No one taught me more about the importance of using your local butcher than my maternal Grandparents Ron and Barb May. I spent a lot of my Oxfordshire childhood with them, partly to help my fraught mother after the birth of my twin brothers just 18 months after the joyous arrival of my hyperactive self.
Having a forthright wife and four daughters meant that Gramps often struggled to get a word in edge ways. He worked long hours at his shop, Mays Carpets on the Cowley Road, but he would always finish early on Saturday lunchtimes and make a trip to the shops in Marston to get the meat and vegetables for Sunday lunch. One rather fateful afternoon he went to the butchers but returned empty handed, soaking wet and without his car, a yellow Austin Metro.
The women in the house were, as usual, talking at great speed and at times over each other. It took around half an hour before my Nana noticed the lack of shopping and the state of his clothes. He explained that he had left the keys in the car with the engine running while he went into the butchers (a common practice in those days). When he returned the rust bucket had been nicked. He had walked all the way back up the steep hill on Headley Way in the pouring rain then stood for half an hour waiting to get his words out. Nana chastised him but his reply was something that will always stay with me. “Be fair Barb I couldn’t get a word in edgeways! Everyone is talking but no one is listening.”
David John, the butcher, still remembers the story of the yellow Metro to this day, the last time I saw him I told him it was part of my Gramp’s eulogy. When I’m in Oxford I always make a point of going to his shop which is now in the Covered Market in the centre of town. His game pies are one of my favourite Christmas treats, but I know that if I want butchers like him to remain part of our high street we need to use them all year round. Many people right now will be thinking about Christmas dinner and making a ‘special trip’ to the butcher for their meat. The next time they set foot through their butchers’ door will be Christmas 2013.
The sad fact is that in the mid 1980’s there were around 22,000 high street butchers. This fell to just 6,553 in 2010, according to Ed Bedington, Editor of Meat Trades Journal. Part of the reason they thrived in the past was because people, like my grandparents, used them all year round. I’m part of The Meat Crusade, which is campaigning to save the high street butcher. So I am asking you to think about what our high streets will look like without the butcher. Sadly it really is a case of use them or lose them.
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ReplyDeleteKate, what powerful and beautiful prose and all the more meaningful because I know it comes from the heart.
ReplyDeleteEvery Friday my father visits our family butcher - Mr Wallers in Ledbury- to pick up the meat order for the week. It seems their conversations re the fortunes of Man U v Sheffield Weds, us kids, the business etc. are as pleasurable as the delciious meat we are foruntate enough to enjoy as our Sunday Roast / the rest of the week ! Our butcher is an all year round experinece and one I am very grateful for ... Happy Christmas to all high street butchers : I hope 2013 will be a prosperous year !