IT WAS exactly 20 years ago that I was having a family holiday with my wife and two small children on an island off the west coast of France.
Dining on freshly caught lobster and new potatoes covered in Colorado beetles, all was peace and tranquillity in a cottage by the seaside.
I was not aware then that important events were taking place many thousands of miles in Russia that were going to change my life on the farm at home in North Wales for ever.
I refer to the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine.
Over the next six months or so, I was to become involved with a working group set up by the CLA which was to become one of the most fulfilling periods of my life.
Only half of my farm was affected by Welsh Office movement restrictions for sheep, and all my sheep quickly wandered to the other half.
But it was the science of nuclear technology and all those wonderful journeys to far-flung places and the contact with farmers so much worse affected by me which was to make this all so interesting.
It was probably also the start of my writing experiences which have been quite extensive over the intervening years.
My experience of Chernobyl’s aftermath started at a farmer’s meeting in Llangefni market followed shortly after by a meeting with some VIP from the CLA in a posh hotel in Chester.
Little did a bewildered young farmer in those days anticipate what would happen next!
It was a small meeting in a hotel in Betws-y-coed where one the old grandees of the CLA passed around a map showing the deposition of radiation in North Wales from Chernobyl coupled with time and rain deposition.
Too complicated to read and comprehend at the time, I quietly pinched it and took it home so that I could study it in more detail.
The facts in this document totally contradicted what we were being told by the Welsh Office.
Maps detailing Welsh Restricted Area in relation to fallout from Chernobyl
Until this time there had been a mutual understanding of trust and confidence with civil servants at a time when farmers were being encouraged to produce more food in this country.
What a contrast with today when an odd mix of environmentalists and tourist consultants makes you wonder whether you need farmers at all.
The map also showed accurately the time when the atomic cloud from Chernobyl would have moved across North Wales. But how could I be sure this document was correct?
To check the actual rainfall at this time meant a visit to Liverpool University library to check Met Office records for that day.
I did get a bit of a shock when they revealed no recorded rainfall on that day and any problem with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl was not mentioned.
From that time I knew that politicians and Welsh Office bureaucrats were actually telling lies (what Tony Blair would refer to it as “spin”).
I was to learn an awful lot about nuclear power stations and even how they were operated to make weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear bombs.
But is it any wonder that the great British public has such great suspicion of nuclear power when they have been bombarded with so many lies and propaganda over the years?
It was the untruths of the civil servants which was to really rankle me at meetings at the Eagles Hotel in Llanrwst where all they did was to stitch up an arrangement with the auctioneers, and finally with the head man himself down in Cardiff.
At that time I was only the gofer, but I should have got up that day and called that man a liar.
I could write a book about Chernobyl, but for me it did change my life. Never again have I trusted any statement from a politician based on the “best of scientific knowledge at the time”: I always want secondary scientific proof rather like the Met Office records at the time of Chernobyl.
For me my farming career was to be progressively destroyed by such things as BSE and Foot and Mouth Disease, with GM crops thrown in.
I sometimes think that statements by civil servants with regard to farming industry are not worth the paper which they are written on.
One thing is certain, though: Chernobyl made an innocent farmer suspicious for the first time.
