Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (38 page)

Ilminster went to the polls in the last days of July to elect two new councillors to the seats vacated by two previous mayors,
Norman Campbell and Dave Gooding. 1,763 votes were cast, representing 21 percent of the electorate - not bad for a town which
in the last six years has been so apathetic about its future that new members have had to be co-opted on to the council as
no one was prepared to stand for office. One of the new councillors, Mark Davis, is a governor of Greenfylde First School,
where two of his three children are pupils. The other is Ewen's wife Caroline, who watched the developments keenly and decided
it was time to involve herself in what was happening in the town.

In the first week of September, she takes her seat at the council table for a meeting to discuss plans for the road alterations.
The meeting is being held in the hall at Swan­mead Community School and I am surprised to see that well over a hundred people
have turned up. We are all there to listen to Gerry Waller, managing director of the engineering firm that has been contracted
by Tesco to build the store. Gerry is genial-looking, with a big smile on his flat face that reveals extensive, and expensive-looking,
dental work. In order to change the slides on the carousel he has to keep walking in front of the white fold-down screen,
and the coloured maps and diagrams make flickering patterns on his shiny blue suit.

'First we're going to build the new car park, then we're going to start work on the one-way system,' he begins with a brilliant
smile. The audience starts to fidget. It soon becomes apparent that the agreement made between the council and the town at
the Dillington House meeting no longer exists. The car park will be built by Christmas, but from January to Easter Ditton
Street, the small street which connects the north and south of the town and currently a two-way thoroughfare, will be closed
while Gerry's mob widen the pavements and change the traffic flow to one-way. The road will re-open at Easter, when work on
the store itself will begin, but even though the store will not be open until the end of 2007, Ditton Street will be one-way
from January onwards. There is a further act of treachery. While work is going on in Ditton Street, access from the new car
park to the town is planned to run through Frog Lane, a small steep path that leads upwards to the east end of the town. Mr
B's shop is the furthest away and this proposed 'access solution' is the worst possible result for him.

Gerry's bulky body keeps bobbing backwards and forwards in front of the screen. A woman in front of me mutters to her husband,
'Why doesn't he have anyone who can change the slides for him?' Gerry is at pains to say that anyone affected will be visited
in due course by representatives from Tesco. He keeps on smiling.

At the end of his presentation, there are questions. Yes, Gerry says, he is happy to clarify that there
will
be access through Ditton Street while work is going on, but it won't be user-friendly, as the street will be full of bulldozers
and machinery. When he has an answer, it tends towards imprecision. Often he doesn't have one at all. He can't answer questions
about car park charges because he doesn't actually work for Tesco. He can't help Brian Drury, whose shop, B.D. Garden and
Pet Supplier, is right in the middle of Ditton Street and who takes his deliveries of half-hundred-weight sacks of dog food
and potatoes through the front door. In due course, Gerry says genially, Brian too will be 'getting a visit' from Tesco. He
can't help at all when it is pointed out to him that, just two months ago, it was agreed that the traffic flow in Ditton Street
would remain two-way until Tesco actually opens, not altered irreversibly almost a year before.

There are currently 1,897 Tesco stores in Britain and in 2007 they plan to open another 153. Their expansion plans seem unstoppable,
not just into the grocery business but into almost every area of life. Not content with 31 percent of the entire grocery
spend in this country, they also sell sofas, bikes, MP3 players, stuffed toys, arts and crafts, baby baths, pushchairs, nappies,
tents, golf clubs, luggage, table-tennis tables, sports watches, power tools, pet food, car accessories, security alarms,
high-pressure washers, shower units, shower curtains, towels, sheets and duvets, saucepans, mixers, cutlery, lighting, brooms,
carpet sweepers, mats and runners, shelving and wine storage units, beds, dressers, cupboards, dining-room tables and chairs,
pillows, cookers, ironing boards, sat-nav systems, broadband internet access, TVs, vacuum cleaners, car insurance, pet insurance,
travel and life insurance, credit cards and loans, mobile phones with access to the Tesco network, gas and electricity supplies,
holidays and flights, contact lenses, legal kits for making wills, conveying property, fighting small claims and getting divorced,
flowers by post, low-calorie food, and they offer a diet club . . . and for every transaction you make, you earn points on
your Tesco reward card which can go towards Tesco petrol, holidays, yoghurt, biscuits or home insurance, whatever you might
want. Tesco, like it or not, are in our lives from cradle to grave.

I fear for Ilminster: 90 percent of the money we spend in supermarkets leaves the local area. In 2000, the competition commission
reported that if anyone retailer accounted for more than 8 percent of anyone sector, then this was liable to lead to an abuse
of power. Their recommendations were ignored.

When Tony Blair swept to power in 1997, the government went overboard to prove that New Labour would be a friend to business.
But by allowing the supermarkets to grow so fast, New Labour has stifled the enterprise culture they claimed to support. They
are a friend to big business, but not to business as a whole. In France, where supermarkets co-exist with thriving local economies,
legislation limits growth. Even though the giant chain Carrefour fights for greater market share, the French government holds
the line. No such measures currently exist in UK law and the presence of a massive supermarket in a small town not only jeopardises
the businesses that exist but also stops other people from taking a chance. I know that John Rendell wants to sell his grocery
shop, but I wonder who will be prepared to risk their capital on a vegetable shop knowing that Tesco is opening up five hundred
yards away?

After the meeting ends, I walk up Ditton Street to the George in the Market Square with Henry Best, Clinton Bon­ner, Bryan
Ferris and Aaron Driver from the wine shop. 'It's all done the Tesco way,' says Bryan, gloomily, as he and I negotiate the
controversially small pavements. 'These aren't that small, are they?'

