And now we get to the miserable offerings sold by supermarkets, in plastic bags. They taste of absolutely nothing. You would be better off eating the plate on which they are served. They are nothing more than cross-trainers for your mouth, something to do when you’re not smoking.
I would like to meet the people responsible for this. I would like them to try one of my radishes and one of my chicken’s eggs, and I would like them to eat watercress straight from the beck in Appletreewick. And then I would like to stand, with my hands on my hips, and demand an explanation.
Make no mistake. I hate anything labelled organic. I deliberately won’t buy Fairtrade crisps. Or anything with a pithy nuclear-free, multicultural slogan. I loathe the movement, but I love, with all my heart, the destination. And this from a man who blasted his taste buds to kingdom come with nicotine by the time he was twenty-six. This from a man who cannot tell the difference between chicken and fish.
So yes, I recycle and I grow my own eggs, and I harvest my barley field from the inside out, so that any of the birds in there have a chance to flee. But all of these things are my choice. I would not dream of banning supermarket radishes or the bags in which they come. I would not set up a website for like-minded individuals. I would not go on a march.
I get on with these little things quietly, because if I made a noise and a fuss I would be labelled an environmentalist. Which is a terrible, hideous, beardy label for unwashed communists.
Nobody wants that, and this highlights something rather interesting. If the eco-ists would only shut up, I wonder if the sound of their droning would be replaced by the sound of normal people fitting solar panels and making soup from nettles and twigs.
Sunday 17 May 2009
I’ll be right there, Sir Ranulph – must conquer the sofa first
Sir Ranulph Fiennes explained last week that he reached the summit of Everest by imagining it wasn’t there. He said he was prepared simply to ‘plod for ever’, never once allowing himself the luxury of thinking about where he was going, what he was doing or whether he was halfway to halfway yet. In other words, Britain’s greatest adventurer achieved his goal by adopting the mindset of everyone else. ‘Plodding for ever’ is what almost all of us do almost every day. We get up in a morning, we trudge through the day, with no sense of purpose or ambition, and then we die.
Just this morning, after an enormously long time, the lift doors finally opened in my London apartment block to reveal a middle-aged woman who apologized for the eternity I’d been kept waiting. ‘I like to go up and down in here,’ she said. ‘You sometimes meet quite interesting people.’
So while Sir Ranulph walks from pole to pole, goes to his shed to amputate bits of his body that have become a nuisance, climbs the world’s highest peaks, has a heart operation and then runs seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, we have a woman who amuses herself by going up and down in a lift.
I’m no better. I amuse myself by getting up in a morning, going to Guildford, driving round corners a bit too quickly, while shouting, and then driving home to bury whichever pet has died that day. On Tuesday it was the mouse. Or, to be more accurate, the tumour with a mouse growing out of it.
I envy Ranulph Fiennes. I envy his drive. I envy his questfulness. Certainly, I know for sure that if I were enraged by a big American movie company that dammed a trout stream to make a feature film about talking animals, I’d sit at home and do nothing except write imaginary letters to my MP. Fiennes, on the other hand, nicked some explosives from the SAS stores and attempted to blow the Americans back from where they’d come.
If I’d got frostbite by trying to retrieve my tent and cooking equipment from the jaws of the Arctic Ocean, I’d whimper and wait for the doctor to work his miracles. Fiennes simply broke out his saw and did the job himself. He did. He cut bits of his own hand off because ‘it was annoying me’.
The rest of us are so very different. I, for instance, want to learn how to play the piano. But that means buying one, getting someone to bring it round, finding a book full of tunes that I like and that don’t have too many sharps or flats in them … and, all things considered, I can’t be bothered. I want to start collecting butterflies, but that means reading books and buying a net, and, frankly, it’s easier to watch television instead. There are so many things I want to do, so many ways I want to push my body and expand my mind, but it’s always easier to carry on plodding.
Gardening is a classic case in point. Last year, in a flurry of square-jawed determination to do something worthwhile, I bought a tree. It was delivered on the back of a lorry, in a huge pot, and plonked by the garage. Which is where it sits now because it’s just too much of a faff to move it.
It’s much the same story with my fountain. Three years ago I arranged for a plumber and an electrician to do the groundwork, but then I decided that not finishing it off was easier than finishing it off, so today my back lawn still has an unsightly pipe and some wires poking out of the grass that I really should cut this afternoon. But I won’t because I’ll be too busy watching the Monaco Grand Prix. Not live, obviously. That would have meant organizing tickets and finding a hotel and getting childcare and going to an airport, and, honestly, it’s so much easier to watch it on television. Unless the weather holds, in which case I’ll just stay in a chair in the ruin that could be a garden. But isn’t.
My latest project is bonsai trees. While everyone else at the Chelsea flower show last week mooched about wondering why there were so few shooting invitations this year, I became transfixed by the display of miniature topiary. The pine trees with their gnarled trunks and wind-blown lean looked exactly like the fully grown examples you might find on a cliff in southern Spain. But they were just a couple of feet tall. The detailing was exquisite. And I found myself swooning in the conjoining of nature’s infinite bounds for beauty and man’s ability to make everything better still.
