Jeremy Clarkson said: "People massively overuse the word community these days, but there certainly is not a community if there's no hub to it, and the pub is the hub."
It has been exactly a year since Jeremy Clarkson opened his utopian vision for a British pub supporting farmers across the UK.
The latest series of Clarkson's Farm has focused on the Diddly Squat farmer's attempts to open a pub, The Farmer's Dog, in the Cotswolds.
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Despite changing its menu seasonally, there is always a constant at the farm, and that is a pledge to serve ingredients produced on British farms.
'It will always be absolutely f***ing delicious', is the tagline on the pub's website regarding the food - which is guaranteed to have come from Jeremy's mind.
There is a one-stop butcher, Hops and Chops, a bottle shop, a bar and much more including Diddly Squat Farm Shop.
Challenges of running a pub
Banning Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer from entering the premises may not be one of the highlights of the pub's one year anniversary, but the project has been more challenging than Jeremy could ever have imagined.
"Honestly, it was much, much harder [running a pub]," he added.
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"There are so many things that you discover about opening and running a pub that you would not even consider.
"When you and I go in a pub, you ask for a pint, you get a pint, you sit down, maybe have some pork scratchings or something, and it does not look that difficult.
"But there's an enormous amount of regulation on food hygiene and safety. And then you have got staffing.
"You have got to try and find chefs, you have got to find waitresses, and that's all very complicated."
And the problems continued to increase for the former Top Gear host.
"And then it turned out that the pub I bought is in the 14th century," he added.
"So it's not on gas, there's a dribble of electricity and it gets virtually no water at all.
"If you run a sink, you are out of water.
"And if you are dealing with more than three people a day, which we are, it completely does your head in.
"Then we were trying to open it way too soon.
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"I wanted to try and capture the August Bank Holiday weekend, which meant that we were trying to open it at the exact same time as I was doing the harvest, so I would spend all day trying desperately to get the pub open and dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of problems.
"Where do you store the lavatory paper? And how do you keep the food chilled? And how do cellars work?
"And the length of the pipe from the cellar to the bar, and if it's more than 20 feet, you are losing 40 pints a week."
Impact on Jeremy's health
Opening the pub also had an impact on Jeremy's health, mainly due to stress and fatigue.
"Then you get home absolutely knackered, and you have to get into your tractor and do grain carting through the night," he added.
"So it's not really a secret [that] the stress was so bad.
"[I was working] Twenty, twenty four sometimes, literally, round the clock. I like hard work.
"If I do not do something constructive in a day, I cannot really get to sleep that night.
"But that was silly, and it did actually mess my heart up.
"It is very stressful running a pub."
Now finding himself running a farm and a pub, which does he find more exhausting?
"It is more stressful than running a farm," Jeremy added.
'Farming can be very isolated'
"You are on your own on the farm, which is why there's so much unhappiness in farming, because you are dealing with it all on your own.
"The benefit is you do not worry about other people, whereas with the pub, you have probably got 80 people working there.
"So it requires more attention running a pub.
"I called people who have got pubs, like myself who do not come from a pub background, and they all said, ‘Do not do it. Do not do it. It is too stressful, and there's absolutely no money in it.
"'In fact, you lose money'. I ignored all of them, and they were absolutely right!"
A pub for farmers
Setting out on his journey to owning a pub, farming was never far away from Jeremy's thinking.
He added: "I wanted somewhere where farmers could go.
"If it is raining on a Tuesday afternoon and they cannot work on their farm, they could come and have a pint and meet other farmers.
"One day it was absolutely bucketing down, and it had been solidly for four months. And farmers were desperate.
"They simply could not get anything planted in thousands and thousands of acres of sodden fields.
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"I went to the pub with a few other local farmers and Kaleb.
"We sat at the bar, and by sharing the problem over a pint, we found we were actually making one another laugh.
"You know that gallows humour that the British are extremely good at it, finding mirth in adversity.
"When we came away afterwards, we only had a pint or two but by going to the pub, you just had a moment of levity in an otherwise troubled week, and it was a good thing.
"It sounds almost twee to say it, but that's kind of what I wanted.
"At the core of my pub is a place where you could go and just for an hour or so, forget your troubles, which is the point of a pub."
Regulatory burden on pubs should be eased given the prominence of the 'great British pub' in communities, Jeremy said.
"There's a lot of legislation that's completely unnecessary, and taxes," he added.
"But it's the same for everybody in every business.
"Particularly in rural areas, the pub seems to have a more important role?
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"The pub is the hub.
"If you have a village, and as we know there's no village bobby anymore, there's no village doctor, because he's in a health centre 30 miles away and cannot get to see him anyway, there's no village shop, as often as not, there's no village vicar.
"You tend to find that they share three or four parishes.
"If you lose the village pub, what exactly is a village? It is just a collection of houses.
"People massively overuse the word community these days, but there certainly is not a community if there's no hub to it, and the pub is the hub."
