{"id":3514075,"date":"2025-06-24T08:49:57","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T08:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3514075"},"modified":"2025-06-24T08:49:57","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T08:49:57","slug":"a-clown-and-two-romances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-06-24\/a-clown-and-two-romances\/","title":{"rendered":"A clown and two romances"},"content":{"rendered":"

A commenter under my last post wrote \u2018all eyes on Gaza from now on\u2019. I\u2019m not sure exactly what he meant, but recent world events suggest that all eyes also need to be on Washington, DC as well as Tehran and Jerusalem. Probably Moscow, Kyiv, Beijing and the Straits of Hormuz as well.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to keep your eyes on all these places all at the same time. And, even if you do, there\u2019s very little impact you can have on the decisions that are made in and about them. In fact, I\u2019d argue that giving our attention to the power plays of global political centres can help feed their pathologies, which is one reason I don\u2019t write about them much anymore. That and the fact that I don\u2019t have much to say about their specifics that other more expert commentators don\u2019t say better.<\/p>\n

I do have some things to say about the generalities of political power centres, and I say them in my forthcoming book. So enough on that for now. Perhaps the only opinion I\u2019ll venture on current world events is that the view I\u2019ve often heard about Donald Trump being different from other US presidents in his domestic focus and refusal to play global war games is now safely in the bin.<\/p>\n

Okay, perhaps just one other opinion \u2013 current events aren\u2019t really helping the case of those who think nuclear energy has a big role to play in tackling global environmental problems.<\/p>\n

But instead of all that, I\u2019m going to focus in this post on more local and parochial matters, emerging from\u00a0this comment<\/a>\u00a0from Walter under my last one: \u201cBy the way, I don\u2019t know what a clown farmer is. Perhaps it is someone who has to have a second income and goes to festivals and the like?\u201d<\/p>\n

My intention isn\u2019t to single out this remark for criticism so much as just to use it as a point of departure, but I guess I\u2019d say that in my experience most farmers across most scales have a second income of one sort or another \u2013 part and parcel of the desperate economics of the food sector and, by extension, the modern world. Going to festivals and the like I confess is rarer within the profession, and perhaps a little more clownish. I\u2019m not much of a festival goer myself, so I\u2019d have happily been able to exempt myself from such accusations of clownery but for the fact that, as you can see, I\u2019m going to the Glastonbury Festival next week.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All I\u2019ll say in my defence is that I\u2019m in the fortunate position of having a free \u2018Performer\u2019 ticket, and I\u2019ll be making the case for small-scale agrarian localism in a couple of talks there. I never dreamed when I started this blog that it would lead to a Glastonbury performance, but there we have it. So, if you happen to be at the festival do join me to discuss finding lights in a dark age at the Speaker\u2019s Forum at 11am on Friday. And also talking about \u2018Food Security in a Changing Climate\u2019 at 2pm next Sunday. Originally this was slated to be a discussion between me and the Labour MP Clive Lewis, one of the best among that bad bunch, but it now looks like it\u2019s just going to be me on my lonesome. So do join if you can.<\/p>\n

But let me get back to this question of who qualifies as a \u2018real\u2019 farmer, rather than merely one of the clowning variety. This is something I\u2019ve wrestled with in my writing and in my self-identity over the years. In ways I won\u2019t rehash again here, I think our society puts too much weight on the term \u2018farmer\u2019, and still more on \u2018real farmer\u2019. One reason I\u2019ve embraced the identity of \u2018farmer\u2019 is to push back against this, but I\u2019ve sometimes felt uncomfortable when others represent me as an example of that revered and semi-mythical being, the real farmer. Clown farmer is probably closer to the mark, to be honest.<\/p>\n

A point I make in my forthcoming book is that comedy and clownery are serious things, so perhaps \u2018clown farmer\u2019 is in any case an identity I can seriously embrace. There\u2019s a lot of online chat in the alternative farming space that dismisses people as hobbyists who, in contemporary parlance, are seen as merely \u2018larping\u2019 or \u2018cosplaying\u2019 at farming. But why stop at farming? The modern world and the kinds of things it places value on is one big cosplay as far as I can see. At least cosplaying as a farmer is kind of on the right track.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I don\u2019t mean to sound too defensive about all this. The superpower of the clown is the ability to laugh at themselves. I could do with a bit more of that, and so could our society. A clown farmer in a clown society is good enough for me.<\/p>\n

Still, as I said, clowning is a serious matter. The late, great anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has had a big influence on me in his view that the modern epoch erred when it forgot about the comedy of political power claims (Mikhail Bakhtin<\/a>\u00a0is another influence along those lines). Perhaps the idea of being a \u2018real farmer\u2019 involves something similar, albeit further down the power hierarchy than such comic claims as being \u2018prime minister\u2019, \u2018president for life\u2019, or \u2018his excellency\u2019.<\/p>\n

Another influence on me and another late and great was my permaculture teacher, Patrick Whitefield. I liked his definition of \u2018farming\u2019 \u2013 not a job, not physical work, not some time-honoured country club with exclusive membership, but a way of observing the landscape and thinking through the intertwined human and natural ecologies lying latent within it.<\/p>\n

