Book info

• Title Diddly Squat
• Author Jeremy Clarkson
• Year 2021
• Genre Memoir

Welcome to Clarkson's farm. An idyllic spot offering picturesque views across the Cotswolds, bustling hedgerows and natural springs, it's the perfect plot of land for someone to delegate the actual, you know, farming to someone else while he galivants around the world in cars. Until one day, Jeremy decided he would do the farming itself. After all, how hard could it be?... Faced with suffocating red tape, biblical weather, local objections, a global pandemic and his own frankly staggering ignorance of how to 'do farming', Jeremy soon realises that turning the farm around is going to take more than splashing out on a massive tractor. Fortunately, there's help at hand from a large and (mostly) willing team, including girlfriend Lisa, Kaleb the Tractor Driver, Cheerful Charlie, Ellen the Shepherd and Gerald, his Head of Security and Dry Stone Waller. Between them, they enthusiastically cultivate crops, rear livestock and hens, keep bees, bottle spring water and open a farm shop. But profits remain elusive. And yet while the farm may be called Diddly Squat for good reason, Jeremy soon begins to understand that it's worth a whole lot more to him than pounds, shillings and pence...

Thoughts

Like many, I adored every episode of Clarkson’s Farm, enjoying as the host was told off every other minute by people that really do know how to farm. You always got the feeling that whilst he was being classic Clarkson, he also wanted to learn and do his bit and actually listen to the people around him. Unfortunately, this book - a collection of newspaper columns he wrote along the way - wasn’t quite as much fun, as he didn’t have the people to bounce off. It’s just a bit too Clarkson for me. But I did like him re-evaluating his own writing as we went along. ‘What was I thinking when I wrote this?’ he says at one point.

Rating: 3 / 5