's, what is he doing? I don't know, something to do with computers and AI probably. So instead we have, we've got producer Amy who we've allowed to speak for one special week.
Amy Green: Yay.
Richard Prideaux: And we've purloined George from, well, from Guns on Pegs and Scribehound. So I'll let George speak because he's got such a wonderfully melodious voice.
George Browne: Melodious, is it? Well, it's very nice to be back. It's a great honour to be asked again.
Richard Prideaux: Last time you were here you were in a room which had a timer on the light switch so every sort of 7 1/2 minutes you had to stand up and hit the switch to bring yourself back in.
George Browne: You had to do sort of interpretive dance in the middle of the room to get the get the motion sensor to register that I was present. Today I am in a completely different place and hopefully all the lights will not go out. I'm interested in this Doggerland thing though. How far out into the North Sea does Negus propose we go? Is he suggesting that we, you know, rejoin the continent.
Richard Prideaux: I think that'd be too far even for Richard Negus. I know he does quite like spending time in the south of Italy and things like that, but reattaching Suffolk fully to the continent might be too much for him, I think.
Amy Green: Yeah, I think it would be. I think that would be just a little step too far. But getting close enough that you could use something such as a trebuchet He might be up for that.
George Browne: I think he would. He'd be very happy about all the new flat land though, wouldn't he? approaches flat land.
Richard Prideaux: Think of the hedge and \*\*\*\* opportunities that would offer in that new land.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: That's a very good point.
George Browne: Maybe some very interesting archaeology.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I mean, in all seriousness, it is something people have suggested because you go, you'd have to go that far off the coast of Suffolk and the water's only a metre or two deep in places. the old land, this land bridge that used to connect the British Isles to Europe was there and it had rolling hills and valleys and all sorts. There were sort of herds of elk running around and hunter-gatherers trying to hunt them.
George Browne: Yes. It's going to still need quite a lot of sand, I would imagine.
Richard Prideaux: Do we need Bedfordshire?
George Browne: Just going to dig out Bedfordshire.
Richard Prideaux: I think hollow out Bedfordshire and make Doggerland is probably the best option for everyone really.
George Browne: Seems fair.
Amy Green: I can't see a problem.
Richard Prideaux: No. So we are recording this at the very, very end of June and it will be coming out at the very beginning of July. And for several reasons in our world, July is effectively either you've started harvesting early month or it's game fair month.
George Browne: And I'll tell you what, I reckon harvest, certainly in this neck of the woods, looks like it's going to be pretty early this year. I was out in Wiltshire over the weekend and the barley looks absolutely ready to rip. Now it's not actually ready, I chewed some and it's still pretty soft, but it's all ready to go as far as, you know, colour wise.
Richard Prideaux: Where was this scene where you were just standing in someone's field chewing barley? Or was this just, did you stop for a wee kind of lay-by?
George Browne: Well, I was, we were out on a sim day with the Most Noble Lord of the Gartus, the Guns on Pegs podcast listeners. So we were surrounded by the beautiful rolling chalk valleys of Wiltshire and lots of stunning scenery actually. And yeah, their barley all looked ready to go.
Amy Green: Is the barley actually grown well this year? It's gone tall enough and everything or is it still a bit stunted?
George Browne: Yeah, it's a little bit short. It's a little bit short.
Amy Green: And very dry recently. I mean, we've had, we don't have crops around here in the same way that you guys do in Hampshire and East Country, but the silage cuts that they've been taking have been pretty short.
George Browne: It's interesting. It's not as short as last year when it was, sort of barely even knee high in places. It is a bit better than that. And actually, they look like decent thick crops, but I only inspected one ear in great detail. So also, I'm not really an agronomist or a farmer in any meaningful sense. So I'm sort of starting to reach the outer limits of my knowledge now.
Richard Prideaux: Is this going to be a service you offer to people, sort of George Browne's metaphysical crop walks? You sort of go out and say whether it feels right.
George Browne: I do quite a lot of farming from car on long journeys, you know, look out the window and go, cool, cows look good. You know, as you whistle past at 70 miles an hour, it's the perfect speed at which to assess livestock.
Amy Green: It's like vibe farming. just going, right, okay, it's a little bit soft, wait two more days and that'll be hard enough, ready to go, perfect.
Richard Prideaux: I used to drive by mountaineering from car, where you would, as driving through a valley on the way to somewhere else, look at all these ridges and go, yeah, I reckon that would go, sort of a grade 3 scramble or maybe, actually, maybe it's a V-diff in that section, so you might need ropes on there.
George Browne: Drive-by farming sounds a bit different though. Drive-by farming sounds like, you know, you surreptitiously deposit livestock on somebody's place as you go past.
Richard Prideaux: That's guerrilla farming. It's like seed bombing, but except you do it with cows, you know. Seed Friesianing. Friesian bombing. There we go.
George Browne: I like the idea of guerrilla farming. I like the idea of drive-by farming. I think maybe, you know, this could be a new movement.
Amy Green: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, certainly there's a campaign there.
George Browne: Sort of the anti-Derek Gow.
Richard Prideaux: Beaver bombing that he does. Yeah.
George Browne: Allegedly.
Richard Prideaux: Allegedly or lynx bombing is the other one, isn't it?
George Browne: Allegedly.
Richard Prideaux: Who are you, my lawyer?
George Browne: I'm my lawyer.
Richard Prideaux: On this stage, you appeared on a podcast where you claimed that so and so engaged in illegal activity. Yeah. So the wonderful game fair at Ragley Hall. Are we all going?
George Browne: We are. Well, I am.
Amy Green: I believe I am because you need somebody to drive.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, the questions have been raised about whether I should put in for the mobility scooter this year to get.
George Browne: Around. If you don't, you won't have another opportunity to do so for, 20 odd years at least.
Richard Prideaux: We hope not.
George Browne: We hope not.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, I do quite like the idea of rattling down those metal walkways on the main sections on a mobility scooter. Like Rommel, sort of rolling into the, again, into the low country.
Amy Green: You'd be, you'd be doing George's technique, drive by game fairing.
Richard Prideaux: Drive by game fairing, yes. You don't have to actually go into any of the stalls. You just go past and judge.
Amy Green: Yeah, and if you take some binoculars, you can see the prices from the walkway.
George Browne: And knowing you as I do, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you modded your Game Fair mobility scooter to make it do 40 miles an hour.
Richard Prideaux: I do think that when you're still wandering through the thronged crowds, can you be a thronged crowd? And you turn behind you and there's a 19-year-old with long hair wearing a high-vis vest driving a John Deere Gator or something very, very slowly with a VIP on board trying to get to wherever they're doing a talk.
George Browne: Yeah, have you ever done the Game Fair setup? Because they are extremely enthusiastic about people wearing high vis at all times.
Richard Prideaux: Are they? I never have. I used to do years ago with the family business, we used to do lots of country fair set up things, but that was late 90s, early 2000s where as long as you didn't run over more than three people per show, they didn't really give a crap.
George Browne: Yes, I think that they had a ticking off from the HSE at some point because certainly when I first did one, which would have been just the year post COVID, so probably 2021, they didn't appear to give two hoots. And then in subsequent years, they've got more and more enthusiastic about neon vests.
Richard Prideaux: The Guns on Pegs stand has sort of evolved into this, like a floating aircraft carrier of a stand now, hasn't it? With all sorts of sections.
George Browne: Yes, sort of part living room, part office, I guess. And a bar.
Richard Prideaux: Be there again next year? This year? This year.
George Browne: Guns on Pegs will be there, yes. I mean, I don't really have very much to do with the activities on the stand these days. I'm there representing the podcast and that sort of thing. So we're recording in the Game Fair Theatre again on Saturday, which we do every year. And much of the rest of the time, I'm just going to be a punter, barring one or two things.
Amy Green: Oh, well, that's nice. What time are you going to be at the Carter Jonas Theatre with Guns on Pegs podcast?
George Browne: I think it's 4.30. I think we have the theatre from 4, but it normally takes us a little bit of time to get set up. So at 4.30 we'll be on stage for about an hour or so talking, shooting related nonsense.
Amy Green: Excellent.
Richard Prideaux: It was last year where just as you were all going in, I said to Sam of your tribe, don't worry, just remember that everyone's looking at you, judging you and it is recorded live.
George Browne: Yes. I mean, I have to say that podcasting for me feels very natural and sort of my happy place. Being on stage, I find really quite scary, certainly in the build up to it. Once we're on stage, the adrenaline kicks in and I can sort of, I'm so concerned about making sure that we get to the next bit and that the thing's flowing along nicely that I sort of forget how nervous I am. But if you look closely, you will be able to see my hands shaking for the first 10 or 15 minutes until I settle into it.
Richard Prideaux: So the adrenaline sort of flows through the rest of you down into the ground and out like a lightning rod.
George Browne: Yeah, there's a reason we have a drink in our podcast and that's one of them.
