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20 December

Off for Christmas queasily early tomorrow morning, but in a very good mood. I spent Sunday planting an orchard of rare fruit trees that a couple of friends and I have been planning for a while. Rows of apples, pears, greengages and plenty of fruit bushes are now standing proudly in a sea of mud which will be sown with wild flowers next spring and may even provide us with its first fruits next autumn. This is just the first stage of a bigger plan we have to create something which will hopefully last for decades and preserve some of the thousands of old apple varieties that are being lost thanks to the armlock that supermarkets have on the fruit trade in Britain. See a great article about this here, by one of my fellow orchardeers.

Talking of ancient things being lost, I'm currently working on a newspaper feature about the decline of the English pub. I'm focusing on the way the traditional local is being squeezed out of existence by the rise of the pub corporation and its identical chain pubs. I want to find as many examples of this happening from around the UK as I can - stories of pubs being tarted up into yuppie bars, or sold off for housing, but also stories of communities standing up for their pubs and saving them from the marketing men. So if you know of anything like this happening in your area, please let me know by posting something on here or emailing me.

In the meantime, have a good Christmas. And if there are any good old pubs near you I advise spending as much time in them as possible, purely for political reasons of course.

Posted by paul at December 20, 2004 05:36 PM

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Posted by: Alice at December 27, 2004 11:02 PM

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