Bonsai-ists are the same as Yorkshire’s dry-stone wallers, who bring the countryside to life, and the thirteenth-century cathedral builders, whose vision provides a focal point in our temperate flatlands. I spoke for a while with a fellow bonsai enthusiast, who explained about how it’s essential to concentrate on the roots rather than the plant you actually see, and how to change the fertilizer and ensure a steady flow of phosphoric acid, and how to prune the leaves and to make sure there is precisely the right amount of sunshine. And I’m afraid my eyes started to glaze over as I realized it would be much easier to fire up the PlayStation and spend an hour or two shooting my children in the face.
For this reason, I’m never going to build the fantastic train set that exists only in my mind. I’m never going to hang the pictures I haven’t bought yet. And I’m never going to clear Cambodia of landmines. And neither are you, because you’re sitting around reading the papers, same as you did last week and the week before.
I know we can’t all be Ranulph Fiennes.
We can’t do everything. But don’t you wish that sometimes you could find the time from the drudge of the humdrum … to do something?
Sunday 24 May 2009
Letting beavers loose in Scotland is a dam-fool idea
As we know, the economy is stagnant, we are up to our shoulders in debt and things are likely to get worse. So imagine my surprise to find the government has decided to spend £275,000 on eleven Norwegian beavers that will be freed to roam wild in Scotland. As this works out at £25,000 each, I’m wondering if the money could have been better spent. Because I’ve done some checking and it turns out that for the same kind of cash they could have bought an extremely rare white lion cub, half a dozen house-trained chimpanzees and a brace of albino pythons. A striped Bengal cat, which looks very much like a small monochrome tiger and is created by mating an Asian leopard cat with a domestic tom, can be bought, according to a Forbes magazine survey, for as little as £500. Extremely good value for money considering that I should imagine many of the couplings end with the domestic tom inside the female’s stomach.
<
br /> Of course, the people responsible for choosing the beaver instead would argue that Scotland is not an appropriate place for mutant tigers or pythons – I think they’re wrong on this – and that they went for the big-toothed rat because it used to live there before man invented toast and wanted something to put on it.
Needless to say, the scheme has met with considerable opposition from the likes of Jeremy Paxman and Sir Ian Botham, who say that beavers will eat all the fish they were hoping to put back, and from locals who think they will catch cryptosporidiosis – an incurable ailment that causes such uncontrollable diarrhoea that sufferers have been known to excrete their own lungs.
I made that up, in the same way that alarmists have made up the threat levels. Beavers do carry a range of parasites – as businessmen on trips to east Africa know to their cost – but the chances of becoming ill after a walk in the glens are nil.
For me, the problem with reintroducing beavers to Scotland, where they haven’t lived for 400 years, is that pretty soon the Highlands will be a broken and desolate place full of nothing but poisoned oxbow lakes, dead deer and grouse moors that look like the UAE’s empty quarter.
To understand the problem, we need to go back to the nineteenth century and the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Obviously man knew best, so to make sure it was as diverse as possible, bears and wolves were not encouraged with quite the same fervour as various deery things. Which meant that pretty soon the whole place was awash with elk. Lovely. Unfortunately, elk absolutely love aspen trees, which meant that soon enough they were all gone. And that was a problem for Johnny beaver, because without the aspens he couldn’t dam the rivers and streams. So he moved out. And without the dams, the water meadows dried hard in the summer months, meaning there was no grass for the deery things to eat. So they started to move out as well.
Unwilling to accept they’d made a mess, the authorities blamed the migration on carnivores and started a cull of wolves and bears. Which meant their numbers started to fall, too. Until in the 1950s pretty much all any visitor could see on a trip to Yellowstone was about a million bored elk wondering if the fender from Wilbur and Myrtle’s Oldsmobile would keep them going till the aspen trees came back.
And then came the clincher. Unlike the Indians, who had regularly burnt the region, the whitey eco-ists had steadfastly waged war against all forest fires. This meant the ground was littered with tinder-dry fallen twigs and branches. So when the lightning struck in 1988 and the fire started, it burnt close to the ground rather than in the trees. This meant it burnt hot and could not be extinguished and the result of that was simple. The soil in the entire park – all 2m acres of it – was rendered sterile and useless.
That’s what will happen to Scotland. Oh, they may say the beavers will be monitored and they’ll be good for the tourist industry. But that’s what Dickie Attenborough said about Jurassic Park just before the T-rex ate his children.
I’m not suggesting that the beavers will eat people who go to see them, although if they are ramblers that would be no bad thing. But who’s to say the trees they chew don’t contain some unknown bacterium that stops sheep becoming man-eaters? Who’s to say the floods their dams create won’t swamp Glasgow? Who’s to say the Loch Ness Monster isn’t an ancient beaver experiment that got out of hand? Of course, the beaver enthusiasts will dismiss all this as nonsense and point to the red kites that were successfully reintroduced in the Chilterns a few years ago. Absolutely. I love to see these majestic birds soaring over the cut on the M40 as I drive to London. They lift my spirits. But did anyone notice the RSPB findings last week? The sudden and dramatic decline in the number of lapwings, wood warblers and fieldfares? Could this have anything to do with the sudden re-emergence of the airborne raptor? Then we have foxy woxy. Now that the hunt is not allowed to (legally) kill them, everyone’s chicken run is full of nothing but feathers and feet. Mine looks like a voodoo preacher’s wet dream. And that means we have to buy our eggs from the supermarket, which means we’ll all catch salmonella and die in great pain.