Richard Prideaux: I was going to say, does it help if you just sort of get drunk enough that you can defocus your eyes so much that you can't see beyond the stage so you can't actually see the crowd if they're just a blur?
George Browne: One year I bought, I typically buy my drink for that episode at the game fair, and I bought a bottle of Cask Strength New Zealand whiskey. And I hadn't read the label with sufficient care before we went on stage. And it wasn't so much my vision was the problem, but I had a little sip of it and then I couldn't really speak for about a minute and a half.
Amy Green: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: The little flammable warning on the label to that really.
George Browne: Very nice whiskey though.
Richard Prideaux: So Amy, you've not, your first attendance at a game fair was with me, wasn't it? You had never been to anything like.
Amy Green: That.
Richard Prideaux: No, sorry, I'm croaking at the same time and I'm trying to not get distracted by that huge wasp that's come into my office. It's the size of a V22 Osprey.
Amy Green: Nice. Definitely not a hornet.
Richard Prideaux: We shall see. So what did you think of that first game fair.
Amy Green: So it's interesting because the first one that we attended was just as punters, purely punters. Shooting field sports, country ways is not in. It wasn't in my blood to my knowledge until all of my grandparents died. And then I suddenly found out that actually my both of my grandfathers had done a little bit of shooting when they were younger and all this kind of thing. It's like. We did a test. I know my uncle used to go fishing as a boy, but it's kind of like everybody did then, I suppose, especially where they lived. But the game fair, completely different place to me, completely different crowd, but was really nice and just relaxed, interesting, lots to see, lots to do, loads of things to try food and drink wise, which is always a bonus in my book. And the weather was just fantastic as well, I think. And that one was Ragley Hall, wasn't it, that first one.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it was Ragley and then we went to Blenheim and then it's back at Ragley, which is actually easier for us because it's closer, but I think it's slightly harder for the rest of the country to get to.
George Browne: Amy, what was your experience of sort of trade shows and fairs and that of that ilk before the game fair then?
Amy Green: So before the game fair, When I was a kid, I remember mum taking me to kind of the local county shows and things. I think I went to Cheshire County Show. I just have one memory of that where I was looking in one of the tents and they had all sorts of different things including ferrets. And I was handling this ferret which was being really nice and gentle and my mum saw it from across the tent and thought oh that looks really nice and I always loved animals as a kid. And then she walked over and smelt it and immediately just said, you are not having one. No ferrets in our house. Okay. But other than that, I suppose other kind of shows that would be similar but in different areas were the outdoor trade show, there's a big outdoor show down in London that I went to a few years ago, which was all climbing, hiking, hill walking, that kind of thing. But that was all indoors as well. So it's always a bit different going to anywhere that's like the NEC or this, that was at the, I think it's the Excel down in London. Yeah. So not the same kind of thing at all. And then like I said, just as a child, county shows. So very different.
Richard Prideaux: There was something you said to me at the first game fair, Amy. There was a layer of conservation and land management and farming and all sorts of other things. overlaid onto what is meant to be a recreation thing. Whereas if you go to the National Outdoor Expo or whatever the hell it's called this year, which is the hiking one, you won't find anything to do with conservation or anything like that, unless maybe the Woodland Trust have a stand there or something like that. And that'll be the only thing.
Amy Green: Yeah, 100%. 100% true. So you've been going to the game fair for a long time, I'm guessing, George?
George Browne: Well, actually, my first game fair was only in 2019. I might have gone to one when it used to move around a lot when it was the CLA game fair. There was one in Hampshire, which I remember going to, but I would have been, I don't know if I'd even have been a teenager at that point. That would have been at Broadlands, I think. But yeah, apart from that, I've only ever really experienced the game fair. until last year at any rate, as somebody on a stand. And so then last year I went along for the day, Scribehound didn't have a stand. So I went along just for the Saturday to record the Guns on Pecks podcast and I wandered around the game fair a bit as a punter. And it's such a different experience. You know, one of the things about being on a stand is that you often feel guilty for being off it.
Amy Green: Yes.
George Browne: Because it is quite a full on thing and everybody is, you're on the stand at sort of 7:00 in the morning, 7, 8 o'clock and it's just pretty full on from then until quite late at night sometimes because of all the little drinks parties and what have you. So yeah, just being able to wander about and, nip into a stand and or nip into a friend's stand and have a chat without constantly feeling, well I've got to get back because the guys will need me. it's nice to have that freedom. And actually I did a bit of retail there last year. I bought shooting coats for my kids, which was an interesting experience trying to work out the very confusing size brackets that they have.
Richard Prideaux: When I look at the kids' clothing there, it always seems like they've got the arm length right, but not the body length.
George Browne: Well, this is exactly it. So I bought 22 shooting coats, ostensibly the same size. My daughter's one is a perfect fit apart from the sleeves being a little bit long. And my son's, I mean, it looks like a sleeping bag on him. It comes almost to ankle length.
Amy Green: Fantastic.
George Browne: I can only assume that they were aiming for the same size because the number in it was the same.
Richard Prideaux: It's like one of those sort of Arabian throbe things, sort of just walks along, you wear that as a sole garment.
George Browne: Yeah, like a trench coat.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. There must be a spreadsheet somewhere of the average size of a child, like child size ratio, but I imagine every manufacturer has got their own different version of it and otherwise it's you end up just marketing entirely to short torsoed long-armed \*\*\*\*\*\*\* or something like that.
George Browne: It is complete. I mean, I could actually go on about this for a very long time, but this is a countryside, a broadly countryside podcast rather than a parenting podcast. But yes, different companies, I think they just sort of guess. Oh, well, you know, how big is a six-year-old? Well, about that big.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
George Browne: I'm not sure they've ever seen a six-year-old.
Richard Prideaux: This is why I always gravitate towards the Ghili stand, Ghili clothing, because I've got 50 inch chest, 38-ish inch waist and a giant head, which is a problem for finding clothing unless you go to Ghili because the owner, Hamish, is, well, I'm fairly sure he's descended from the Nephilim, the sort of the mythical race of giants from the Bible. He makes me look like, well, look tiny in comparison. But all the Gilly clothing of the sizes, brilliant, they fit me.
George Browne: I love Gilly stuff. They're sort of field shirt thingies. I bought one and I wasn't sure if it was the right size. So they then ordered another one the next size up. And then I got over excited and thought, I'll have two more. So I'd initially intended to return one of them, whichever one turned out to be the wrong size. And in the end, I just thought, \*\*\*\*\*\* it, I'm going to have more of these. So when I'm fishing next week in Scotland, I will be wearing a ghillie shirt every day.
Richard Prideaux: So is this a good ruse to get them past your wife as well? So you can say, no, it's the same shirt. Look, it's the ghillie one.
George Browne: Well, it would be if they weren't three different colours.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, Your wife's quite good on those kind of things, I imagine.
George Browne: She does tend to notice.
Richard Prideaux: So we've got a few with our 3.5 million listeners or three listeners, whichever one you believe, that we have now. I think most people know what the game fair is and what it's about. By now we've banged on about it often enough in these shows, but it's actually quite a little tent pole of an outdoor show within the UK market because it's It's quite big, isn't it, in terms of numbers? It's like 130,000 people over 3 days.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: Big numbers.
George Browne: I often see sort of people, you know, after all of these shows, there's people on social media moaning about the thing. Oh, we turned up and we'd been round in two hours and it was time to go home, we'd done everything. And I just think that's nonsense. There is so much to see and do and there are huge numbers of people there, particularly on sort of the Saturday if it's sunny. It's like Piccadilly Circus there sometimes.
Richard Prideaux: And because you're in those rows in between all the tents and the marquees and the things, it often feels quite busy just by the fact you can't fit everyone into that, what gun makers row or the shopping experience or something, wherever you go to buy your hot tubs from.
Amy Green: Yeah. I mean, Callum, Callum had been to like four or five shows before he even managed to make it into the fishing village, hadn't he? So I can't believe that you can get around the whole show in two hours.
George Browne: Yeah, you do have to go looking for the fishing village a bit, or at least you have done in previous years. It's sort of because they put it down by the lake. You sort of have to go and hunt it out a bit. It's sort of slightly off to one side.
Richard Prideaux: Well, the way Callum described it, was sort of like brigadoon. It was sort of like this mythical place that if the mists were just right, it would reveal itself to you. go, oh, well, there's the fishing village. I found it this year.
George Browne: Yes, you have to invoke Jeremy Wade.
Richard Prideaux: So speaking of Jeremy Wade, we've had a bit of a ruse and a bit of an idea for what we can do for the game fair this year. And being terrible at making money as we are, we've decided to do a thing which will cost you, the listener, a small amount of money, but the money will all go to the Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust. So we're going to do game fair bingo. And if the game fair people are listening, it's not your trademarked game fair, it's a different game fair. So.