Which neatly segues into my second general theme for this post. Last weekend I went hiking and bird-watching in Eryri (Snowdonia, North Wales) with my son. Then on Sunday (father\u2019s day) we went rock-climbing. It wasn\u2019t exactly a festival, but it certainly involved some clowning around on my part. Here\u2019s a picture my son took of me on the route. I\u2019m the guy in the white hat, because \u2013 clown or not \u2013 I\u2019m always the good guy in all of my stories. And actually it\u2019s a helmet, not a hat, because it\u2019s the good guys that get all the flak.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The route is graded \u2018Very Difficult\u2019, which in the strange world of British climbing grades means it\u2019s very easy. It was first climbed in 1905, when it probably\u00a0was\u00a0<\/em>very difficult with the knowledge and equipment available then. The last time I was there was thirty-odd years ago when I tried leading it with ice axes and crampons as a winter route. It was too warm, wet and unfrozen, and I was beaten back by a waterfall pouring through a gully I had to climb. Still, that effort was way more badass than my exploits last weekend, where I wobbled up the route with a tight top rope from above courtesy of my fearless son. So maybe there\u2019s a theme here along the lines that the good clown needs to grow old gracefully and learn when it\u2019s time to hand on the clowning to younger generations. Anyway, I\u2019m glad I did the route with him. Though next father\u2019s day I might just ask for a bottle of whisky instead.<\/p>\n

Another theme emerges from the historical timing of the route\u2019s first ascent. Mountaineering developed as a leisure pursuit in Britain in late Victorian and Edwardian times. This was partly because Britain\u2019s industrial and colonial economy had only then accumulated enough surplus for some people at least to be able to fritter away their time climbing mountains for no practical purpose (climbing remained an upper-class pastime until after World War II, when a new generation of working-class climbers from the northern cities pushed standards forward).<\/p>\n

But the emergence of mountaineering in that era was also partly a Romantic reaction to the march of that very industrial economy that made it possible \u2013 finding a peace and a meaning in nature and wild spaces, and in testing oneself against non-human forces like rock and gravity, with their beautiful indifference to our human sense of self-importance and progress. Also, escaping the restricted, tamed and monolithic routines of an over-humanised and consumption-oriented everyday life. In that sense, mountaineering sits within a Romantic tradition that also invests the contemporary conservation and rewilding movement (note the capital \u2018R\u2019, by the way \u2013 it\u2019s important!)<\/p>\n

Heading down from the climb through Cwm Llugwy, our main companions on the mountainside were sheep, some of them nosing around ruined old stone pens. The long association in these parts between human, dog and sheep that\u2019s enabled people to coax high-quality food and fibre from these wet, infertile hills is to my mind one of the more awe-inspiring achievements of human science.<\/p>\n

Across the other side of the Ogwen Valley, my son and I had hiked up Y Garn through Cwm Idwal the previous day. Cwm Idwal, as I understand it, has been cleared of its sheep for the last twenty odd years to protect its subarctic flora and promote the regrowth of trees. It did seem slightly more scrubby than when I used to visit in the salad days of my youthful climbing exploits. Only slightly, but then nature moves to a different rhythm than impatient humans. Also, contrary to the billing, we saw quite a lot of sheep in the cwm. Somebody is paid, I think, to keep clearing these marauders from the cwm, but I daresay it\u2019s not an easy task.<\/p>\n

On my way home, I saw a roadside sign \u2013 \u2018NO to Rewilding: Save Taxpayers Money\u2019. I\u2019ve written before about the great rewilding debate and I don\u2019t plan to rehearse all the issues here. Suffice to say I\u2019m not averse to the idea of cutting sheep numbers in the Welsh hills, provided there\u2019s some like-for-like redress elsewhere in the economy \u2013 cutting traders in the City of London, for example. But I do wish the pro-rewilding camp would take more trouble to see the Romantic roots of their own position, and the oddness from an agrarian perspective of paying farmers not to practice forms of local farming that cannot be dismissed themselves as a romantic carryover from the past.<\/p>\n

A final observation to close. I\u2019ve been making some modest efforts to learn Welsh lately for various reasons. One of them arose from Carwyn Graves\u2019s book\u00a0Tir<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and his remarks in it about the Welsh language and the way it richly encodes knowledges of nature and human implication in the landscape (I have quite some way to go before I\u2019m in a position to comment further about that). Another is that I\u2019ve visited Wales often for many years without ever feeling the need to learn anything about this other and more ancestral language of southern Britain. Alas only recently has that struck me as quite arrogant.<\/p>\n

As I said, I have a long way to go yet, but I was pleased to be able to pick out a few words on this recent trip. A man in a whitewashed cottage called T\u0177 Gwyn was pottering around its small ornamental garden as I passed. How on earth have I spent all these years in this country without even knowing what that meant? Coming back to the theme of my opening sentences, I only wish other men in other T\u0177 Gwyns (sorry, Tai Gwyn) were likewise tending to their own gardens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In ways I won\u2019t rehash again here, I think our society puts too much weight on the term \u2018farmer\u2019, and still more on \u2018real farmer\u2019. One reason I\u2019ve embraced the identity of \u2018farmer\u2019 is to push back against this, but I\u2019ve sometimes felt uncomfortable when others represent me as an example of that revered and semi-mythical being, the real farmer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3514112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79719,213531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3514075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foodwater","category-food-water-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514075"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3514113,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514075\/revisions\/3514113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3514112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}