I have this advice for Scotland’s eco-ists. Don’t try to manage nature. Embrace it. Make it a part of you. Eat it. Forget the beavers, which, while cute and clever compared with, say, a rock or an apple, are expensive and mostly invisible. If it’s tourists you’re after, look at the giraffe. Children would love to see them on the glens, they won’t hurt Sir Botham’s salmon, they carry no unpleasant diseases, they are cheap and no one will steal their eggs.
Sunday 31 May 2009
Say cheese, darling – I’ll stick on your horse’s ears later
One of the things I’d most like to do is force the people on Desert Island Discs each week actually to live on a desert island with nothing but the music they select. Then we’d be able to see how wacky and interesting they feel after twenty years of ‘Two Little Boys’ by Rolf Harris and the ‘Love Song’ from Sanders of the River.
We see a similar problem with those who make wild and stupid claims about what they’d save should their house suddenly be on fire. By all means tell your mates over dinner that you’d rescue the onyx cufflinks bought for your eighteenth birthday by a long-lost girlfriend. But don’t come crying to me when the firemen are removing the soggy and charred lump of meat that used to be your dog.
I’ve always said that, if a giant meteorite were to be heading for my house, I’d save my copy of Monty Python’s Big Red Book, which was signed in 1976 by every member of the team. That, however, is a lie, designed mostly to reveal that I have such a thing. The truth of the matter is that it would be left behind. Because what I’d actually save are my photograph albums. If they were to burn I would feel a biting sense of loss. And that’s strange because I haven’t looked at them since 1979 and I’m fairly certain I never will again. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I haven’t looked more than once at any picture I’ve ever taken. And I bet you haven’t, either.
How many people – hands up – have ever watched their wedding video? That’s, let’s see … none. And think how much effort you made on the big day. You paid a man in a cheap suit to come along. You allowed him to jostle your friends and relatives out of the way. You sacrificed an hour of perfectly good drinking time so he could get some nice angles of you on the swing, under the weeping willow tree in the churchyard. And where’s the video now? I bet half of you don’t even know.
It’s the same story with pictures. In the olden days our SLRs were the size of Bibles, but we’d lug them around with an assortment of spare lenses and flash guns and we’d move people out of the sun and make everyone smile and we’d take the film to the developers and we’d pay a bit extra for a fast turnaround because we were desperate to see how everything had turned out. And then we’d leaf through the finished shots in ten seconds, put them in a drawer and never, ever, look at them again.
Today, things are very different. Because you have a digital camera on your phone, you take pictures of absolutely everything, and on YouTube every day’s a wedding day. You used to come back from your holiday with twenty-four pictures, because that’s how many were on the film. Now most people come back from a trip to the shops with about a billion. The other day I took a picture of the sky simply because it had no clouds in it.
And yesterday I caught my daughter taking a picture of a pair of scissors. Our new tortoise, meanwhile, has had more portrait work done on it than the Queen.
Because cameras are in effect free and because there is no longer any developing, photography no longer has a cost. And without a cost it has no value. It’s much like the music you can buy on iTunes. It’s not music at all. It’s just millions of people making a noise. You may say this is a good thing. You may say it was unjust that in the days before photography only the rich could afford to immortalize themselves on paper. And now everyone can. But down the line I can see this causing all sorts of issues.
Let me explain why. This morning I decided to transfer all the pictures of the sky and our kitchen sciss
ors from my iPhone on to my computer. This is easy enough if you have about four spare weeks, the temper of someone who’s actually dead and a master’s degree in American business-speak.
The problem is that over the years I have owned many phones and many digital cameras. So when the computer detects that it’s been presented with some pictures, it stores them in the electronic equivalent of a dusty box in the cellar, behind the gun safe. Finding them again is a nightmare. But find them you do, and then what? Do you delete the ones that have no meaning or that are out of focus? No. You either leave them all where they are, in which case they will be lost for all of time when your hard drive crashes. Which, one day, I assure you it will. That, of course, is not as disastrous as losing a photograph album, because you will also have put them on Facebook in the mistaken belief that the rest of the world will somehow be interested in what you did on holiday. Frankly, I’d rather look at someone’s piles than their holiday pics. Or you carefully move them to a disc, which involves going into town, buying a packet of three, coming home, finding out you’ve bought the wrong ones, going back into town again and then finally getting everything transferred. It would be easier to set up an easel and break out the oils.
But before you do any of these things, I bet you have a little fiddle with the computer’s Paint Shop program. You start out imagining that you’ll put everything the right way up and maybe get rid of everyone’s red eye. But pretty soon you will be giving your children massive noses and making your family pets sepia. I always give my wife some horse’s ears, which makes her very angry.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 18
