Crofty Eschews Tesco for Local Northumbrian Holiday Heroes

Fresh back from a week's camping at Bellingham just over the top of Hadrian's wall in Northumbria, I thought I'd share my holiday heroes.

Determined to avoid Tesco and contribute to the local economy we sought out local food producers (and purveyors of excellent gardening and music in the process).

So here are my local heroes, starting with food:

Kielder Organic Meats: This farm literally next door to the Camping and Caravanning Club site at Bellingham does exactly what it says on the tin. They produce pork, beef and lamb of the highest quality possible, butchering it on site and selling from their farm door shop.

If you have any consideration about animal welfare it's worth going to see their happy rare breed sheep, pigs and cattle contentedly allowed to roam and grow unenhanced by artificial accelerants. They couldn't be happier apart from being offered the unlikely - and unsustainable - option of survival.

Ridley's Fish and Game: We sought out this local dealer tucked away on the uninviting Acomb Industrial Estateindustrial unit, and it was worth the effort. Mr Ridley is knowledgable and passionate about food; and was eager to promote the benefits of local business - I'll bet Terry Leahy's ears were burning when we'd finished our grumpy-old-man-rant that listed the number of small businesses run out of town by Tesco's arrival, including local food producers initially invited in to the Tesco web only to be trapped and forced out of business by the unreasonable demands of the food giant.

The barbecued Mackerel plucked from the sea that morning, and the Rabbit stew the following day were just perfect, and all the better for knowing where they came from.
OK, that's food, now on to music.

All over Bellingham were posters advertising Bellingham All Acoustic Club (or BAA Club - gettit?...Baa, rural England, sheep?). Not only that but during our week away Rod Clements, ace guitarist, ex-Lindisfarne (the group that were so good they named an island after them), was playing their small hotel based venue. It was touch and go whether we got a place - we had to put our names on a list - but went and were welcomed to the sort of folky club that deserves encouragement. On the bill with Rod were Clockwork a group of young adults from a Hexham school playing traditional music with energy and obvious enjoyment that said more about the real future of live music than any of the wannabe celebs queuing to prance before a panel of experts with an eye on a commodity rather than art.

Also on the bill were the club's founders: Landermason. Paul Mason and Fiona Lander are a fairly well known duo who play an impressive range of instruments and styles - Paul's guitar playing is the sort that wants you to stick your guitar on the campfire and not bother again, he's that clever.

Rod Clements himself is one of the UK's, not unsung, but undersung, songwriters. He writes well observed bluesy songs about real life with a lovely turn of phrase that can be both challenging and emotionally charged. His guitar playing is superb ranking him among the UK's best slide guitarists, and his solo performance is warm, witty and a great evening's entertainment - check him out if you can.

(Oh, and just to get geeky for a minute, is one of the very few people to be playing a 1970s Harmony Sovereign guitar like me)

Finally, on to our top tourist destination.

The Garden Station: Another 'does what it says on the tin' highlight. At the former Langley Station on the old disused Hexham rail line is a garden created between station platforms that would have once bustled with local travellers. Now set in mature woodland it is a delightful garden that has that 'nature-just-restrained' feel. But more than that, the whole site breathes peace and oneness (sorry if that's a bit hippy-dippy), but the station has been converted into a vegetarian cafe with excellent meals created by the CordonVert chef and current garden custodian Mike Winstanley.

The station no longer bustles but oozes peace and tranquility, making it the perfect setting for a range of creative courses on gardening, poetry, art and much more.


So eschew Tesco, forget National Trust and their pestering for membership: seek out the small and support them.

All Is Not Equal Under The Skye

Skye is a beautiful place, a far away wild mountainous island where it's still possible to believe - despite a bridge to the mainland - that you have left the UK for another land where people have Viking blood and no telly. It is a place of enormous skies, towering mountain vistas and roads that go for tens of miles to only one place.

We camped at the Loch Greshornish Camping and Caravanning Club site, in May, and learnt that a small island, sitting almost at the Northwesterly corner of our land, gets whipped by the spinning outer edges of the weather with pole twisting, canvas flapping force at times.

The Camping and Caravanning Club franchise has recently been bought by Dave and Nicky - English comer-inners to Skye who bought the farmhouse, croft and existing campsite two years ago. Since taking on the C and CC mantle they have had their work cut out - as well as bringing the place up to standard they must manage the substantial tract of land with sheep, ducks, chickens and long-horn Highland cattle they inherited with the land.

Chatting to people on site who knew it before it's apparent Dave and Nicky have done a lot of work - hard standing for caravanners, new roads, and greatly improved facilities - new toilets and showers to name a couple. But stood up to my elbows in suds in the outdoor washing up hut listening to the conversations , a noticeable divide is apparent in opinion on the site. There seems to be two camps (sorry!): those who need cosmetic improvement and those whose needs are simply functional.

Take the outdoor washing-up area. An electric light might be a nice thing to have, one day; but it doesn't go dark until ten o'clock on Skye - but you should just have one, right, everyone want to wash up in the dark after ten pm, don't they? That seemed to be the illogical stance of one of the site's detractors.

