I have a stubborn streak I'm not especially proud of.
If everyone is talking about a thing, I will not do the thing. It doesn't matter how good the thing is. The more people tell me about it, the more determined I become to be the one man in Britain who hasn't got round to it. I know exactly how ridiculous this is. I'm working on it, mainly because the only person losing out is me — and, when it comes to what goes on the telly of an evening, everyone else in this house.
Which is how we ended up not watching Clarkson's Farm for an embarrassingly long time.
I had no good reason. I liked Top Gear back when it was the three of them, before they wandered off and left it to Joey from Friends. (No disrespect to Matt LeBlanc, who I've always rather liked.) People kept telling me the farm show was excellent. That, of course, was precisely the problem.
We tend only to watch things together as a family over dinner, and by that point I had been marching everyone through the entire Marvel catalogue and most of Christopher Nolan's stuff — part of an ongoing and largely unrequested film education I'm delivering to my eldest, Evie, one evening at a time. Eventually I ran out of road, gave in, and put Clarkson's Farm on.
We loved it immediately. And because I'd been so magnificently stubborn, we had three series banked and ready to go, which is the one genuine advantage of being late to everything.
It's exactly the sort of thing we like. Wholesome without being soft, funny without being smug, and quietly far more informative than it has any right to be. You go in for the comedy of a man fighting a council and come out understanding rather more about subsidies, weather and margins than you did before.
The confession
Here's the bit that doesn't reflect well on me.
I still haven't been to the farm shop.
We don't live far. We go more or less past it on the way to Burford Garden Centre, regularly. And every time, the stubborn streak wins. You hear about the queues. You see them on the programme, people wrapped round the building waiting to buy a candle. And something in me curls up and says absolutely not.
Which would be fine, except that I have since built a website whose entire purpose is to get people to visit exactly this sort of place. I run a directory that says go to the farm shop, go and meet the person who made the thing, go and queue if you have to. And I haven't been to the most famous one in the country, which is fifteen minutes up the road.
I'd like to report that I've reasoned my way out of this. I haven't. I've just decided to go.
The thing I did work out
There is one honest defence, and it's not really a defence so much as a realisation.
Jeremy Clarkson does not need my help getting people through the door. Whatever problems that farm has — and half the entertainment of the show is watching them arrive in single file — footfall is not among them. myfoody exists to help people find good food producers they'd otherwise never hear of. Diddly Squat is not, by any measure, hard to hear of.
So the site isn't for him. Fine.
But the point of the show is not really Clarkson. It's the argument underneath it: that British farming is under genuine pressure, that the people doing it are largely invisible, and that most of us have no idea how any of it works. That argument applies to thousands of farms with no television series and no queue round the building. Those are the ones I'm interested in.
Which brings us to the app
Lisa Hogan — who co-runs Diddly Squat with Clarkson — has launched something called Only Farmers, with her son Wolfe Bentinck. It went live as a website in June and arrived as an app this month.
The name is a joke you'll get instantly, and I suspect that's rather the point.
The idea came from conversations in the farm shop. She'd meet farmers running vineyard tours, lambing days, workshops and farm stays, and found that "hardly anyone knew they existed". The demand was there, the farms were there, and the bit in between wasn't.
That is a sentence I could have written myself.
What it does: you find farms near you on a map, browse experiences — walks, tastings, workshops, stays, seasonal events — and book and pay in the app, with messaging to the people hosting you. On the other side, farmers list what they offer, manage bookings and payouts, and can apparently also rent out idle equipment and post jobs. Clarkson has been pushing it on the show, telling farmers that if they're running something, they should get on there and say so. He called it a cracking idea, which from him counts as a rave review. Though I'm sure he would say that regardless...we wholeheartedly agree it certainly seems a brilliant idea.
I should be straight with you: I haven't yet actually used it. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's brilliant when I've done nothing more than read about it and poke at the listings. It's also a commercial platform — it takes bookings and a payment goes through it — which is a different animal from what we do here. myfoody is free, has no ads, sells nothing, and nobody can pay to be in it. Those are two different models and I'd rather say so plainly than pretend we're the same thing.
But we are, unmistakably, pointed at the same problem from opposite ends. They're solving discoverability for farm experiences. We're trying to solve it for the people who make and sell the food — the butcher on the corner, the bakery you drive past, the fishmonger with something on the counter you've never seen before. Same gap. Different half of it.
And frankly, anything that gets more people onto a working farm, spending money with the family who runs it, is a good thing whether or not it has anything to do with me.
So, Diddly Squat
I've recently cut my hours at work to spend more time on other things such as myfoody, which means I can now go on a Thursday morning.
No queue. No crowd. No opportunity for the stubborn streak to get involved at all.
I'll go, I'll buy considerably more than I intend to, and I'll probably stop at the Farmer's Dog for a pint on the way home to reflect on my personal growth.
I might leave Evie at home, though. She has a sixth sense for a sirloin, no money...and absolutely no shame about it.
Photo: Matt Seymour / Unsplash