Today, I have been mainly harvesting apples for purée, pears for tarte au poire, and four types of plum (damson, mirabelle, prune and greengage) for The Slog’s unique Plum Quartet Jamalade…so-called because it includes lemon rind for added oooomph.

In the midst of all this, M. Cantiran delivered the promised five tonnes of topsoil for what will one day be the kitchen garden at the back of my house here. It might well be a day far into the future, as I am a bloke with just the two arms, armed with just the one rake.

Tomorrow I shall be wrapping up the remaining conference pears with a view to slowing down the ripening process until Christmas, when my family will arrive here en masse. The wrapping material, by the way, is designed as an underlay for parquet flooring; but it is so soft and forgiving of the fruit, it’s absolutely perfect for the task. The whole will be put somewhere dark and cool, otherwise known as the fridge in the barn.

Otherwise, I’ve been ordering stuff from Poland. These items include a dozen cases of Perla beer, several metres of balustrade, skirting board for the parquet, and oak cut to size for the kitchen work surfaces. With the exception of the beer, every item has been hand-made. Including delivery, it will add up to approximately 30% of the cost of Western-manufactured crap.

The concept of hand-made these days is ridiculed by the globalist neoliberals as somehow on a par with hugging trees or talking to plants. They might do well to realise that, on the whole, talking to plants gets a more positive result than talking to neoliberals…..but setting such things aside, hand-made means the following outcomes:

1. Higher quality

2. Greater durability

3. Tailor-made

4. Far higher levels of employment

5. The healthy flourishing of local communities

6. Job satisfaction and fulfilment for all those engaged in the process.

What this doesn’t do, of course, is obey the golden rule of ‘growth’: of constant repurchase to replace the last shoddy s**t we bought in the misguided belief that it might last longer than a couple of months.

Mechanisation and automation have destroyed millions of jobs over the last decade. I have no bone to pick with that, just so long as everyone accepts that the niche market for genuine craftsman-created products is in reality a niche larger than most.

Those braindead Western governments which have eschewed craft training and apprenticeship in favour of pointless University Degree targets need to grasp this truth sooner rather than later. The fruitless search for volume growth is no longer the survival weapon we need: the future for a healthy West must be based on smaller volumes with much higher margins marketed to the Asian élites. We do not produce anything useful at a realistic price that the average Asian consumer might want. That, it seems to me, is a need that their own local manufacturing bases must satisfy. What we need to do is mine our infinite creativity….and dismiss the mindless Xerox copier approach to marketing.

Earlier at The Slog: Major players in the Paedofile head for the shadows