This post is not about kittens

Yesterday was "open day" day. First up was a trip out to Upper Norton Farm, just north of the A303, for a Riverford open day. This is where many of the veggies in our veggie box are grown, organically. It's not as pretty as the original Riverford farm down in Devon that we visited last year, but it was still interesting to see where our food comes from. We met our scheme organizers, finally putting a face to the email address; we bought free-range eggs and organic apple and ginger juice; and we snacked on baby cucumbers from the polytunnels. It was all very ... middle class. The place was packed with Guardian-reading, Birkenstock-wearing, baby-buggy-pushing 30-somethings, which points to the inherent limitations of this kind of scheme, admirable though it is. It's preaching to the converted, not to the vast swathes of society who could really benefit from it. Plus, it's dreadful realizing (yet again) just how much of an archetype one really is. Makes you want to take up fox-hunting, just to be contrary.

A field of raw porridge:



However, we pressed on with our middle-class pursuits and gatecrashed an open day at Hursley Park, IBM's R&D lab just outside Winchester. It wasn't wholly intentional gatecrashing; we knew something was going on and swung by on the offchance that it was open to the public. Nobody was stopping people at the gates or taking names, so we parked up, went for a stroll around the gorgeous house, and admired the grounds -- and the thousands of current and former IBMers and their families that were there. There was a minature farm and kite-flying and a fly-past by a Spitfire, which was developed at Hursley Park before IBM took it over. It was a salutory reminder of how good some of these established, gigantic global companies can be in terms of looking after their staff; the sports grounds were beautifully maintained and the clubhouse rather impressive. It rather reminded me of Norwich Union's facilities at Pinebanks and the sporting events and children's Christmas parties that I attended back in the 1970s. Given our individualist, telecommuting, distributed work environment, I felt rather nostalgic for the corporate collectivism that these firms promote(d). Getting a subsidized gym membership just isn't the same as having company-organized interdepartmental netball and football tournaments, is it?