George Browne: Could we call it generic outdoor field sports and farming show bingo?
Richard Prideaux: Standing in a field next to Ragley Hall bingo. So George, you came up with a list after one of our episodes last year for a Game Fair Bingo card. Can you remember what was on it?
George Browne: Vaguely. It included squares that had your face and Negus' face and Callum's face. And I think there was one that said something like, red trousers.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Dog in a pram?
George Browne: Yeah. Dog in a pram. There was another one that said mustard trousers.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: I can't remember. I think it was a 16 square grid and I don't think I can reel off all 16 of them. But you get the vibe.
Richard Prideaux: So what we propose to do this year is we'll have a, maybe I can get it together for the end of this week, we'll see. If it's in the show notes for this episode, I did. If not, then there'll be something next week or the week after that will have something, a list there for you to buy a game card from. So there'll be several different versions. There'll be around about a pound each and the money goes to the Game Wildlife Conservancy Trust. You can buy as many as you wish, but the idea will be that you go round with your bingo card and you can see what you can spot. We also want suggestions from the audience and there will be a link for this in the show notes to what goes on those bingo cards. In fact, I've just realized the linear nature of time. I need your suggestions, don't I, before I make the bingo cards. So there we go. That's how time works, Richard. There's past, present and future. Right.
Amy Green: I mean, I do sometimes question if you can understand that, but you know, let's carry on.
Richard Prideaux: I exist in four-dimensional time anyway, so Yeah. We want your suggestions, so send them into the link that's in the show notes for this episode. Send them to producer Amy. Just things like red trousers, mustard trousers, dog in a pram, Vinnie Jones.
George Browne: Full camo, full tweed.
Amy Green: White jeans.
Richard Prideaux: Stag do, Hen do.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: Cowboy hats.
George Browne: Yeah. Teal for Dora.
Richard Prideaux: That's Amy, actually.
Amy Green: I was going to say.
Richard Prideaux: Pith helmet.
George Browne: Yes, very good one.
Richard Prideaux: That kind of thing. So we want your suggestions, please.
George Browne: And this is just for fun, so there's no prize. Is that right?
Richard Prideaux: Yes, because a prize would have required organisation and putting out funding for it. The prize is that the GWCT get some money and we all have some fun.
George Browne: Yes, but I do think like it would be quite fun for people to be able to share their success. Have you thought of that? That's a very good idea. I was thinking about this. But Amy, have you got an idea before I jump in?
Amy Green: Mine was very simple, is that they can tag Country Slide Pod on social media with a picture of their card if they want to share it that way.
George Browne: I think one step further to that, which is in order to be declared as to having achieved bingo, which now I say that out loud, sounds wrong.
Amy Green: Well, you can't take it back.
Richard Prideaux: Hold on, darling. We're very nearly at bingo. Nearly there.
George Browne: Anyway, you have to take a picture of the item in question for it to count.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: So then you upload your pictures.
Richard Prideaux: So I feel like on Friday or Saturday at the game fair, my phone is going to explode the moment I get back into signal with tags of women in white miniskirts and things like that.
Amy Green: Your algorithm is going to be all over the place.
Richard Prideaux: It already is from what you people send to me.
Amy Green: Moving on. So Game Fair Bingo.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, we'll announce it via our social media, probably with all the links when it's ready to buy, but that will be in the next week or two. We won't make any money from this apart from the payment processor fees, everything all go to the Gable Wildlife Conservancy Trust. who I'm sure are over the moon to find out they're being tied to this event in this way.
George Browne: Funding is funding.
Amy Green: Exactly.
Richard Prideaux: You can take the check without having to approve the method by which it's arrived. Yes. Okay.
George Browne: That's our excuse and we're sticking with it.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, for the sake of our lawyers, but there we go. So that is the Countryside Game Fair Bingo. Will you be encouraging the Guns on Pegs audience to engage in this?
George Browne: Yes, I think I will. We're sort of recording a bit out of whack at the moment because, well, complicated reasons, but mainly because I'm going on holiday next week. So I need to work out in which episode I need to say this so that it goes out just before. It might be the one I'm recording tomorrow, but I'm not sure.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, so you'll have to mention a link that does not exist yet in the episode that you're recording tomorrow.
George Browne: Which will go out when the link does exist.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, fantastic. Well done everyone.
George Browne: Yes, the linear nature of time is causing problems again.
Richard Prideaux: I often find it does in my life. I've thought of an idea after it should have happened and then I make the preparations for something that doesn't exist yet.
George Browne: Yeah, that checks out.
Richard Prideaux: So speaking of which, the Project X. Yes. So we're all going to be very cagey about talking about this for various reasons, but we have hinted at it in the past. This is not the thing that Callums can't talk about yet. That's a completely different thing. We'll let Callum talk about that on his own.
Amy Green: That's definitely not a project either.
Richard Prideaux: No, make a time code note on that, Amy, in case I have to remove it later for legal reasons. So Project X, you may remember, regular listeners, way back in, I think it was February of this year, I hurriedly announced that we're going to be doing some extra shows in sort of addition to Country Slide, where they will be things like how the countryside works, which will feature the melodious tones of George Brown off of Scry Pound and Guns on Pegs.
George Browne: It will. Now, it should be added that it's not going to be me that's doing the explaining there, as we've already established. I'm not qualified to explain how farming works, for example.
Richard Prideaux: No, that's the extra content, isn't it? George has a stab at it before someone's explained it to him.
George Browne: That's actually quite a good idea.
Amy Green: That is a very good idea. I might just keep that one under our hats. Yeah.
George Browne: I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be fun.
Richard Prideaux: And we've also got the Land Girls podcast, which is going to be Amy.
Amy Green: It is. It is. I'm really looking forward to that one as well. Doing lots of interviews to find out all about what what other different careers in conservation, working on the land, all these kind of things that were happening around the UK mostly and talking to the women who were in those roles, finding out more about them.
Richard Prideaux: There is an element of finding people who genuinely work in conservation and have been working in it for a while or are forging a career there. not just on social media, not just doing it performatively for Instagram and things like that. I'm being very careful with my wording.
Amy Green: No, but essentially it's not going to be names that you have heard of necessarily, but they're going to be people who know what they're doing and are very good at it.
George Browne: Yes, I think that the really interesting thing there is the sort of practition in the nature of it, because the social media image of the countryside is particularly where women is concerned is possibly not focused on people who are actually out there, to borrow Patrick Galbraith's getting mud under the fingernails so often. It tends to be more of a sort of lifestyle approach to it rather than the actually getting your hands dirty and doing things. I think it's going to be a really, really great, great podcast that.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. We're hopefully trying to subvert the algorithm a little bit in doing that as well, because it's quite easy for us chaps to do that kind of thing, because we can just let ourselves go and be a \*\*\*\*\* handed son of the soil whilst not really caring about our appearance, unless you're Harry Hutchinson, in which case you have to be absolutely ripped.
George Browne: I have wondered whether this is where I've been going wrong all this time.
Richard Prideaux: As I said on the after show the other week, I have landed a partner now. I never have to worry about my appearance or attractiveness to women ever again.
George Browne: If somebody said to you that Country Slide would increase its listenership tenfold if you were suddenly absolutely stacked, would that change your view?
Richard Prideaux: I mean, it would sort of remove the cider and pasties from my diet, which genetically I'm predisposed towards. I don't know, maybe. But even when I was spectacularly fit, I was still broadly this shape. I'm just a weird freak of genetics. I'm not sure it's actually possible. Whereas the ripped George Brown, sort of when, was Guy Adams from Scribehound of the Daily Mail, got absolutely ripped for men's fitness. And he said it wasn't that hard, which is really annoying.
George Browne: Yeah, I don't think I believe him. He told me what that required and it sounded very hard.
Richard Prideaux: Not as hard as his abs, no.
Amy Green: It sounds like it takes a lot of discipline to get to that level and also a removing of many of life's joys from your life.
George Browne: Well, and also in Guy Adams's case, to be on the cover of Men's Health, he had to have a full torso wax.
Amy Green: Oh, no.
Richard Prideaux: I think in my case that would be sort of a fourth rd bridge kind of issue, but you know the moment you finish waxing one end. It's like coming back at the other. So Back on Project X, which is not the official. No, well, I think that's going to be the case. This is not a instead of Country Slide. Country Slide will continue and it will continue in the same possibly slightly career steering way that it has already. But we'll be adding on stuff either side of it. It's basically there with more of the voices that you may already know and love. from other audio projects and some new ones you haven't got a chance to know yet. Well, that sounded all too professional, but I ruined it by saying that.
George Browne: I think one should always undercut moments of professionalism with that sort of thing.
Richard Prideaux: As you know, Callum's thing about he's like offering a treat to a dog. He's got his teeth, his teeth are slightly on show, his lips are slightly pulled back. He's never quite taking it in the way it was meant. That's like us with professionalism. We could get there, but we're choosing not to.
