But it was when he was doing that environmental unit that things went really pear-shaped. He nearly went mental. “It’s clicked,” he said one Thursday night as he climbed into bed.
I thought he was referring to his footballer’s left knee, the one he slid on when he did his tackles in his youth. (He never did go down on one knee for me!). That was the knee that used to swell up like clockwork every winter evening whenever the dustbin needed carrying out to the front. “Giving me some right gyp is that knee,” he used to say, rubbing the bony bit whenever I made even passing reference to the plastic recyclable that needed pulling out onto the pavement. I am reluctant to describe my husband as a lazy ha’peth, but that is precisely what he is when he puts his mind to it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When he used to work down the pit he would come home, eat his tea, put his feet up and read one of his curse units. There was always something on the go. “Working hard, or hardly working?” I used to say to him. Now I can understand him feeling tired after a day of humping coal cutters, setting them up and then shifting them again. But I couldn’t understand it when he claimed the same fatigue after a day of reading. I mean, reading’s not work, is it? Unless, of course, you’re one of those solicitor people or lawyer types, in which case they charge you a hundred and twenty quid an hour to do it for you. Now they have a right to feel tired at that price!
But you would have thought that reading was real work when Donkey did it, and especially after he got his environmentalist’s bug. I can’t remember the name of the course he did. It was something like the name of a brand of petrol, or of a re-usable plastic bag you have to buy from the supermarket, Greener Than Green, or something. Now the only greens I know anything about are the ones that the kids won’t eat, and village greens, like the one at the top of Kiddington Common that used to house the pond and bandstand and the big trees where the lads hung old car tyres from long ropes.
And then all of a sudden everything went green. Electricity and gas went green. Plastic bags went green, and even petrol went green. It made everyone feel easier when they bought their new four-wheel drives. Now we could have painted our old outhouse green, but it would still have been our old outhouse. It used to be an outside lav until Donkey took out all the plumbing and concreted it over. It would still have been an old lav, even green, and a smelly one at that. Leopards can’t change their spots.
It was the same with Donkey when he went green, if you ask me. He was the same old Donkey underneath, and still smelly. But he was suddenly all animated, impatient to act, no longer satisfied with sitting in his chair, one moment reading, the next complaining about the gyp from his knee. He started the talk about taking direct action only a week or two after he started his Greener Than Green thing. The words dynamism and campaign were rarely off his lips. I told him I would be all too happy to witness some direct action in the direction of the kitchen, digging over the back garden, shifting that eternal pile of ironing or weeding the path. Yes, it would need some dynamism, a long-lost quality for whose return I had been campaigning directly for several years. I reminded him that he once had a dynamism attached to the back wheel of his bike. It used to light up his lamps, but he got rid of it claiming that batteries were kinder to his tyre walls.
There was a month of pure hiatus. You couldn’t see Donkey when he went past because he was usually moving so quick. At the request of his precious green course, he hunted around for a focus. First he needed comrades to join his group. Then he declared their conjoined identity the vehicle from which they could campaign on a local issue. The course required a group focus, it seemed, alongside the slogan ‘Think local, act global’. The end was going to justify the means.
He was going to call it PEE, Pure Earth Environments. They had rejected Sustainability, Honesty, Independence Taskforce and they had tried Committed Realists Against Pollution and True Urban-Rural Dynamism. But none of his mates liked the names. Then, out of the blue, or perhaps the green, came an issue that fired them up, in a carbon-neutral, captured way, I assume. It was a cause célèbre to which they might unequivocally imply themselves. They toyed with the reclamation of the old muck stacks that used to surround the pit, but by then the Coal Board had landscaped them all, planted striplings and turfed them out. Had he waited another year, of course, he would have had a point, because the price of oil soared and the Coal Board started to open-cast the old stacks and had to rip up all the costly greening they had taken a full year to install. If he’d taken up the open cast, then he might have had a cause the village could take seriously, but it was not to be.
