Reality – alive and kicking

Apr 4 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

I’VE been running my own businesses for 11 years now and, believe me, the ups and downs certainly teach you a thing or two about life – real life.

Not the stuff you see on the BBC’s so-called ‘reality’ business show, The Apprentice. Nothing in the programme bears any resemblance to real business life – you just don’t fire people like that, that sort of carrot and stick approach can’t exist and oh, if you actually had employees like that ... it seems that a number of the participants are some of the most dysfunctional individuals I’ve ever seen in business. So obviously, it’s compulsive viewing and great TV.

Actually, I guess they’re not actually fired. Because to be fired you have to have been employed in the first place. And then, rightly, you’ve got some protection from the law to help stop you being mistreated and discriminated against for being posh or arrogant or stupid or plain dislikable.

So that sort of TV reality’s not real. Really. And real means a lot to me. That’s why we recently published our cookbook and called it Passion for Real Food in a quest to have people join us in understanding more about what we’re all eating.

It’s why we actually go along to farms to source our produce and talk to the real producers themselves.

And it’s why I leapt in at the deep end a couple of years ago and tried my hand at the reality of rearing pigs and sheep.

It’s generally accepted that of the two species, pigs are the more intelligent. As a result, they’re pretty demanding, soaking up constant attention but giving a lot of joy and affection in return. My three saddleback pigs, Pinky, Perky and Porky, ended up on our menu a few months ago now but it’s satisfying to know that, unlike so many pigs, they had a good life while they were with us.

However, sheep are a different thing altogether. They certainly appear pretty stupid at first – and for most of the time for that matter. But I’d been warned that in reality, sheep spend all their time on this earth dreaming up inventive ways to leave it. If they can’t find a fence on which to hang themselves or a 6in-deep stream in which to drown, they often just lie on their backs and give up the will to live. So if they’re given that much credit, they must have some appreciable level of cognitive reasoning.

And so it seems to be. Just recently it was decided that, at two years old, ours are about ready to go on the menu as mutton. So I made arrangements to take them to the best abattoir I know of in the North East and borrowed an animal trailer. For a couple of days before they were due to go, I reduced the amount they had to eat. I had this cunning plan that if they were hungry, I could coax them with food into an old stable in the paddock, roll a rather large boulder against the door to keep it closed and then I could easily load them into the trailer the next morning. The first bit worked like a dream and I left them to settle down in the stable for the night.

Rising early the next day I met up with a well-tempered mate who’d come to help. It was one of those lovely early spring mornings. This was a big day for all of us and it was a good start. At least it was until I saw the boys staring at me through the fence with, behind them, the stable door open and swaying gently in the breeze. Now I know I thought these sheep were special but was it purely a spooky coincidence that it was on Easter Sunday that I found the boulder that was supposed to have kept them imprisoned had been rolled away. But it certainly made me smile that these supposedly stupid sheep had somehow applied teamwork, worked on the task together and, because we now couldn’t catch them, got themselves another week on the planet.

Never mind pampered youngsters with nothing better to do than get on the telly, work dysfunctionally, be nasty to each other and win a £100,000 salary. Chasing laughing sheep around a muddy field at 6:30 in the morning. That’s real.