George Browne: I think it's actually quite a good point though, because, you know, I think one of the things that we all agree on is that a level of incompetence and chaos is sort of part of the part of the vibe to this. we want to take how the countryside works, for example, I'm going to talk to people who really do know whatever aspect of the countryside it is that we're talking about, going to be talking to proper experts, but there's going to be a degree of misunderstanding and attempting to translate things for the layman, I suppose.
Richard Prideaux: I think there's an issue with every kind of media, but any kind of niche media in which there is a rural media world. It either ends up being restrained by some external forces, whether that's commercial, whether it's who your advertisers are, who your funders are, those kind of things. Or it's the So repetition of what you hear other people doing and there's a sort of a house style that develops within that niche. I want to keep going in the way we have done, which is maybe reflect more of what we see on the ground and the conversations we have on the ground and those kind of things, rather than what you, know, you tune in, let's hear about the countryside. Oh, that sounds nothing like me being on the phone to Nick or Matthew or whatever.
George Browne: Yes, and I think there's the other aspect to it as well, which is, if you take farming as an example, one, farming is a massive sort of catch-all term for everything from, growing a little bit of mustard for Coleman's to vast, industrial milking operations and this sort of stuff. So it's sort of hard to hard to put it all in one category in one sense. But also when you're talking about it, you can either talk about it in terms for, somebody who lives in Clapham. Actually, Clapham was the wrong choice. You know, someone who lives in, some suburb somewhere and, but the closest they get to say a cow is, the picture of 1 on the bottle of milk they buy from Tesco's. Or there's the sort of expert farmer audience who are expected to know what all of the acronyms and all that sort of thing means. But actually, I can read a sheep farming article and it might as well be in French, but I do know my way roughly around cereal farming because that's what we do here. So I guess the idea is to talk to an engaged countryside audience about things that might be new to them or where their level of understanding is not so great and trying to find that balance in there, if that makes sense.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. There's also preconceptions that come with all of these things that if you're in dairy farming, to you, what farming is and you also have a preconception about what the public thinks about you. And that might come from the comments on social media or under an article about farming or what somebody has replied to your post about your farm shop with or something like that. So everyone, I think, can benefit from seeing what other people think about their world as well as finding out how somebody doing something that is basically the different flavour of what you do. They have a different preconception, different view of that world entirely.
George Browne: Yes, and we can go incredibly granular with this as well, again, because you know dairy farming in East Anglia is a pretty different beast to dairy farming in Wales, just by virtue of the landscape. You know, it comes with its own set of challenges and ways of doing things.
Richard Prideaux: Within these new shows, we're hoping to bring in some things that we've already done. So Amy and I run Wild Food People, wildfoodpeople.co.uk. It's where you can find our foraging courses. Somewhere in July, all those public foraging courses are going to move over to our social enterprise to the CIC, Community Interest Company, that we set up just about 18 months or so ago, so that they can benefit that because they all take place in landscapes that we manage under that social enterprise anyway, so it makes sense. That means that the Wild Food People podcast, which has been, I think the last one we put out was June last year, with John Miller.
Amy Green: It's been on a hiatus, hasn't it?
Richard Prideaux: That will be coming back and that will be coming back covering all aspects of wild food, whether that's foraging, hunting, fishing, preparation of food, the issues affecting conservation and gathering food from the wild, as well as some of the outdoor cooking and wilder ingredients, even if they are slightly on the farm side of things as well, which again, I think you'll be having some input into George with your setting fire to animals on coals of.
George Browne: Yes, this is one of my principal hobbies at this time of year is setting fire to lumps of wood and then subsequently using those to set fire to various different sizes of bits of animal or fish actually come to think of it.
Richard Prideaux: Explain cooking badly, yes.
George Browne: Yeah, well, exactly. This is what I do is I cook badly. And again, I think this comes back to what we were talking about with the, you know, the levels of incompetence because I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not an expert at these things and I think that we'll all be learning from one another on this side of things.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and I like this idea of continual learning journeys because, well, anytime you get to the point of thinking, right, I know everything now, I don't need to learn anymore, something will swing in from left field and swipe you across your face with a new lesson, won't it?
George Browne: And I think that there's this sort of curiosity as well. If you take the sort of fire cooking thing, live fire cooking thing, you maybe start off with something fairly straightforward like a steak, but it's not long, if you're like me at any rate, before you're starting to think things like, I wonder if I can asado an entire roe deer. And instantly I can tell you the answer is, yes you can, but it's not a tremendous idea.
Richard Prideaux: I don't plan to do many other things that day.
George Browne: Yeah, it takes a while. It's not the best way to cook a deer. That's my lesson that I learned on that one.
Richard Prideaux: But that's, to be perfectly honest, the wild food people element of this is the one I'm most excited about because we get to expand into so many issues and so many areas because being able to cook something wild over an open fire in a place where it is lawful and appropriate to have that fire. There are so many steps to get there. It's like this thing about a bacon cheeseburger is one of the most technologically advanced things in human civilization because of all the stuff you have to have to be able to make. that bread, have the lettuce there at the same time as bacon, at the same time as a burger, have cheese that won't go off. It's this huge technological development. There's this sort of skill development, skill acquisition layer you need to have to be able to cook over an open fire well in the outdoors.
George Browne: Yes, you're absolutely right. It's new skills all the way down, isn't it? From acquiring the thing that you're going to cook to preparing it to making the fire, managing the fire, different cooking techniques, so on and so forth. It's almost infinite how deep you can go into it.
Amy Green: Is and there's so much to learn with that. And if you go into smoking and all of that side of it as well, and it's just, there's always that area where chemistry starts overlapping with it as well. And it's whether it's more art or science and Yeah.
George Browne: Yes. I think that's another really good point, which is that there's going to be lots of opportunities for bodgery in this, particularly on the cooking side of things, because another thing that I'm quite a fan of is overly elaborate cooking apparatus. I've always wanted a cold smoker that's made out of, a bit of an old Hoover and a metal shoe box and I don't even know what a metal shoe box is, but that sort of thing.
Richard Prideaux: When I first met you, one of the first things you asked me was, have you ever made a water wheel powered spit to go over a fire?
George Browne: Exactly, that kind of thing. You know, is it necessary? No. Does it really achieve anything very much? Also, no. Will it work? Probably not. I think the fun is in the trying.
Richard Prideaux: We also need somewhere with running water where we can light the fire. Or it's this summer, maybe not. This is an autumn project, maybe?
George Browne: Yes, well I suppose that if we do the cookery in the wetter months, it reduces the probability of us setting fire to the landscape as well, which is probably quite a good message to put out.
Richard Prideaux: If our first, if our first press release is sorry, we've set fire to half of Hampshire.
George Browne: I think episode one of Wild Food People, disposable BBQ somewhere in the North Pennines.
Richard Prideaux: On the grouse more, yes.
Amy Green: Locally, locally sourced poultry.
Richard Prideaux: Well, that's the thing. Well, they used to do the race, didn't they, to, was it the Savoy who used to try and get the first grouse of the season?
George Browne: I think they still do that, I think you can, there's some places that sort of pride themselves on being able to serve you grouse on the 12th in London.
Richard Prideaux: So as red grouse are the game bird that is wild, really. You know, it's the most shot in the UK that has to be a wild source. You could shorten that chain quite substantially by having a disposable BBQ on the edge of the grouse bird. So you shoot a grouse, the first grouse of the season, try and nail it onto the BBQ straight away.
George Browne: Yeah. Or, have your loader stand there with a long pole landing net.
Amy Green: That is a skill.
Richard Prideaux: Or a gaff or something. You can sort of try and drag it up the ball and towards you. Why is it you've not had me back on my guns on pegs part? So I think that's a good place to leave the main show for now, but as a summary, we want your suggestions for things that will be on the Game Fair bingo card, and then they'll be available for purchase prior to the Game Fair, with all proceeds going to the Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust. Is it Conservation Trust and not Conservancy?
George Browne: It is the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it hasn't been Conservancy Trust since about 1974 or something. something, I don't know. I should know, but GWCT, you know what they do. Wonderful things are great partridges. Then we also have our Project X, which will be landing hopefully sometime just after the game fair and thereabouts, which will feature all this or the start of all this wonderful new content and a new look, but in country slide and the voices you love won't be going anywhere. How you feel about that is down to you. That might be a relief. It might just be sort of a portent of doom coming, well, just for the rest of your life, really, because we're not going anywhere. Have I missed anything?
George Browne: I think that's everything.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So on to the after show. Goodbye, everyone.
George Browne: Bye.
Amy Green: Bye.
Richard Prideaux: One of us has to speak first.
George Browne: Given that it's your podcast, I assumed that you would do that.
Richard Prideaux: Callum, what do you think?
Amy Green: I'm not allowed to talk.