They had walks around the common, discussing the dam, the boggy areas copsed below it, the gorse bushes and the bracken. They argued over what they might preserve by changing things. They got onto the local council, wrote letters to the Metro and had meetings with men at the town hall in Bromaton. The problem was that what they suggested - the erection of signs and notices to draw ramblers’ attention to the unique history and nature of Kiddington Common - went down so well that officialdom simply said, “Yes” and did it. A couple of weeks after their direct action, therefore, Donkey and his green mates had achieved everything they had set out to get, their success thus leaving them depressed and again lacking focus. It made not a scrap of difference anyway, because for twenty years parents had stopped letting their kids wander across the common, some say because of the fear of child molesters, flashers and abduction. So few people walked the common that the old paths had grassed over, returned to nature perhaps, a state that Donkey and his mates wanted to reverse, so that it would become a real community resource again. But the real reason that people don’t wander the common any more, of course, is that these days no-one now feels safe with things sticky, muddy or natural. They’re afraid they might be allergic.
It was then that they thought of windmills. Donkey, you see, was a closet fossil, a fossil fuel, no less. He was a coal man at heart and, though he knew about carbon peroxide, acrid rain and global warning, he was still convinced that coal was the future. He could even claim research findings and detailed opinions of people he called imminent scientists, all of whom agreed with him. So there was no rest for the wicked, just a new cause.
Where we lived, of course, coal had become a thing of the past, with nearly all of the evidence of the pits grassed over, smoothed out of both local history and collective memory. The muck stacks that used to smoulder all summer had all been flattened. There was even talk of making them into a Kiddington Golf Course, where the newly affluent and incomers onto the estates could spend their hard-earned leisure. Donkey and his mates were, of course, totally against the idea on the grounds that the activity was elitist and that it was responsible for irresponsible amounts of water usage. In any case, Kiddingtonians were already taking their golfing holidays in Thailand, where planning laws are said to be less draconian. Anyway, those poor people in the Third World, they need the money, don’t they?
You might have thought that a set of greens would have embraced windmills like those Hindus in India embraced their trees to protect them from defloration. But when Donkey and his gang became YAWN!, Yorkshire Against Windfarms Now!, they claimed different kinds of association, quoting something called Parrott efficiency. Maybe the birds lived in those Indian trees they were always talking about. They did sums, lots of sums, on Donkey’s computer, all set out on one of his sandwich spreadsheets, all multicoloured and revised and reprinted three times a week to incorporate the new figures, the updated guesstimates that he and his cronies spent half their waking hours trawling the internet to find.
The sandwich spreadsheet demonstrated that by the time you had built roads, made steel, mined rare metals, made alloys, transported the goods, constructed the infrastructure and allowed for the fact that they would all need to be backed up with gas-fired power stations, the windmills came out more polluting than coal. They went on about scrubbers, and, Lord knows, ther
e were enough of them around in Kiddington! They discussed capturing carbon, which I thought people did in the 1930s during the Great Depression when they went onto the slagheaps with buckets. And so, when the YAWNs got to the bottom of their sandwich spreadsheets, the figure for coal was better than the figure for wind, given that you had to have the coal or gas as well anyway in case you didn’t get the wind. No shortage of that when Donkey was around, believe you me... It was a revelation, Donkey said, and thus justified their taking direct action against the project at Chisteacre, especially because powers that be were suppressing the true facts so as not to undermine their interests.
The electricity board was proud of its project. A brighter, cleaner future, they called it on the billboards, all green, of course, that surrounded the site, thus masking and excusing the activity of graders, bulldozers and excavators as they built mile upon mile of new roads across the wold. The great, white windmills, as yet only in artist’s depression, stood like giant trees on the pimple-hillock that used to be the slag heap next to one of the few collieries that used to operate in the east of the county, on the Vale of Pork. Donkey and his YAWN! cronies formed what they called a spectrum alliance with the Resident’s Action Group, a set of nimbys who were afraid that their house prices would collapse if they had anything remotely linked to industry between themselves and the distant horizon, especially now that farming had all but collapsed and there weren’t even tractors to disturb the quietude of their rural idyll, a paradise funded by the lucrative corporate contract work and divorce settlements handled by their legal partnerships in Punslet.