Others complained about the poor quality of the joinery inside the shower block, the door handles admittedly looked like they had been there since they were salvaged from a house in the 1970s; but they worked, everything worked. It was just a bit tatty and very much a work in progress. Work that means 12 hours a day for Dave and Nicky.

So who are in these two camps? Those who seem to need things to look nice, by and large, seem to be caravanners and motor home owners who have not been tent campers. They compare this site unfavourably to the regimented sounding, highly efficient Caravan Club sites; whilst tent campers and carvanners who have gone soft (sorry again) seem much more tolerant of this lovely loch side site, realising that there is more than enough beauty on Skye without having to rely on the inside of the toilet door for it.

If you are considering camping on Skye do go to the site at Loch Greshornish and stay with Dave and Nicky where they will for this year, be run ragged by their C and CC mentor while he drills them in the ways of the club. Eat Nicky's eggs for breakfast less than an hour after she has collected them from beneath clucking hens and quacking ducks. Join them in a lock side walk as the sun sets and chat about the life changing decision they made to come to Skye, and understand why it is worth the hard work when they end their day with that lochside stroll rather than watch The Apprentice on telly.

This site will get better, the new owners have the drive and vision to make it work, but I sort of hope it doesn't get too smart and snazzy. Skye isn't like that - the Crofters Hebridean life was always about surviving against the elements with the resources around you, not stamping your impression on the landscape insisting you have your way - I doubt you'd succeed much in any case.

I'd Give It a Minute or Two, If I Were You...

Thinking about camping and the minor inconveniences made me think about the other occasions when we are forced in to rubbing shoulders with people we don't know particularly well. It made me wonder whether there was an etiquette that might save the embarrassment that comes with doing private things in public.

I had cause to think following our most recent trip at the Camping and Caravanning Club site at Rhandimrwyn in Wales. I had a particularly bad attack of wobbly tummy (readers of a gentle disposition might want to turn away here). and sat in a cubicle I heard a chap enter the Gents and after taking a lungful of the air, struggle to stifle a retch. Fearing I was the cause of his nausea I hid until it was safe to emerge undetected.

Fortunately the C&CC toilets were their usual excellent standard and so I was quite comfortable sitting reflecting on how a life among working men has made this sort of incident unnecessary. There is a sort of culture among men, particularly from the manual trades, that breeds toilet etiquette. Some of you will already know what I am talking about. The sort of thing that causes a colleague to say, as you pass in the doorway of the Gents', "I'd give it a minute or two if I were you son..."

And there it is, a perfect expression of etiquette: the one not wishing to burden the other with the dreadful smell he has left behind.

But is it that simple? Experience shows that it is not always easy to gauge the quality of the fug you leave behind.

I think there is a gap in the market for some sort of guide, coupled with an indicator device to be left on the toilet door. I can see it now: a single fingered clock with ten minute segments to indicate the length of interval required before it is advisable to enter.

On the inside door of each cubicle we could have a guide that helps the inexperienced sitter determine what interval to recommend. For example, whether you can actually smell your own, is a good guide to severity; whether there is any thickening of the atmosphere is another; and whether you feel lightheaded is a good indication of toxicity.

Yes, watch the next series of Dragon's Den and I might just be there making a pitch to Sir Alan.

Oh You Take the High Road etc...

I don't care what anyone says, you can't beat a camping holiday. There is just something special about camping that makes up for the inconvenience of shared showers, shared toilets and/or mud outside your front door for a few days. Outside our front door last week, almost literally, was Loch Lomond - the Camping and Caravan Club site at Luss goes right down to the shore of the Loch and it is lovely.

What is best though is the privilege of being by the loch before the coach loads of old ladies bearing carrier bags from Edinburgh Woollen Mills, when there are the best views of the loch - the views you see when the dog has dragged you out of your sleeping bag at 7.15, when the mist is still on the water and it is perfectly still.

For these views I even forgave the site for having traffic howling past on the A82. If we are to compare C And C sites around the loch I think that its position wins hands down over the site at Milarrochy Bay on the Eastern shore. What made it even sweeter though was when strolling along the beach of an evening, we were sharing these views with the patrons of the Lodge on Loch Lomond, a hotel whose car park was packed with high end BMWs, a few Porsche Carreras and a Ferrari 350M and many of whose clientele were well heeled Americans who thought the beach was exclusively theirs:

"Hi there, we are staying here, are you here for the day?"
"No we are staying here too"
"Oh, which room are you in ?"
"Ours goes right down to the shore..."

To be fair, by this time they'd sussed that our clothing designers were more Primarni and Ebay than Dolce Gabbana, but still, I think they thought we were quaint when they stopped to consider that we might not be entirely serious. And in any case, I challenge them to say they had a better time than we did.

Further along the loch shore, just beyond the boundaries of our site, lived a chap who played the bagpipes. To hear the sound of his evening practice drift across the loch was just enough to forgive Scotland for the other pipers you might hear hanging around the tourist locations in clan tartan with a cap held out hopefully to the passers by. Try as I might I couldn't stop the hairs on the back of my neck standing up when I heard the skirl of the pipes; it was all I could do to stop myself shouting 'Freedom!' in a loud voice with an accent somewhere between Glasgow and Melbourne.