Richard Prideaux: So things have gone slightly awry for this week's episode of Country Slide in that Richard Negus is off on a fact-finding mission about whether they could dump some extra sand out into the North Sea and reclaim Doggerland to make it an extension of Suffolk out towards the Low Countries. And Callum is unavailable because he's, what is he doing? I don't know, something to do with computers and AI probably. So instead we have, we've got producer Amy who we've allowed to speak for one special week.
Amy Green: Yay.
Richard Prideaux: And we've purloined George from, well, from Guns on Pegs and Scribehound. So I'll let George speak because he's got such a wonderfully melodious voice.
George Browne: Melodious, is it? Well, it's very nice to be back. It's a great honour to be asked again.
Richard Prideaux: Last time you were here you were in a room which had a timer on the light switch so every sort of 7 1/2 minutes you had to stand up and hit the switch to bring yourself back in.
George Browne: You had to do sort of interpretive dance in the middle of the room to get the get the motion sensor to register that I was present. Today I am in a completely different place and hopefully all the lights will not go out. I'm interested in this Doggerland thing though. How far out into the North Sea does Negus propose we go? Is he suggesting that we, you know, rejoin the continent.
Richard Prideaux: I think that'd be too far even for Richard Negus. I know he does quite like spending time in the south of Italy and things like that, but reattaching Suffolk fully to the continent might be too much for him, I think.
Amy Green: Yeah, I think it would be. I think that would be just a little step too far. But getting close enough that you could use something such as a trebuchet He might be up for that.
George Browne: I think he would. He'd be very happy about all the new flat land though, wouldn't he? approaches flat land.
Richard Prideaux: Think of the hedge and \*\*\*\* opportunities that would offer in that new land.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: That's a very good point.
George Browne: Maybe some very interesting archaeology.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I mean, in all seriousness, it is something people have suggested because you go, you'd have to go that far off the coast of Suffolk and the water's only a metre or two deep in places. the old land, this land bridge that used to connect the British Isles to Europe was there and it had rolling hills and valleys and all sorts. There were sort of herds of elk running around and hunter-gatherers trying to hunt them.
George Browne: Yes. It's going to still need quite a lot of sand, I would imagine.
Richard Prideaux: Do we need Bedfordshire?
George Browne: Just going to dig out Bedfordshire.
Richard Prideaux: I think hollow out Bedfordshire and make Doggerland is probably the best option for everyone really.
George Browne: Seems fair.
Amy Green: I can't see a problem.
Richard Prideaux: No. So we are recording this at the very, very end of June and it will be coming out at the very beginning of July. And for several reasons in our world, July is effectively either you've started harvesting early month or it's game fair month.
George Browne: And I'll tell you what, I reckon harvest, certainly in this neck of the woods, looks like it's going to be pretty early this year. I was out in Wiltshire over the weekend and the barley looks absolutely ready to rip. Now it's not actually ready, I chewed some and it's still pretty soft, but it's all ready to go as far as, you know, colour wise.
Richard Prideaux: Where was this scene where you were just standing in someone's field chewing barley? Or was this just, did you stop for a wee kind of lay-by?
George Browne: Well, I was, we were out on a sim day with the Most Noble Lord of the Gartus, the Guns on Pegs podcast listeners. So we were surrounded by the beautiful rolling chalk valleys of Wiltshire and lots of stunning scenery actually. And yeah, their barley all looked ready to go.
Amy Green: Is the barley actually grown well this year? It's gone tall enough and everything or is it still a bit stunted?
George Browne: Yeah, it's a little bit short. It's a little bit short.
Amy Green: And very dry recently. I mean, we've had, we don't have crops around here in the same way that you guys do in Hampshire and East Country, but the silage cuts that they've been taking have been pretty short.
George Browne: It's interesting. It's not as short as last year when it was, sort of barely even knee high in places. It is a bit better than that. And actually, they look like decent thick crops, but I only inspected one ear in great detail. So also, I'm not really an agronomist or a farmer in any meaningful sense. So I'm sort of starting to reach the outer limits of my knowledge now.
Richard Prideaux: Is this going to be a service you offer to people, sort of George Browne's metaphysical crop walks? You sort of go out and say whether it feels right.
George Browne: I do quite a lot of farming from car on long journeys, you know, look out the window and go, cool, cows look good. You know, as you whistle past at 70 miles an hour, it's the perfect speed at which to assess livestock.
Amy Green: It's like vibe farming. just going, right, okay, it's a little bit soft, wait two more days and that'll be hard enough, ready to go, perfect.
Richard Prideaux: I used to drive by mountaineering from car, where you would, as driving through a valley on the way to somewhere else, look at all these ridges and go, yeah, I reckon that would go, sort of a grade 3 scramble or maybe, actually, maybe it's a V-diff in that section, so you might need ropes on there.
George Browne: Drive-by farming sounds a bit different though. Drive-by farming sounds like, you know, you surreptitiously deposit livestock on somebody's place as you go past.
Richard Prideaux: That's guerrilla farming. It's like seed bombing, but except you do it with cows, you know. Seed Friesianing. Friesian bombing. There we go.
George Browne: I like the idea of guerrilla farming. I like the idea of drive-by farming. I think maybe, you know, this could be a new movement.
Amy Green: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, certainly there's a campaign there.
George Browne: Sort of the anti-Derek Gow.
Richard Prideaux: Beaver bombing that he does. Yeah.
George Browne: Allegedly.
Richard Prideaux: Allegedly or lynx bombing is the other one, isn't it?
George Browne: Allegedly.
Richard Prideaux: Who are you, my lawyer?
George Browne: I'm my lawyer.
Richard Prideaux: On this stage, you appeared on a podcast where you claimed that so and so engaged in illegal activity. Yeah. So the wonderful game fair at Ragley Hall. Are we all going?
George Browne: We are. Well, I am.
Amy Green: I believe I am because you need somebody to drive.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, the questions have been raised about whether I should put in for the mobility scooter this year to get.
George Browne: Around. If you don't, you won't have another opportunity to do so for, 20 odd years at least.
Richard Prideaux: We hope not.
George Browne: We hope not.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, I do quite like the idea of rattling down those metal walkways on the main sections on a mobility scooter. Like Rommel, sort of rolling into the, again, into the low country.
Amy Green: You'd be, you'd be doing George's technique, drive by game fairing.
Richard Prideaux: Drive by game fairing, yes. You don't have to actually go into any of the stalls. You just go past and judge.
Amy Green: Yeah, and if you take some binoculars, you can see the prices from the walkway.
George Browne: And knowing you as I do, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you modded your Game Fair mobility scooter to make it do 40 miles an hour.
Richard Prideaux: I do think that when you're still wandering through the thronged crowds, can you be a thronged crowd? And you turn behind you and there's a 19-year-old with long hair wearing a high-vis vest driving a John Deere Gator or something very, very slowly with a VIP on board trying to get to wherever they're doing a talk.
George Browne: Yeah, have you ever done the Game Fair setup? Because they are extremely enthusiastic about people wearing high vis at all times.
Richard Prideaux: Are they? I never have. I used to do years ago with the family business, we used to do lots of country fair set up things, but that was late 90s, early 2000s where as long as you didn't run over more than three people per show, they didn't really give a crap.
George Browne: Yes, I think that they had a ticking off from the HSE at some point because certainly when I first did one, which would have been just the year post COVID, so probably 2021, they didn't appear to give two hoots. And then in subsequent years, they've got more and more enthusiastic about neon vests.
Richard Prideaux: The Guns on Pegs stand has sort of evolved into this, like a floating aircraft carrier of a stand now, hasn't it? With all sorts of sections.
George Browne: Yes, sort of part living room, part office, I guess. And a bar.
Richard Prideaux: Be there again next year? This year? This year.
George Browne: Guns on Pegs will be there, yes. I mean, I don't really have very much to do with the activities on the stand these days. I'm there representing the podcast and that sort of thing. So we're recording in the Game Fair Theatre again on Saturday, which we do every year. And much of the rest of the time, I'm just going to be a punter, barring one or two things.
Amy Green: Oh, well, that's nice. What time are you going to be at the Carter Jonas Theatre with Guns on Pegs podcast?
George Browne: I think it's 4.30. I think we have the theatre from 4, but it normally takes us a little bit of time to get set up. So at 4.30 we'll be on stage for about an hour or so talking, shooting related nonsense.
Amy Green: Excellent.
Richard Prideaux: It was last year where just as you were all going in, I said to Sam of your tribe, don't worry, just remember that everyone's looking at you, judging you and it is recorded live.
George Browne: Yes. I mean, I have to say that podcasting for me feels very natural and sort of my happy place. Being on stage, I find really quite scary, certainly in the build up to it. Once we're on stage, the adrenaline kicks in and I can sort of, I'm so concerned about making sure that we get to the next bit and that the thing's flowing along nicely that I sort of forget how nervous I am. But if you look closely, you will be able to see my hands shaking for the first 10 or 15 minutes until I settle into it.
