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<strong>Done</strong>

Roger Morgan-Grenville

You are supposed to mean your New Year’s resolutions, and I sort of did.

When I told Caroline, at about 11.30pm on our understated solo Covid Hogmanay in front of Jules Holland and a box of late-sell-by-date Jaffa cakes, that I intended to stop snacking, I had genuine hopes of being ten kilos lighter by the end of the year.

So far, I’ve cracked five of them, mainly through not buying sweets, snacks and biscuits in the petrol station and on the road. I am now insultingly close to the right BMI for my height, about which I actually care slightly less than not at all. Recently, the gains have been reversed.

I blew it completely on Tuesday, when I was driving down to the west country, and bought a large bag of liquorice with a view to stretching it over three days on the road. It didn’t quite work out that way, and, like a dog left with a week’s worth of food, by Portsmouth I had to throw the half-finished bag onto the back seat and out of harm’s way. Where it would have stayed had there not been a small pile up opposite Rownham’s Services on the M27, which just gave me the chance to stop the car, lean back, and grab the bag.

By Ringwood, I had eaten three-quarters of them, after which I hurriedly threw them right down into the well behind the passenger seat, where I couldn’t reach them, even by leaning back. But seasoned travelers down that stretch of the A35 will know that there is always stationary traffic at Wimborne Minster, a situation that enabled me to contort myself, fetch them out again, and eat all but the last ten percent.

Genuinely cross with myself, this time I hurled them right back into the boot, determined to have no more to do with them until the following day. I listened to a podcast on Omega 3, trying to do anything other than think about liquorice, a ruse that might have worked had not a combine harvester not been crossing the road just before Bere Regis, and caused us all to stop. Normally, this would have annoyed me; this evening, it brought only delight.

Quick as I could, I hopped out of the car, and ran back to open the boot and find the bag lodged between my wellies and an old cricket box. It was only when I was pretending to re-arrange what little luggage there was in it, on the pretext that it might have been destabilizing the overall ride, that I realised that there was a family in the car behind, laughing at me, and pointing at the bag of sweets in my hand. I chucked them nonchalantly back in as if they meant nothing to me, and then had to stop at a layby near Tolpuddle ten minutes later to retrieve them.

And so it went on, until the last one, that one that should have been eaten around Friday morning, went down the hatch as I drove into my destination village of West Milton at 6.30. If I hadn’t been feeling so sick, I would have had the energy to hate myself.

Thus finished eighteen months of the field research and farm visits that have made up Taking Stock, my book on man’s 10,000 year relationship with cattle, and where it goes from here.

12,500 miles, 93 farms, 38 primal cuts, 2 abattoirs, 5 butchers, 4 vets, 3 nutritionists, a priest, a tannery, 2 universities, 78 books and over 200 scientific papers later, I sent the first draft in this morning.

When I started, I had no idea that I would come to mind so much about missing Farming Today. 400 episodes later, I live for the moment that I am interviewed on it.

Probably about liquorice.

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