London Letter: Living off the land

LIKE  most South Africans, I would love to have my own patch of wild land where I could chill in peace.

But this back-country dream is not shared by many young Brits, who consider a cramped flat in the metropolis core to be the apex of cool living.

Yet, to my surprise, I’ve discovered management and I are now living more off the land in England than we ever did in Africa.

I realised this during breakfast one weekend when management decided she wasn’t cooking cholesterol and decided we would have toast and trout pate instead.

I know, that sounds pretentious as all hell, but the pate was made by her craft group from a fish that I had caught.

To give a bit of history, management and three other squeezes get together every Wednesday night and do craft stuff. This ranges from making crochet blankets which have so many holes that they’re windy in winter and you don’t need them in summer, to fine cuisine. And as trout is not the best tasting fish (I smother the fillets with chillies), I suggested that she and her fellow crafters have a stab at making it more palatable.

The end result was a trout and lemon pate that was Michelin quality.

The toast would have been homemade as well, but management’s bread making machine has karked it, and as you can buy a gazillion loaves of bread for the price of a single DIY breadmaker, she did the maths.

We then had toast and hedgerow jam, made from berries that sprout red and black in any hedge you walk past in summer. It was superb.

Sometimes she makes a pavlova with said berries, but she’s counting calories at the moment (the barmen at our local is still chortling after she ordered a gin and slimline tonic last Friday). But I think with jam she subtracts calories from the effort it takes to make the stuff.

And boy, does she make it. In the cupboard we have stacked bottles of raspberry, strawberry and rhubarb jam. Rhubarb? I know – I hate the stuff; but this jam is the best in the world. I once even spread it on my trout pate and it still tasted great.

There’s also Lemon Curd, something that takes me back to my boarding school days when it looked and tasted like hayfever sneeze. No more; we picked the lemons wild and you cannot believe how good it tastes. I never thought I would be an advocate for Lemon Curd, but there you go.

Breakfast was rounded off with management’s homemade yogurt, which was a bit tart for my liking, but it’s brimming with heath. We also had a glass of Elderflower cordial, from a bush I discovered on one of our walks in the woods. I think I said that once too often, as she frostily reminded me that she was also there.

For supper we had fish and chips. The fish was cod, which sadly I hadn’t caught as I don’t own a trawler, and the chips were cut from Maris Piper potatoes, which I didn’t grow as there’s only enough room in the garden for my fish pond and perhaps one spud. But management had made the tomato sauce, which tasted so real that I cannot eat the Day-Glo supermarket stuff anymore.

So to recap, in a day’s menu, we had homemade pate from fish that I had hooked, homemade jam and juice from hand-picked ingredients; and genuine tomato sauce without synthetics. Even the yogurt was home-cultured, if that’s the right word. The only store-bought stuff was cod, bread and potatoes. In fact, we’re so organic that I’m in danger of becoming a boring bang-on brown-bread-and-sandals luvvie.

I asked management why this had happened. Why were we suddenly living off the land like some wannabe red-neck backwoodsman?

Her answer wasn’t that self-sufficiency was noble and good. Rather it was because she was bored now the kids have left home.

In other words, this isn’t the Robinson Crusoe dream; it’s empty nest syndrome.