Richard Prideaux: So the adrenaline sort of flows through the rest of you down into the ground and out like a lightning rod.
George Browne: Yeah, there's a reason we have a drink in our podcast and that's one of them.
Richard Prideaux: I was going to say, does it help if you just sort of get drunk enough that you can defocus your eyes so much that you can't see beyond the stage so you can't actually see the crowd if they're just a blur?
George Browne: One year I bought, I typically buy my drink for that episode at the game fair, and I bought a bottle of Cask Strength New Zealand whiskey. And I hadn't read the label with sufficient care before we went on stage. And it wasn't so much my vision was the problem, but I had a little sip of it and then I couldn't really speak for about a minute and a half.
Amy Green: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: The little flammable warning on the label to that really.
George Browne: Very nice whiskey though.
Richard Prideaux: So Amy, you've not, your first attendance at a game fair was with me, wasn't it? You had never been to anything like.
Amy Green: That.
Richard Prideaux: No, sorry, I'm croaking at the same time and I'm trying to not get distracted by that huge wasp that's come into my office. It's the size of a V22 Osprey.
Amy Green: Nice. Definitely not a hornet.
Richard Prideaux: We shall see. So what did you think of that first game fair.
Amy Green: So it's interesting because the first one that we attended was just as punters, purely punters. Shooting field sports, country ways is not in. It wasn't in my blood to my knowledge until all of my grandparents died. And then I suddenly found out that actually my both of my grandfathers had done a little bit of shooting when they were younger and all this kind of thing. It's like. We did a test. I know my uncle used to go fishing as a boy, but it's kind of like everybody did then, I suppose, especially where they lived. But the game fair, completely different place to me, completely different crowd, but was really nice and just relaxed, interesting, lots to see, lots to do, loads of things to try food and drink wise, which is always a bonus in my book. And the weather was just fantastic as well, I think. And that one was Ragley Hall, wasn't it, that first one.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it was Ragley and then we went to Blenheim and then it's back at Ragley, which is actually easier for us because it's closer, but I think it's slightly harder for the rest of the country to get to.
George Browne: Amy, what was your experience of sort of trade shows and fairs and that of that ilk before the game fair then?
Amy Green: So before the game fair, When I was a kid, I remember mum taking me to kind of the local county shows and things. I think I went to Cheshire County Show. I just have one memory of that where I was looking in one of the tents and they had all sorts of different things including ferrets. And I was handling this ferret which was being really nice and gentle and my mum saw it from across the tent and thought oh that looks really nice and I always loved animals as a kid. And then she walked over and smelt it and immediately just said, you are not having one. No ferrets in our house. Okay. But other than that, I suppose other kind of shows that would be similar but in different areas were the outdoor trade show, there's a big outdoor show down in London that I went to a few years ago, which was all climbing, hiking, hill walking, that kind of thing. But that was all indoors as well. So it's always a bit different going to anywhere that's like the NEC or this, that was at the, I think it's the Excel down in London. Yeah. So not the same kind of thing at all. And then like I said, just as a child, county shows. So very different.
Richard Prideaux: There was something you said to me at the first game fair, Amy. There was a layer of conservation and land management and farming and all sorts of other things. overlaid onto what is meant to be a recreation thing. Whereas if you go to the National Outdoor Expo or whatever the hell it's called this year, which is the hiking one, you won't find anything to do with conservation or anything like that, unless maybe the Woodland Trust have a stand there or something like that. And that'll be the only thing.
Amy Green: Yeah, 100%. 100% true. So you've been going to the game fair for a long time, I'm guessing, George?
George Browne: Well, actually, my first game fair was only in 2019. I might have gone to one when it used to move around a lot when it was the CLA game fair. There was one in Hampshire, which I remember going to, but I would have been, I don't know if I'd even have been a teenager at that point. That would have been at Broadlands, I think. But yeah, apart from that, I've only ever really experienced the game fair. until last year at any rate, as somebody on a stand. And so then last year I went along for the day, Scribehound didn't have a stand. So I went along just for the Saturday to record the Guns on Pecks podcast and I wandered around the game fair a bit as a punter. And it's such a different experience. You know, one of the things about being on a stand is that you often feel guilty for being off it.
Amy Green: Yes.
George Browne: Because it is quite a full on thing and everybody is, you're on the stand at sort of 7:00 in the morning, 7, 8 o'clock and it's just pretty full on from then until quite late at night sometimes because of all the little drinks parties and what have you. So yeah, just being able to wander about and, nip into a stand and or nip into a friend's stand and have a chat without constantly feeling, well I've got to get back because the guys will need me. it's nice to have that freedom. And actually I did a bit of retail there last year. I bought shooting coats for my kids, which was an interesting experience trying to work out the very confusing size brackets that they have.
Richard Prideaux: When I look at the kids' clothing there, it always seems like they've got the arm length right, but not the body length.
George Browne: Well, this is exactly it. So I bought 22 shooting coats, ostensibly the same size. My daughter's one is a perfect fit apart from the sleeves being a little bit long. And my son's, I mean, it looks like a sleeping bag on him. It comes almost to ankle length.
Amy Green: Fantastic.
George Browne: I can only assume that they were aiming for the same size because the number in it was the same.
Richard Prideaux: It's like one of those sort of Arabian throbe things, sort of just walks along, you wear that as a sole garment.
George Browne: Yeah, like a trench coat.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. There must be a spreadsheet somewhere of the average size of a child, like child size ratio, but I imagine every manufacturer has got their own different version of it and otherwise it's you end up just marketing entirely to short torsoed long-armed \*\*\*\*\*\*\* or something like that.
George Browne: It is complete. I mean, I could actually go on about this for a very long time, but this is a countryside, a broadly countryside podcast rather than a parenting podcast. But yes, different companies, I think they just sort of guess. Oh, well, you know, how big is a six-year-old? Well, about that big.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
George Browne: I'm not sure they've ever seen a six-year-old.
Richard Prideaux: This is why I always gravitate towards the Ghili stand, Ghili clothing, because I've got 50 inch chest, 38-ish inch waist and a giant head, which is a problem for finding clothing unless you go to Ghili because the owner, Hamish, is, well, I'm fairly sure he's descended from the Nephilim, the sort of the mythical race of giants from the Bible. He makes me look like, well, look tiny in comparison. But all the Gilly clothing of the sizes, brilliant, they fit me.
George Browne: I love Gilly stuff. They're sort of field shirt thingies. I bought one and I wasn't sure if it was the right size. So they then ordered another one the next size up. And then I got over excited and thought, I'll have two more. So I'd initially intended to return one of them, whichever one turned out to be the wrong size. And in the end, I just thought, \*\*\*\*\*\* it, I'm going to have more of these. So when I'm fishing next week in Scotland, I will be wearing a ghillie shirt every day.
Richard Prideaux: So is this a good ruse to get them past your wife as well? So you can say, no, it's the same shirt. Look, it's the ghillie one.
George Browne: Well, it would be if they weren't three different colours.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, Your wife's quite good on those kind of things, I imagine.
George Browne: She does tend to notice.
Richard Prideaux: So we've got a few with our 3.5 million listeners or three listeners, whichever one you believe, that we have now. I think most people know what the game fair is and what it's about. By now we've banged on about it often enough in these shows, but it's actually quite a little tent pole of an outdoor show within the UK market because it's It's quite big, isn't it, in terms of numbers? It's like 130,000 people over 3 days.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: Big numbers.
George Browne: I often see sort of people, you know, after all of these shows, there's people on social media moaning about the thing. Oh, we turned up and we'd been round in two hours and it was time to go home, we'd done everything. And I just think that's nonsense. There is so much to see and do and there are huge numbers of people there, particularly on sort of the Saturday if it's sunny. It's like Piccadilly Circus there sometimes.
Richard Prideaux: And because you're in those rows in between all the tents and the marquees and the things, it often feels quite busy just by the fact you can't fit everyone into that, what gun makers row or the shopping experience or something, wherever you go to buy your hot tubs from.
Amy Green: Yeah. I mean, Callum, Callum had been to like four or five shows before he even managed to make it into the fishing village, hadn't he? So I can't believe that you can get around the whole show in two hours.
George Browne: Yeah, you do have to go looking for the fishing village a bit, or at least you have done in previous years. It's sort of because they put it down by the lake. You sort of have to go and hunt it out a bit. It's sort of slightly off to one side.
Richard Prideaux: Well, the way Callum described it, was sort of like brigadoon. It was sort of like this mythical place that if the mists were just right, it would reveal itself to you. go, oh, well, there's the fishing village. I found it this year.
George Browne: Yes, you have to invoke Jeremy Wade.
