The beer in question comes from the local pub, the Queen Vic. Bacon such as this is surely what Sunday breakfast in the country is all about.Another well known bacon and ham curer of much repute - royal warrant to the Queen Mother, no less - is Emmett's Stores in Peasenhall, near Saxmundham. They have hams and bacon that are sweet-cured (using Guinness) or given a simple, mild cure for those who want a more natural flavour. Both are superb, particularly the properly fatty, sweet-cured streaky bacon All are oak-smoked. By the way, Emmett's is also the village store, so you can get your Dreft, loo rolls and fags at the same time.Southwold - and, even more so, Walberswick across the river - seem set in a time warp. Here, sides of bacon and hams are given a rich cure of molasses and beer - "plus other bits and bobs", before being gently smoked.

Country living, it's a gas.Paul Heiney, writer, broadcaster and Suffolk pig keeper (two beautiful sows), in his perfect pink book Ham And Pigs - A Celebration of the Whole Hog (Excellent Press, pounds 16), enthuses over the butcher FE Neave in Debenham: "I went to Debenham, as near a picture of a perfect Suffolk village as one could wish for: pink, yellow, and white cottages line either side of the main street separated from the road by wide grassy verges." It affects everyone you see. Suffolk boasts such special produce that the only comestible necessary to import might be a bottle of Fernet Branca to aid digestion. (The Crown inn in Southwold doesn't stock it; I've checked.) Specialist shops and farms across the county need the support of everyone, locals and visitors alike.I cannot think of a nicer thing to do on a Saturday morning than to get up early, visit an asparagus farm, call in at a good butcher's, trudge along the shingle at Aldeburgh, buy some stiff fish and choose a bottle or two from Adnams wine cellars in Southwold. And, if you are inland, you would be daft not to buy some bottles from the excellent Wyken vineyard near Bury St Edmunds Once this frenzy of shopping is over, it's off to the pub.

And often the journey back to Hampstead or Little Venice is loaded almost as heavily What's the point? There is no need for this carry-on. There are asparagus growers, soft fruit merchants, oyster cultivators, pig farmers, fish curers and smokers, brewers, viticulturists, an apple juice and cider maker and, of course, fishermen. On the high street retail side you will find good butchers with fantastically good hams and bacon, and proper fishmongers.Suffolk suffers from the second-home syndrome as much as any county with a pleasing countryside. And it is not uncommon for Volvo estate cars and other capacious vehicles to be filled to bursting with supermarket carrier bags, crammed with weekend grog and fodder: enough chicken tikka and ready- prepared tiny vegetables wrapped in plastic to last a week, not just a weekend. Suffolk sports some glorious towns and villages, with a wealth of varied architecture and enormous style - unlike the endless golden glow of Cotswold stone, the sometimes bleak grey look of Cornish slate, and weatherboarded Sussex. But it is nourishment of another sort that concerns me here.It is heartening to see that, in this fair county of Suffolk, there are enterprising and dedicated folk who work the flat land cultivating fine produce and plundering its dune-dotted, sometimes spooky coastline (readers of the MR James ghost story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", will know all about that spookiness).