'An Utter Disgrace.'

Even posh people have been put off.

A certain rural based emporium has been in the news in the last couple of days. I am going to admit something of which I’m deeply ashamed. I have been to, and purchased items from, that very emporium.

It is called Daylesford farm shop, and according to another local, Mr J Clarkson, it’s what inspired him to open his own farm shop 5 miles away.

Daylesford is a ridiculous vanity institution about 10 miles from where we live, it’s called a farm shop, and indeed the vast majority of the fruit, vegetables and meat they sell comes from the ‘farm.’

However the farm is a massive estate owned by Lord Bamford, the man who inherited JCB, the British based earth moving machinery manufacturer. JCB are a very big employer in the UK. Lord Bamford is a very keen Brexiteer and has given copious amounts of money to the UK Conservative party. Oh, and someone made him a Lord, but I’m sure there’s absolutely no connection. That’s how our great institutions have always worked, you buy favours and suck up to leaders. Who does that remind me of? I can’t think.

So, back to the story, it’s coming, don’t panic. Daylesford farm shop is a very good representation of what has happened to the UK in my lifetime. A farm shop, back 30 or 40 years ago was literally the corner of a barn on an actual working farm where a farmer sold some of their produce directly to the public.

It was a lovely, bucolic notion, a proper small scale family business. In the following decades some of those farm shops got bigger and bigger and sold more and more produce and products that didn’t even come from the farm.

Fake ‘traditional rural crafts’ like hand crafted baskets and herb pillows would also be on sale, or jars of local honey with a gingham covered top tied with a ribbon would sell for three times more than honey in a supermarket. And the great British middle class lapped it up.

Then, in 2002, when we were building an extension on our house, we started hearing more and more stories from the builders banging nails into our roof about an old barn a few miles away they were also working on.

It was a huge old structure with a massive Cotswold stone tiled roof. I have no idea how old the original barn is, but let’s just accept that it’s old, and when you want to refurbish such a building with tiles made from the local limestone, each one individually split and chiseled to shape, you’re looking at a cost in the many hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds.

But of course these particular farmers weren’t like Mr Johnson, the first farmer I worked for in 1973. He didn’t have a brass farthing to his name and his tatty trousers were held up with bailer twine. The Bamfords are cut from a different cloth, and over the next couple of years what had clearly once been a fairly prosperous farm in the Evenlode Valley was turned into a ‘Sex in the City’ fantasy of what the best of Britain can produce.

This is not to denigrate the people who work on the farm, many of whom we know. They are working on a genuinely organic farm, producing an incredible array of fruits vegetables and meat that is, without question, of a much better quality than the Aldi in the nearby town of Chipping Norton sell. Of course it is eye wateringly expensive and it is always, always incredibly busy.

But, as we have just learned, not as busy as it was a couple of days ago.

The farm shop was visited by a super rich religious extremist, fundamentalist weirdo and his poor downtrodden family. Now, I’m sure there have been plenty of super rich extremist weirdos visiting Daylesford over the years. The car park is generally littered with massive SUV’s. All black, all petrol or diesel, all hopelessly inefficient and happily pumping out multiple cubic meters of toxic gas for poor people to breath. That’s normal, we know how to live with that.

But this visit was a major step up. This weirdo demanded a 20 vehicle motorcade, yes, he thinks he’s that important, plus another dozen or so security staff dotted about the place, people with actual guns and bullet proof vests, in the car park of Daylesford.

We didn’t get this news from the press, although of course they were there in force, we got it from, I won’t use her real name, Mary, who was buying something posh I’m sure, so she was at the farm shop when the weird bloke arrive.

20 vehicles, all black, many armoured, massive, bulky, too wide for rural British lanes took over the car park. The weirdo in question then entered the posh shop before having lunch in a private room of the posh restaurant. He was there for three hours.

In all that time, the twenty massive vehicles with their massive inefficient engines were all running in case they needed to make a quick exit.

All twenty of them with their massive engines running for 3 hours. Just to facilitate lunch for a weird prick who recently stated that the very country he was visiting is, and I quote, “a truly Islamist country.” Yeah right, because you can hear the call to prayer all the time in effing Daylesford.

Jayzuss, get a grip mate.

And here’s something I only found out later. There are normally a handful of disabled parking spaces in the car park of the most expensive farmshop in the UK. This reactionary bigot and his absurd retinue took up every single disabled space for three hours, in a classic pig ignorant and utterly selfish, insensitive way.

Read the room beardy boy, we don’t want you around. Sling your christian hook and eff off.

Not that pricks like him give a flying fart, they are so heavily cosseted and protected, plus a twat like him will only get his news from the ranks of sycophantic dweebs that suck up to him and the mango mussolini. He probably believes the posh Cotswold folk were delighted to see him. LOL

Of course some bleeding heart liberal wishy washy tree hugging hypocrite like me isn’t going to be thrilled when the ultra right wing Christian fundamentalist freak Vice President is in my neighbourhood, but I enjoyed the fact that he really pissed off the posh English folk who surround me.

According to a report in the times, Mrs Poshly Toffingham (not her real name but it should be) asked some heavily armed security officer if he could turn his engine off as it was upsetting her labrador that was in her Tesla. She was worried about the fumes.

Interestingly, it appears the security detail did move the massive, heavy piece of shit truck but obviously they kept the pathetically hopeless engine chundering out the lovely clean diesel.

The woman we know, Mary, asked an armed British police officer if he could suggest to the many dozens of American security detail standing around if they could turn the filthy cars off as the toxic smell was wafting into the part of the huge Daylesford empire that sells scented candles and small bottles of body lotion for £69.95.

The officer responded by saying something along the lines of ‘To be honest I don’t think the current US administration are that bothered about the environment ma’am.’

Our friend overheard another lady of a certain age, cut glass accent, posh as they come, say in a very loud voice, and referring to the massive pile of black monster trucks, ‘This is an utter disgrace, who does this vile man think he is. Sod him.’

My advice, do not get between the Poshly Toffinghams and Daylesford farm shop.

So the wretched engines, the pride and joy of right minded American Christian weirdos, kept thundering away for another couple of hours until the thoroughly unpleasant man, his family and the 100 or so people paid to protect him from posh ladies departed in a high speed phalanx of gas belching monster trucks.

How utterly delightful that the Vice President of the United States of America got to see how the people of this sceptred isle really live.

I’m sure the Bamford’s were delighted, they clearly hold extremist weird views not that dissimilar to the truly intellectual VP, with his description of women who don’t want to marry a prick like him as “childless cat ladies.”

Anyway, I’ve just heard a call to prayer from the 14th century once Christian church in the Cotswold village I live in, so I must grab my carpet and pray.

In the meantime, just to lighten the mood, here’s a load of locals in the village of Charlbury, not far from Daylesford farmshop with their welcome to the VP.