Richard Prideaux: So speaking of Jeremy Wade, we've had a bit of a ruse and a bit of an idea for what we can do for the game fair this year. And being terrible at making money as we are, we've decided to do a thing which will cost you, the listener, a small amount of money, but the money will all go to the Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust. So we're going to do game fair bingo. And if the game fair people are listening, it's not your trademarked game fair, it's a different game fair. So.
George Browne: Could we call it generic outdoor field sports and farming show bingo?
Richard Prideaux: Standing in a field next to Ragley Hall bingo. So George, you came up with a list after one of our episodes last year for a Game Fair Bingo card. Can you remember what was on it?
George Browne: Vaguely. It included squares that had your face and Negus' face and Callum's face. And I think there was one that said something like, red trousers.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Dog in a pram?
George Browne: Yeah. Dog in a pram. There was another one that said mustard trousers.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: I can't remember. I think it was a 16 square grid and I don't think I can reel off all 16 of them. But you get the vibe.
Richard Prideaux: So what we propose to do this year is we'll have a, maybe I can get it together for the end of this week, we'll see. If it's in the show notes for this episode, I did. If not, then there'll be something next week or the week after that will have something, a list there for you to buy a game card from. So there'll be several different versions. There'll be around about a pound each and the money goes to the Game Wildlife Conservancy Trust. You can buy as many as you wish, but the idea will be that you go round with your bingo card and you can see what you can spot. We also want suggestions from the audience and there will be a link for this in the show notes to what goes on those bingo cards. In fact, I've just realized the linear nature of time. I need your suggestions, don't I, before I make the bingo cards. So there we go. That's how time works, Richard. There's past, present and future. Right.
Amy Green: I mean, I do sometimes question if you can understand that, but you know, let's carry on.
Richard Prideaux: I exist in four-dimensional time anyway, so Yeah. We want your suggestions, so send them into the link that's in the show notes for this episode. Send them to producer Amy. Just things like red trousers, mustard trousers, dog in a pram, Vinnie Jones.
George Browne: Full camo, full tweed.
Amy Green: White jeans.
Richard Prideaux: Stag do, Hen do.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: Cowboy hats.
George Browne: Yeah. Teal for Dora.
Richard Prideaux: That's Amy, actually.
Amy Green: I was going to say.
Richard Prideaux: Pith helmet.
George Browne: Yes, very good one.
Richard Prideaux: That kind of thing. So we want your suggestions, please.
George Browne: And this is just for fun, so there's no prize. Is that right?
Richard Prideaux: Yes, because a prize would have required organisation and putting out funding for it. The prize is that the GWCT get some money and we all have some fun.
George Browne: Yes, but I do think like it would be quite fun for people to be able to share their success. Have you thought of that? That's a very good idea. I was thinking about this. But Amy, have you got an idea before I jump in?
Amy Green: Mine was very simple, is that they can tag Country Slide Pod on social media with a picture of their card if they want to share it that way.
George Browne: I think one step further to that, which is in order to be declared as to having achieved bingo, which now I say that out loud, sounds wrong.
Amy Green: Well, you can't take it back.
Richard Prideaux: Hold on, darling. We're very nearly at bingo. Nearly there.
George Browne: Anyway, you have to take a picture of the item in question for it to count.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: So then you upload your pictures.
Richard Prideaux: So I feel like on Friday or Saturday at the game fair, my phone is going to explode the moment I get back into signal with tags of women in white miniskirts and things like that.
Amy Green: Your algorithm is going to be all over the place.
Richard Prideaux: It already is from what you people send to me.
Amy Green: Moving on. So Game Fair Bingo.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, we'll announce it via our social media, probably with all the links when it's ready to buy, but that will be in the next week or two. We won't make any money from this apart from the payment processor fees, everything all go to the Gable Wildlife Conservancy Trust. who I'm sure are over the moon to find out they're being tied to this event in this way.
George Browne: Funding is funding.
Amy Green: Exactly.
Richard Prideaux: You can take the check without having to approve the method by which it's arrived. Yes. Okay.
George Browne: That's our excuse and we're sticking with it.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, for the sake of our lawyers, but there we go. So that is the Countryside Game Fair Bingo. Will you be encouraging the Guns on Pegs audience to engage in this?
George Browne: Yes, I think I will. We're sort of recording a bit out of whack at the moment because, well, complicated reasons, but mainly because I'm going on holiday next week. So I need to work out in which episode I need to say this so that it goes out just before. It might be the one I'm recording tomorrow, but I'm not sure.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, so you'll have to mention a link that does not exist yet in the episode that you're recording tomorrow.
George Browne: Which will go out when the link does exist.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, fantastic. Well done everyone.
George Browne: Yes, the linear nature of time is causing problems again.
Richard Prideaux: I often find it does in my life. I've thought of an idea after it should have happened and then I make the preparations for something that doesn't exist yet.
George Browne: Yeah, that checks out.
Richard Prideaux: So speaking of which, the Project X. Yes. So we're all going to be very cagey about talking about this for various reasons, but we have hinted at it in the past. This is not the thing that Callums can't talk about yet. That's a completely different thing. We'll let Callum talk about that on his own.
Amy Green: That's definitely not a project either.
Richard Prideaux: No, make a time code note on that, Amy, in case I have to remove it later for legal reasons. So Project X, you may remember, regular listeners, way back in, I think it was February of this year, I hurriedly announced that we're going to be doing some extra shows in sort of addition to Country Slide, where they will be things like how the countryside works, which will feature the melodious tones of George Brown off of Scry Pound and Guns on Pegs.
George Browne: It will. Now, it should be added that it's not going to be me that's doing the explaining there, as we've already established. I'm not qualified to explain how farming works, for example.
Richard Prideaux: No, that's the extra content, isn't it? George has a stab at it before someone's explained it to him.
George Browne: That's actually quite a good idea.
Amy Green: That is a very good idea. I might just keep that one under our hats. Yeah.
George Browne: I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be fun.
Richard Prideaux: And we've also got the Land Girls podcast, which is going to be Amy.
Amy Green: It is. It is. I'm really looking forward to that one as well. Doing lots of interviews to find out all about what what other different careers in conservation, working on the land, all these kind of things that were happening around the UK mostly and talking to the women who were in those roles, finding out more about them.
Richard Prideaux: There is an element of finding people who genuinely work in conservation and have been working in it for a while or are forging a career there. not just on social media, not just doing it performatively for Instagram and things like that. I'm being very careful with my wording.
Amy Green: No, but essentially it's not going to be names that you have heard of necessarily, but they're going to be people who know what they're doing and are very good at it.
George Browne: Yes, I think that the really interesting thing there is the sort of practition in the nature of it, because the social media image of the countryside is particularly where women is concerned is possibly not focused on people who are actually out there, to borrow Patrick Galbraith's getting mud under the fingernails so often. It tends to be more of a sort of lifestyle approach to it rather than the actually getting your hands dirty and doing things. I think it's going to be a really, really great, great podcast that.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. We're hopefully trying to subvert the algorithm a little bit in doing that as well, because it's quite easy for us chaps to do that kind of thing, because we can just let ourselves go and be a \*\*\*\*\* handed son of the soil whilst not really caring about our appearance, unless you're Harry Hutchinson, in which case you have to be absolutely ripped.
George Browne: I have wondered whether this is where I've been going wrong all this time.
Richard Prideaux: As I said on the after show the other week, I have landed a partner now. I never have to worry about my appearance or attractiveness to women ever again.
George Browne: If somebody said to you that Country Slide would increase its listenership tenfold if you were suddenly absolutely stacked, would that change your view?
Richard Prideaux: I mean, it would sort of remove the cider and pasties from my diet, which genetically I'm predisposed towards. I don't know, maybe. But even when I was spectacularly fit, I was still broadly this shape. I'm just a weird freak of genetics. I'm not sure it's actually possible. Whereas the ripped George Brown, sort of when, was Guy Adams from Scribehound of the Daily Mail, got absolutely ripped for men's fitness. And he said it wasn't that hard, which is really annoying.
George Browne: Yeah, I don't think I believe him. He told me what that required and it sounded very hard.
Richard Prideaux: Not as hard as his abs, no.
Amy Green: It sounds like it takes a lot of discipline to get to that level and also a removing of many of life's joys from your life.
George Browne: Well, and also in Guy Adams's case, to be on the cover of Men's Health, he had to have a full torso wax.
Amy Green: Oh, no.
Richard Prideaux: I think in my case that would be sort of a fourth rd bridge kind of issue, but you know the moment you finish waxing one end. It's like coming back at the other. So Back on Project X, which is not the official. No, well, I think that's going to be the case. This is not a instead of Country Slide. Country Slide will continue and it will continue in the same possibly slightly career steering way that it has already. But we'll be adding on stuff either side of it. It's basically there with more of the voices that you may already know and love. from other audio projects and some new ones you haven't got a chance to know yet. Well, that sounded all too professional, but I ruined it by saying that.
George Browne: I think one should always undercut moments of professionalism with that sort of thing.
