This Post, Butchered...

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There is no planned image on tonight's post because Blogger seems to be having a sodding fit tonight, so here we are. I only seem at the moment to be able to load up previously used images from blog posts past, so here's one of a steak that I've already consumed: I think it might be my retirment day meal. However, imagine, if you will, large and expensive cuts of dry-aged beef on display in one of the better retail meat establishments...

I've just subscribed to a butcher's YouTube channel, which seems like probably the least likely statement I might normally have contemplated uttering. But there you go: the prospect of watching a butcher carving up half a ton of prime Scottish grass-fed ninety-day beef in over half an hour of video might not appeal to many, but I do like beef and I do like to watch a craftsman at work. The piece I watched was this one, and its content is self-explanatory and worth the watch, especially if you buy your meat from the supermarket.

The quality of the beef he was working with was of absolutely prime quality and used to be available at decent butchers in most High Streets at one time, but which is far more difficult to find these days, as are indeed butchers themselves. When we moved to North Wales in 1980, finding good meat was simply a matter of course. In Bethesda - a town of just three or four thousand inhabitants at the time, we not only had three butchers, but three bakers, several grocers and a bus company. In the city of Bangor - a very small city at that - there was a general butcher owned by a national chain [not too good], a pork butcher, and the old established butchers known always as Johnny Six; a proper grocers that sold game such as pheasant and rabbits, more than one greengrocer, boot menders, a saddlers and Christ knows what else. The High Street of Bangor - indeed that of Bethesda - just forty-six years ago, was awash with fresh produce and the skilled artisans to provide it.

Today we have neither butcher nor baker in either, and the High Streets are bare of aught but chains such as Spar and Tesco Express [Bethesda], and there's now absolutely bugger-all in Bangor, except nail-bars and Turkish barbers; even charity shops are closing their doors, it's so bad. In both places, most of the pubs [and they were legion in 1980] have long since gone, leaving just a few stragglers trying to eke out an existence against the tide of rising costs and taxes. There are however some tentative signs of re-investment, but I fear that the rot has been allowed to go too far for too long to salvage much from the broken carcasses of our town centres...

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