Paul Holmes: Field of rural dreams

It has been a hectic week and, once again, I have to confess I am addressing you on the run - at the end of a long day on my feet among the the milling throngs and madding crowds at Fieldays at Mystery Creek. We have been dispensing olive oil to the grateful masses for a very good price.

I had been to Fieldays only briefly, some years back, to interview a few inventors. The place is vast. You feel that even if you found a good spot you would not be able to see it all because of the curvature of the Earth, tractors of all sizes and the implements they tow behind them as far as the eye can see. Whether they were selling I could not tell. Four shrewd-eyed farmers appeared at my stall to tell me that there were more people looking at olive oil than there were outside looking at tractors and utes.

The crowds flocked through, a different crowd, however, from a food show crowd. Unusual people, a lot of them. To be truthful, there were times I wondered if I had died and God had sent me to the centre of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Food crowds are smart people who are there because there are interested in food and they know things and they know their olive oils and their meat and their pickles and their icecreams, and so forth. Some of the people I dealt with this week I thought might not be able to find their way home. They responded well to my price pitch, however, in which I shouted out, "Recession price."

It is an amazing thing, selling. You tell people that your price is a good one and they will believe you. It may be, or it may be not be, but if you tell people it is a good price, they mostly believe you. I do not know where I learned this.

I was standing outside at one point taking a breather. Well, all right, a gasper. I was talking with my friend Monique, who makes pickles and sells them as Maison Therese. I cast eyes over towards a yard full of red tractors where there was very little traffic.

A man approached me, an old boy with what appeared to be only two teeth and neither was in the front of his mouth.

He told me he was a dairy man and he had a collection of old cars. Next thing he shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out about 20 small laminated photographs of the cars, held together by a rubber band. He began the laborious process of going through each one and giving me its history, its provenance and its mileage. "This one was made for Lady Nathan, in Belgium where they made the Messerschmidts and was sent to England to have the coachwork done .. and is completely unrestored and original and it's for sale and I think you should buy it."

As he told me this all I could see were the two teeth that appeared to hang by their roots from the top of his mouth. And who was Lady Nathan anyway and when did they make Messerschmidts in Belgium? A few minutes later he came by the Paul Holmes Extra Virgin Olive Oil stand. No amount of talk on my part could persuade him to buy a bottle. I thought not of the Messerschmidt but a Fokker.

As I walked towards my car through the teeming crowd, my wife phoned. As I began to talk to her a man interrupted to say he had invented one of the most revolutionary engines of the modern era.

Oh yes, I said, the one where the pistons don't move. This engine had actually been on my mind for a couple of days since someone mentioned it to me.

A question had been whirring away in the back of my mind. How could any internal combustion engine work in which the pistons did not move? He said he would like me to visit him in the inventors' street where he would run me through it all. I told him respectfully that there was absolutely no point running me, a mechanical ignoramus, through anything to do with an engine. I also wondered why anyone would start a conversation with a person who was on the phone.

But, overall, there is a great feeling at Fieldays. Most people were funny and friendly. And I continue to be surprised at how many young people still want their photograph taken with me. Perhaps it is the novelty of being in the company of a relic.

* * *

Joe Karam must be wondering when it all will end. This week the Supreme Court lifted from suppression a couple of pieces of evidence the Crown tried to introduce in the David Bain trial. The police had decided, in a desperate search for evidence, that on the original 111 call David Bain muttered, "I shot the prick". Experts could not accept this was what he said. In fact it is more like muttering or heavy breathing and rasping and gasping. In any case, why, if you have just shot your family and you are on a call to the emergency services, are you going to say, "I shot the prick."?

I suppose the Supreme Court was right to put things into the open. The 111 call assertion by the police was becoming well known, anyway. It might as well have been put out there by the Supreme Court. But it casts doubt again. It is one of those things that conspire against David. He has been found not guilty by people who heard all of the evidence and that should be the end of it. This little fish-hook from the police makes doubt hang on. The police, we have long understood, hate to lose. They go to great lengths to avoid admitting they were wrong. Remember, the Privy Council themselves declared the original trial verdicts unsafe because of the new evidence and quashed the Bain convictions. Now an exhaustive trial has acquitted him.

That should be the end of it. Instead, on and on it goes. And if you still have any doubts then it should still be the end of it because the man has done 13 years in jail anyway.

And what about David's extended family, the crowd who divided David's inheritance? Should they give him back the money or as much of it that is left? I would have thought so.

They got a pretty penny. They were not broke, the Every St Bains. There was a nice stash and a couple of properties. David has nothing. Conscience should get to work here, you might think.

Chance would be a fine thing.