Richard Prideaux: As you know, Callum's thing about he's like offering a treat to a dog. He's got his teeth, his teeth are slightly on show, his lips are slightly pulled back. He's never quite taking it in the way it was meant. That's like us with professionalism. We could get there, but we're choosing not to.
George Browne: I think it's actually quite a good point though, because, you know, I think one of the things that we all agree on is that a level of incompetence and chaos is sort of part of the part of the vibe to this. we want to take how the countryside works, for example, I'm going to talk to people who really do know whatever aspect of the countryside it is that we're talking about, going to be talking to proper experts, but there's going to be a degree of misunderstanding and attempting to translate things for the layman, I suppose.
Richard Prideaux: I think there's an issue with every kind of media, but any kind of niche media in which there is a rural media world. It either ends up being restrained by some external forces, whether that's commercial, whether it's who your advertisers are, who your funders are, those kind of things. Or it's the So repetition of what you hear other people doing and there's a sort of a house style that develops within that niche. I want to keep going in the way we have done, which is maybe reflect more of what we see on the ground and the conversations we have on the ground and those kind of things, rather than what you, know, you tune in, let's hear about the countryside. Oh, that sounds nothing like me being on the phone to Nick or Matthew or whatever.
George Browne: Yes, and I think there's the other aspect to it as well, which is, if you take farming as an example, one, farming is a massive sort of catch-all term for everything from, growing a little bit of mustard for Coleman's to vast, industrial milking operations and this sort of stuff. So it's sort of hard to hard to put it all in one category in one sense. But also when you're talking about it, you can either talk about it in terms for, somebody who lives in Clapham. Actually, Clapham was the wrong choice. You know, someone who lives in, some suburb somewhere and, but the closest they get to say a cow is, the picture of 1 on the bottle of milk they buy from Tesco's. Or there's the sort of expert farmer audience who are expected to know what all of the acronyms and all that sort of thing means. But actually, I can read a sheep farming article and it might as well be in French, but I do know my way roughly around cereal farming because that's what we do here. So I guess the idea is to talk to an engaged countryside audience about things that might be new to them or where their level of understanding is not so great and trying to find that balance in there, if that makes sense.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. There's also preconceptions that come with all of these things that if you're in dairy farming, to you, what farming is and you also have a preconception about what the public thinks about you. And that might come from the comments on social media or under an article about farming or what somebody has replied to your post about your farm shop with or something like that. So everyone, I think, can benefit from seeing what other people think about their world as well as finding out how somebody doing something that is basically the different flavour of what you do. They have a different preconception, different view of that world entirely.
George Browne: Yes, and we can go incredibly granular with this as well, again, because you know dairy farming in East Anglia is a pretty different beast to dairy farming in Wales, just by virtue of the landscape. You know, it comes with its own set of challenges and ways of doing things.
Richard Prideaux: Within these new shows, we're hoping to bring in some things that we've already done. So Amy and I run Wild Food People, wildfoodpeople.co.uk. It's where you can find our foraging courses. Somewhere in July, all those public foraging courses are going to move over to our social enterprise to the CIC, Community Interest Company, that we set up just about 18 months or so ago, so that they can benefit that because they all take place in landscapes that we manage under that social enterprise anyway, so it makes sense. That means that the Wild Food People podcast, which has been, I think the last one we put out was June last year, with John Miller.
Amy Green: It's been on a hiatus, hasn't it?
Richard Prideaux: That will be coming back and that will be coming back covering all aspects of wild food, whether that's foraging, hunting, fishing, preparation of food, the issues affecting conservation and gathering food from the wild, as well as some of the outdoor cooking and wilder ingredients, even if they are slightly on the farm side of things as well, which again, I think you'll be having some input into George with your setting fire to animals on coals of.
George Browne: Yes, this is one of my principal hobbies at this time of year is setting fire to lumps of wood and then subsequently using those to set fire to various different sizes of bits of animal or fish actually come to think of it.
Richard Prideaux: Explain cooking badly, yes.
George Browne: Yeah, well, exactly. This is what I do is I cook badly. And again, I think this comes back to what we were talking about with the, you know, the levels of incompetence because I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not an expert at these things and I think that we'll all be learning from one another on this side of things.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and I like this idea of continual learning journeys because, well, anytime you get to the point of thinking, right, I know everything now, I don't need to learn anymore, something will swing in from left field and swipe you across your face with a new lesson, won't it?
George Browne: And I think that there's this sort of curiosity as well. If you take the sort of fire cooking thing, live fire cooking thing, you maybe start off with something fairly straightforward like a steak, but it's not long, if you're like me at any rate, before you're starting to think things like, I wonder if I can asado an entire roe deer. And instantly I can tell you the answer is, yes you can, but it's not a tremendous idea.
Richard Prideaux: I don't plan to do many other things that day.
George Browne: Yeah, it takes a while. It's not the best way to cook a deer. That's my lesson that I learned on that one.
Richard Prideaux: But that's, to be perfectly honest, the wild food people element of this is the one I'm most excited about because we get to expand into so many issues and so many areas because being able to cook something wild over an open fire in a place where it is lawful and appropriate to have that fire. There are so many steps to get there. It's like this thing about a bacon cheeseburger is one of the most technologically advanced things in human civilization because of all the stuff you have to have to be able to make. that bread, have the lettuce there at the same time as bacon, at the same time as a burger, have cheese that won't go off. It's this huge technological development. There's this sort of skill development, skill acquisition layer you need to have to be able to cook over an open fire well in the outdoors.
George Browne: Yes, you're absolutely right. It's new skills all the way down, isn't it? From acquiring the thing that you're going to cook to preparing it to making the fire, managing the fire, different cooking techniques, so on and so forth. It's almost infinite how deep you can go into it.
Amy Green: Is and there's so much to learn with that. And if you go into smoking and all of that side of it as well, and it's just, there's always that area where chemistry starts overlapping with it as well. And it's whether it's more art or science and Yeah.
George Browne: Yes. I think that's another really good point, which is that there's going to be lots of opportunities for bodgery in this, particularly on the cooking side of things, because another thing that I'm quite a fan of is overly elaborate cooking apparatus. I've always wanted a cold smoker that's made out of, a bit of an old Hoover and a metal shoe box and I don't even know what a metal shoe box is, but that sort of thing.
Richard Prideaux: When I first met you, one of the first things you asked me was, have you ever made a water wheel powered spit to go over a fire?
George Browne: Exactly, that kind of thing. You know, is it necessary? No. Does it really achieve anything very much? Also, no. Will it work? Probably not. I think the fun is in the trying.
Richard Prideaux: We also need somewhere with running water where we can light the fire. Or it's this summer, maybe not. This is an autumn project, maybe?
George Browne: Yes, well I suppose that if we do the cookery in the wetter months, it reduces the probability of us setting fire to the landscape as well, which is probably quite a good message to put out.
Richard Prideaux: If our first, if our first press release is sorry, we've set fire to half of Hampshire.
George Browne: I think episode one of Wild Food People, disposable BBQ somewhere in the North Pennines.
Richard Prideaux: On the grouse more, yes.
Amy Green: Locally, locally sourced poultry.
Richard Prideaux: Well, that's the thing. Well, they used to do the race, didn't they, to, was it the Savoy who used to try and get the first grouse of the season?
George Browne: I think they still do that, I think you can, there's some places that sort of pride themselves on being able to serve you grouse on the 12th in London.
Richard Prideaux: So as red grouse are the game bird that is wild, really. You know, it's the most shot in the UK that has to be a wild source. You could shorten that chain quite substantially by having a disposable BBQ on the edge of the grouse bird. So you shoot a grouse, the first grouse of the season, try and nail it onto the BBQ straight away.
George Browne: Yeah. Or, have your loader stand there with a long pole landing net.
Amy Green: That is a skill.
Richard Prideaux: Or a gaff or something. You can sort of try and drag it up the ball and towards you. Why is it you've not had me back on my guns on pegs part? So I think that's a good place to leave the main show for now, but as a summary, we want your suggestions for things that will be on the Game Fair bingo card, and then they'll be available for purchase prior to the Game Fair, with all proceeds going to the Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust. Is it Conservation Trust and not Conservancy?
George Browne: It is the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it hasn't been Conservancy Trust since about 1974 or something. something, I don't know. I should know, but GWCT, you know what they do. Wonderful things are great partridges. Then we also have our Project X, which will be landing hopefully sometime just after the game fair and thereabouts, which will feature all this or the start of all this wonderful new content and a new look, but in country slide and the voices you love won't be going anywhere. How you feel about that is down to you. That might be a relief. It might just be sort of a portent of doom coming, well, just for the rest of your life, really, because we're not going anywhere. Have I missed anything?
George Browne: I think that's everything.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So on to the after show. Goodbye, everyone.
George Browne: Bye.
Amy Green: Bye.