Owning Things Matters

Years ago, I told a French party guest that all Frenchmen must halt climate change as a matter of pride. I reasoned that a warming planet pushes the climate conditions of French wine regions northwards, and since the thing north of France is England, the only way his grandchildren will be able to taste French wine will be to buy it from English vineyards. He was not happy. We sat next to each other for a couple of hours of card games, and he intermittently broke our silence with jibes against English wines. He ran out of them quickly - there were very few English wines to criticise back then. Lots more silence, and I haven't seen him since.*

I think about this episode every harvest season when I get roped into picking a friend's grapes. Dozens of us are sent up and down the rows of vines with buckets and tiny secateurs, and I'm remarkably good at it. I can spot green grapes among green leaves like a falcon hunting mice. I'm paid nothing. I'm a little raw about that because grapes are growing all around me now, and I think I'm worth a few quid as a casual worker.

So many English vineyards would have been inconceivable thirty years ago - I used to walk to school atop iced-over canals in winter, and I've worn jumpers to summer barbecues. Alas, the weather has changed. Winters can be so dry in parts of England that when it finally rains in spring, the ground lacks absorbency and everything floods. Conversely, summers can bring water shortages and stifling heat, and we even get wildfires. Couple this new warmth with the extremely long summer days (about seventeen hours of full daylight) and stuff just grows. Footpaths that used to be traversed all year can be overgrown and impassable by June.

It's little wonder that large French winemakers are investing here. England's new climate conditions mean it now has more wine-producing potential than we have skilled viticulturists, and the French - who know what they're doing - rightly see this as an opportunity to expand. French knowledge workers are coming here and showing the English how to utilise England's soil, and they're taking a slice of ownership in return. This is all normal global capitalism, of course, but it does feel a bit upside down.

Ever since the coal ran out, the British economy has been seen as a knowledge worker economy. A part of the "natural economic order" is for our companies to buy up foreign resources and send skilled Brits abroad. The world's second and fourth largest oil companies, for instance, are British, and so is its second largest mining company. I'm not sure this is economically sound.

When you sell knowledge instead of leveraging your own assets, you're prey to changing winds. Just ask any knowledge worker who's been around a couple of decades (me, if you like) what happens when developing economies up-skill their own cheaper knowledge workers. You have two options - charge less or up-skill yourself further in a never-ending race to stay one rung higher on the skilled worker ladder. It's exhausting. I flirted with becoming a digital nomad in a previous life, figuring I could live in cheaper countries like a prince. I could have, for a while, but I'd have been toast at the first economic downturn and rubbing two pennies together in the vain hope of them making a third.

I'm pretty sure lots of you are, like me, people who earn money sitting at a desk and thinking, and that the closest you come to using your hands is tapping on a keyboard. That's cool - and I intend to spend several more years doing it - but there is a real world beyond our screens, one made of earth and stone and wood and metal, and it needs people to do physical things with it. Such people are, frankly, more necessary than we are. So I suppose you can either learn a trade (as I did many years ago)** or acquire assets. English vineyards are taking investments.

*In case this sounds like the rude Frenchman stereotype, I should point out that I've lost count of how many wonderful French people I've met. The number of rude ones is precisely that guy and one foul human on the Eurostar.

**Believe it or not, I'm still a competent decorator. Although, in my opinion, I’m a better grape-picker.

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