We have a Patron !

General Sir Richard Trant, KCB DSc DL

On the back page of this Newsletter, we have reported the recent changes in the appointment of our President and Vice- President.  Your Executive Committee, at the same time, took the opportunity to consider the benefits of having a Patron as our figurehead and exercised our minds on what attributes such an appointee would have.

We soon realised that among our friends was an ideal candidate – General Sir Richard Trant, who had kindly given an illustrated talk to our Members in January 2002, on the work of the Cornwall Heritage Trust.  Our new President, John Grierson, informally approached Sir Richard and we are sure that Members will be delighted to learn that he readily and generously agreed.

Sir Richard, who has specifically asked us to call him Dick Trant, was born of a Cornish family in 1928 and was brought up in Newquay in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1945, he enlisted in the army - the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and transferred later into the Royal Horse Artillery.  He served in the Korean War, South Arabia and Northern Ireland on active service and many other places worldwide, retiring in the rank of General as Quarter Master General in 1986.

There followed twelve years in industry including Chairman Hunting Defence Division of Hunting plc.  Dick is now Chairman of the Cornwall Heritage Trust and is involved in many other heritage activities in Cornwall.

Dick’s appointment as our Patron not only adds another dimension to our respectability and influential clout, but also opens the door to partnership and synergy opportunities with other heritage and environmental organisations in the County.  We believe that his experience, contacts and influence, in this respect, will prove invaluable.

Members’ Letters to the Editor:

On Yer Re-Cycle !

Jane and I are incredibly smug and self-satisfied on this subject.  We are both inclined to be ever-so-slightly tree-hugging, and we are really concerned about the sheer amount of refuse we generate – especially so after the excess of a vastly-over-packaged Christmas.  So, we compost anything organic;  we bung everything made of paper into a box and take it to the supermarket paper-skip;  we stuff our plastic bottles into the bottle-bin; we do the same with glass and cans.   And that leaves, usually, around one shopping bag of non-recyclable stuff every three days, and we gratefully give that to the refuse-collector.   About two such bags every week does the trick – and it represents less than one quarter of all the garbage we generate.

None of this hard.   But we are always amazed at how few of our colleagues are doing anything at all by way of recycling, and when we are rude enough to ask them why not, the answer is one or other version of  “can’t be bothered” – usually expressed as  “we don’t have the time”, or  “it takes too many separate bins in our small kitchen”, or  “yes, good idea, we must start doing it – we’ll start tomorrow”.

It isn’t just about trying to help reduce the number of trees we pulp for paper, or cutting down on the amount of new plastic that has to be produced.   Every few weeks, there is a story about the latest village to be objecting to the latest landfill site proposal.  And over three-quarters – three quarters ! – of the stuff which goes into landfills is material which could have been recycled in one way or another.

This isn’t something we can leave to others.   Before long, someone will be suggesting that there are places on the Lizard Peninsula which would make excellent landfill sites, and then watch the fuss.   So the message for all members of Friends of the Lizard is simple: recycle or watch ourselves suffocate under our own garbage.  And if you really want to know how bad it is, watch for an announcement in a future Newsletter about a lecture we will be hosting.  It will be a must-attend.

John Grierson

To Veg or not to Veg?

I have a colleague who is a wishy-washy vegetarian.   For the most part, he manages by eating very little meat - there are health-reasons in his particular case.   Frankly, he tells me, he loves a good steak and some roast leg of lamb from time to time, but instead, he munches fairly happily on lots of veg, uses the Quorn-type products as a substitute, and eats fish occasionally.  Every now and then, when the meat-urge was too strong to resist, he used to trot up to his local butcher (an excellent shop in every way) because he believed that the meat stocked there had come from locally-grown animals, which had lived good, healthy and pleasant lives, and did not come from some factory-farm where they were treated as so many steaks on the hoof.

Then something happened which brought him close to tears, he explained, and made him very, very angry - and it has stopped him eating beef altogether.    On a farm close to where he lives, about thirty bull-calves were bought in to be fattened, and the result was so shocking,

so saddening, that he could hardly believe what was going on.  The farmer, he explained, had told him that bull-beef fattens more quickly than cow or bullock.  More money, more quickly.  Hard to argue against that, when farmers are having a tough time financially, but what a price these animals had to pay !  For the best part of a year, these social, grazing, herd animals were kept in a barn, without ever going outside once;  without ever tasting grass;  without being able to walk more than a few yards in any direction; without ever feeling the sun.   Oh, they were well-enough fed and watered, and grew into very large beasts indeed.  Stopping well short of attributing human feelings to cattle, my colleague assured me, he watched as these poor creatures pressed themselves against the gate as if to catch a glimpse of the outside world, and then retreated listlessly into the dark recesses of the barn.  They were treated barely better than geese force-fed and fattened for fois gras.

And the stench.   Bull urine is rich in hormones which give it a pungency and a punch which can knock over a wall – quite different from cows or bullocks – and unless the bull-pens are very well drained, and sluiced out almost daily, the accumulated stink is just frightening.  The barn was neither drained nor sluiced, and when the wind was in the wrong direction, my colleague had to close every window in the house, and on those rare-enough summer days last year when it would have been good to potter in the garden, he and his family had to stay indoors to escape the inescapable.

I don’t suppose that the business of bull-fattening is widespread.   It is, for a start, a damned dangerous way to farm.   And if it is done the way my colleague saw it being done, then neither he nor I can ever be sure that local butcher’s beef comes from cattle which will have had the kind of life which we fondly imagined it had enjoyed.  I very much hope that I am wrong about this, and that most (preferably all) locally-bred beef has been reared with compassion and understanding.   My colleague and I will not go near supermarket-beef.  And we never eat beef in restaurants.   So, a sort of creeping vegetarianism is taking hold of us, and I can’t say we mind too much. -  “Omnivore”