A Walk in the Woods

This weekend we took a walk in the South Wiltshire Woods around the "chocolate box" village of Castle Coombe. The walk was described in the Weekend FT which is running a series on great walks in the UK.

They failed to mention that in addition to being a charming village nestled in the Cotswold's Castle Coombe also plays host to the Castle Coombe Race Circuit which meant that once we exited the M4 we were suddenly surrounded by a cacophony of souped up Honda's, Subaru's, Nissan's and various other makes all sporting huge wings and tuned exhausts and pumping hard rock music at 9:00 in the morning!

After standing in a traffic jam for 45 minutes we turned off to outflank the travelling hordes suddenly finding ourselves in a countryside wonderland with each lane getting smaller and smaller driving along towering hedgerows opening up onto bucolic pastoral scenes or woodlands with a floor covering of what turned out to be ramps or to my English readers wild garlic.

We arrived in the quaintest of villages parking next to the market cross-a relatively elaborate edifice which once served as the centre of trade for Castle Coombe. Across from it was village church the size of which also suggested that there had been reasonable wealth in the area at one time. Inside amongst others was the grave of a knight whose stone effigy revealed that he had died in battle-a drawn sword; had been on 2 Crusades-crossed knees; and that he had had 6 children-5 of whom had survived childbirth and went on to become a priest, a soldier, a lawyer, a merchant and a farmer's wife according to the pictographs along the side of his monument.

At the village pub we met our friends who had driven down from Salisbury and we crossed the stream and cut up through the fields for a 5.5 mile hike.

My friend and his wife and children moved out of London over 5 years ago and we meet up regularly. His background is in banking part of which was in insolvency proceedings. He is now a private advisor and had just been involved in the demise of a local food company which had gone in to administration.

I had just returned from a trip to New York where I had a dinner with amongst others a Private Equity manager whose business model was to find businesses small enough to fall below the radar of Anti-Trust administrators, buy them, and then proceed to aggressively destroy the competition to move from a dominant to essentially a monopoly position. He explained to me that the goal of capitalism is not to make money, but rather to make as much money as possible regardless of the collateral damage.

With this dinner conversation in mind I asked if the demise of the food company was as a result of the general economics of the recession, poor management, or predatory capitalism. His response was poor management, and bloody bastard capitalism.

I understood poor management, but not bloody bastard capitalism and hazarded if that were not the same as predatory capitalism. "No", he assured me, the bloody bastards out there sprang decisions on suppliers such as the company he was advising without warning out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

In short this company supplies fresh food products to a larger company which slaps it's logo on them functioning essentially as a powerful marketing/distribution organisation. The "marketing" firm had come to the conclusion that in order to increase the shelf life of their products they were going to start pasteurising them and therefore were shifting to a different supplier with that capability.

No problem there-except that they had known about this decision for at least 6 months and gave 4 weeks notice per their contracts that they were cancelling their relationship.

"Two can play at that game" he continued, hinting that the marketing firm might find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend selling pasteurised products as fresh.

Touche.