Alphabet Of Potatoes….. Is There Life On?.....
by Bernie Bell - 09:09 on 21 April 2025
Living as we do in the middle of the UK’s most agricultural area, I’m aware that food is currently too cheap to offer a sustainable living for many small and medium farmers. Something needs to be done - my suggestion is let’s rise up and smash the Thatcherite economic orthodoxies that have served us so badly these last 45 years. I’ll be right behind you.
This morning, at stool, I read this bit in the Guardian about vegetable prices.
I was struck by the fact that Scott Walker is now CEO of UKPotato, the UK’s trade body for potato production. My lovely daughter Ellie and her lovely partner Dan are staying, and, breakfasting at Elda’s Colombian Coffee House, High Street, Presteigne, this morning, I told them this delightful fact. ‘Of course,’ I laughed, ‘it’s not THE Scott Walker, as he has gone across.’ She hadn’t heard of Scott Walker. Young people, it turns out, haven’t.
Ellie is a marketing whizzo, and has been helping me save my digital legacy, zhoosh up my website, (soon, this will link there) and so on. Marketing and potatoes, of course, call to mind my old friend Lionel Spume’s time as Poet-In-Residence for the Potato Marketing Board. It was felt at the time he was apppointed (1968) that the people at the Potato Marketing Board had taken a bold step by choosing an avowedly Marxist concrete sound poet for the job.
Digging around in the archives, I find that I still have two of the pieces he wrote for the Board.
First, this gem, from 1992, which is called, ‘What kind of jacket does my jacket potato come with?’
‘What kind of jacket does my jacket potato come with?’
I asked the girl.
‘Is it
Leather jackets
Wax jackets
Flax jackets
Flak jackets
Jack flackets
Jax flackets
Jax wackets
Jeather lackets?’
‘No. It’s,’
the girl replied,
‘the kind of jacket that all jacket potatoes come with.’
And then, to my delighted surpise, I found another firm favourite, ‘Alphabet of Potatoes.’ This was the first piece he wrote for the PMB, and he presented it at the 1969 AGM and Dinner Dance to an audience moved to silence. (With thanks and open-mouthed admiration to the late Bob Cobbing.)
Alphabet of Potatoes
Annabelle
Ballydoon
Caesar
Dunbar Rover
Estima
Fambo
Golden Wonder
Habibi
International Kidney
Jubilee
King Edward
Lady Balfour
Majestic
Nitza
Orchestra
Pink Fir Apple
Queen Edward
Robinta
Sharpe's Express
TX 15231
Up-to-date
Vanessa
White Lady
Xanthe
Yukon Gold
Zohar
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Apr 19
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Is There Life On?......
https://earthlogs.org/2025/04/19/a-sign-of-life-on-another-planet-should-we-be-excited/
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