'The thing is,' Henry says, settling all six foot six of himself awkwardly on to a tiny chair by a small table in a corner
of the public bar, 'if there were crested newts or dormice on the site we could hold it all up, possibly even stop it. Newts
and dormice, they'll halt anything. Even the right kind of toad might do it.' He takes a long pull from his pint of Cottleigh,
the local brew. Earlier that morning, in his endless quest for something to eat, Fat-Boy surprised a toad hiding behind the
fifteen-kilo sack of dog food in the downstairs 100, but it wasn't the right kind. The right kind, from a conservation point
of view, is the endangered natterjack, which has red spots on its back. Fat-Boy's small green discovery was just a common
toad that probably started life in our garden pond. Still, it was exotic enough to give him a shock.

On the other side of the table, Aaron is trying his best to put a positive spin on the situation. 'We'll have to hold more
festivals, organise shopping evenings. I could do wine tastings. How about barrel races? Pub Crawls? Cider and cheese? Raffles?'

I suggest buying brightly coloured plastic wheelbarrows, which could be left in the car park for anyone to use to cart their
shopping from one end of town to the other. Aaron turns to Mr B, who's sitting at the end of the table. 'How about a raffle?
I'll give a case of wine, you put up a whole turkey and if anyone can carry them all the way from our shops, up East Street,
down Frog Lane and all the way to the car park without once putting them down, then they win!'

Mr B laughs, but despite Aaron's cheeriness we're a depressed group, sitting round the table while outside the window a full
moon appears above the rooftops, bathing the Market Square in its silvery light. It feels hopeless. We are just a handful
of local people, wanting concessions from a multinational, and we are losing every step of the way. Even the small but important
agreement to keep the two-way system in place until Tesco opens its doors has now been ambushed by the engineers. On the way
to the pub, Bryan has picked up that week's copy of the
Chard and Illy
from the garage. The same company which is developing the supermarket, Alborne Estates, has put in a planning application
to construct 42 two-, three- and four-bedroom homes in the open area on the far side of the new car park. 'I wonder how long
they've been cooking all this up,' he says gloomily, staring into his beer glass as though the rich amber liquid might reveal
the answer.

'Isn't there an issue with the badgers?' asks Henry, reaching across the table to take the paper out of Bryan's hands. Holding
the paper well out in front of him, he reads out the final paragraph of the article: '''The planners say the northern part
of the site will be kept free of development and will provide a foraging area for the badger community as well as a corridor
linking the sett to the open countryside." Well, that's that, then, isn't it? Another bull's-eye for the planners.'

Henry gives me a lift back to the Dairy House. I stand by the gate, watching the taillights of his car disappear through the
park, the moonlight so bright I can make out the black and white markings on the young Friesians who are sleeping nearby under
an oak tree. The evening has reminded me of an evening in late 2000, the day after it was announced that Richard Desmond had
bought the
Daily Express.
With my friend and deputy editor, Chris Blackhurst, I had been in the Founders Arms, the pub across the road from the
Daily Express
building on Blackfriars Bridge. It was early evening, the busiest time in a newspaper's day as the office gears up for the
eight o'clock deadline, but the two of us were shell­shocked by what had happened and this had been our first opportunity
to get out of the office.

It had been an agonising autumn, knowing the newspaper was up for sale and living with rumours and uncertainty. Editing a
paper means you are expected to know what's going on, often long before the rest of the world, and often you do. But in those
autumn months, I was wholly in the dark about the future of the institution I worked for. Chris and I had been working together
for almost six years by then; he'd come with me from the
Independent
to take on this seemingly impossible task. Now it was falling apart, our work and effort to transform the lumbering right-wing
newspaper into a modern leftish publication that could challenge the supremacy of the
Daily Mail
just a distant dream. We felt both betrayed and powerless and, in my case, infinitely sad. In time, Chris returned to the
Independent
and is now the City Editor of the
Evening Standard;
he divorced and remarried and now has a new son called Archie. I often find myself missing his great humour, wit, intelligence
and integrity. And as for me, unlikely as it might once have seemed, I now have a farm and own a part-share of sixty pigs.

I unlock the back door to let the dogs out into the garden and follow them along the grass path beside the long herbaceous
border, and through the crooked metal gate into the wood. The moonlight is so bright that I can see the outline of the big
oak tree in the flat reflective surface of the pond. The roots of an oak stretch for hundreds of yards and you are walking
within the oak's domain long before you step under the first overhanging boughs. They branch frequently: the first roots are
as thick as a man's waist, six feet from the trunk they're the diameter of a wrist, at thirty feet as thin as a pencil lead,
at fifty feet as slender as grass and at one hundred feet thinner than a human hair. The smaller the roots, the less time
they live: the thinnest are replaced several times a year but the hair roots, the almost microscopic ones that work in tandem
with fungi to collect nutrients from the soil, survive for only a few hours. An average-sized oak has some five hundred million
root tips which will graft themselves on to the root hairs of another tree of the same species. In time, an oak wood becomes
a single living entity. If a tree is sick, or has been attacked, and can't feed itself through photosynthesis, the root system
enables the other trees to keep it alive.

I lean against the gnarled trunk of the old oak. The night before the paper was sold I had invited Ewen and Caroline to dinner.
It was the first time I had seen Caroline since the late 1970s. They came to our house in Notting Hill and the four of us
walked round the corner to a now defunct restaurant in All Saints Road. I didn't often forget to take my mobile phone with
me but I did that evening and when I returned, old friendships restored and promises to visit them in Somerset exchanged,
I had twenty-three missed calls. On the front page of the following day's
Financial Times
was the story of the sale of the
Daily Express.