Bridport News
For those of us who have an unfortunate love of food, the Bridport area has always presented a significant problem.
There are some worryingly good restaurants around – and the number of them has increased in recent years. There is the farmers’ market, as well as many really excellent permanent, local food shops and, of course, the street market. All of these present significant temptations to the glutton.
What’s worse, the place is positively getting crowded with famous chefs.
For a long time, it was just a matter of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – though that in itself was quite a strain on those of us who salivate easily. But now I see that a winner has been declared for the Masterchef competition – and lo and behold it is person from a village near Bridport. The amazing thing about this particular person – apart from the fact that he was able to impress an array of the best chefs in Europe – is that he is an amateur with another very serious career. It seems that this does not stop him from cooking to perfection – or, indeed, scouring our local hills for special ingredients.
I don’t know whether it is something about the landscape or just a coincidence – but it seems we are located in the midst of a little culinary renaissance.
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It seems we are also located in a Freak Weather Zone.
A few weeks ago, we were in the middle of the Arctic. By the weekend before last, it was positively springtime, with the crocuses and the daffodils beginning to open up; I even saw the first primroses. And then, out of nowhere, we had whatever is the snowy equivalent of a flash flood.
At the time of writing this column, the hilltops in Thorncombe are still alpine – but by the time this is being read, for all I know we may be in the middle of a Saharan heat wave.
It seems that the weather in the west of West Dorset is trying to prove that it is as unpredictable as the economy.
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Talking of economic unpredictability, I was astonished to discover last week that everyone all at once decided to be honest. It became positively fashionable to admit that nobody has the foggiest clue whether the decision by the Bank of England to start doing what we used to call printing money would have no effect, the right effect or too much effect.
I personally have been told by a range of economists of great distinction during the last couple of weeks that the result of this latest “quantitative easing” will be (a) nothing at all, (b) non-inflationary growth, and (c) huge inflationary pressures.
What this proves is that economics is a powerful science — but only if you are looking for explanations after the fact.
It has absolutely no means of giving anything like a guarantee about what will happen if you do things that have not been tried lots of times before.
The problem for politicians, of course, is that people are not really very interested in having good explanations after things have occurred. What the electorate wants are good decisions before things occur.
My conclusion is that governments are better off planning for rainy days by building up comfortable surpluses in good times, rather than living high when everything looks fine and then hoping that the economists will provide fail-safe instructions for getting us out of the mess when there is no money left in the kitty.
It really is like the weather. It is all about having enough umbrellas, enough snow ploughs and enough grit.