Together, YAWN! and RAG’s spectrum alliance barricaded the access road the developer was trying to build, the direct action sit-down conducted by activists drawn from both groups. Between them, they kept up a twenty-four-seven occupation. Donkey even got himself onto the regional news where they described him as an environmental activist. On one bulletin of local news they even called him an extremist, which was a bit far-fetched. He’s not even religious. More of a pain than a campaign, if you ask me. It went on for months. They had visits from all and sundry. An MP or two turned up. They had reporters with their electronic news gathering equipment (to me they just looked like cameramen) and there was a rumour at one stage that Sky News might just move in permanently at the bottom of the hill to broadcast twenty-four-hour coverage of the inaction alongside in-depth analysis, repeated every ten minutes. Now an ounce of discretion is worth a pound of wit, but cometh the hour, cometh the man. It all ended when Donkey clocked one of the policemen that had him in a headlock after a morning of serious campaigning. And so he got carted off to jail. They decided not to persecute him, however. To this day Donkey claims that the electricity company got him off because they didn’t want any negative publicity that might have arisen out of their winning a court case. So he was lucky on that score. But the policeman he clocked did him for assault. He got a two hundred pound fine and was bound over to keep the peace. I decided there and then that enough was enough. I hadn’t seen Donkey at peace for years.
“If you go on like this,” I can remember shouting at him, “you’ll be in jail, and I’ll be in the loony bin. And where would we be then? You’re not doing any more stupid courses!”
“I’ve not done any stupid courses...”
“And don’t you try to pun your way out of this one, you nit-picking environmentalist!”
“But I’ve already enrolled for B299, A Practical Approach To Rainforest Conservation For The Committed Temperate Zone Campaigner,” he pleaded.
“Fustigate the follicled rain forest,” I told him. “I’m not having a jail bird in my house, and that’s what you’ll be if you go on with this trotting around the countryside in your bovver-wellies!”
He relented, and his years of studying came to an end. I wanted to celebrate. We had a bonfire and did it properly, inviting the neighbours like we used to. But on the day, Don came over all funny and had to go to bed. I think the change was a bit much for him. The rest of us went ahead, of course, and we all had a great time. I even sent a special card to the vicar, but he was away baptising. I suppose he can’t miss an opportunity these days. I invited Tommy Hanley, where Don has had his hair cut for forty years or more, but he said no as well. His wife’s not been well. She had a bleach and perm that went wrong a few months ago and daren’t show her face. She burnt a woman’s scalp with neat peroxide and the court case is pending. She’s best keeping herself to herself when there’s damages at stake.
We cooked potatoes in the embers, gave out toffee, parkin and plates of mushy peas with vinegar, all served with frozen tacos spread with a puree of sun-dried tomatoes, a splash of olive oil and a hint of dried basil. The kids wouldn’t eat it, because they didn’t know what it was. They had burgers out of the freezer instead. It’s the devil they know. It was a good do, and it was fuelled by Donkey’s amassed academic documents. He apologised publicly for the carbon peroxide, saying that he had purchased offsets in advance through a company on the internet, so it was all right. I was so relieved that his conscience was clear.
And so we got him cleaned out, returned to the land of the thinking by chucking out all his intellectual academic stuff and even got him to agree to a new life in the sun, despite the threat posed by what he called ribbon tourist development along the Mediterranean littoral. So we arrived. And then what happens? He takes it all up again. What goes around comes round. No Molesta he calls himself. And so when I’m out at work all day, grafting in The Castle to augment our unpredictably meagre pension arrangements, serving chips by the ton, curry and rice by the bucket-full and Bisto gravy lakes, he’s off up the sierras on his quad bike painting his logos on the rocks to protect them from being defaced. It’s my own fault, I suppose, for marrying a Donkey. Love is blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener!
Twenty Three
Music had been a mystery to me... - Donald reflects on the nature of the senses. He remembers how an evening of karaoke provoked political revelation. He rewrites a song as an expression of protest. He reflects on music and locates the origin of his interest in it.
Music had been a mystery to me until A279, Enharmonic Techniques In The Development Of The Nineteenth Century Concert Overture. The course opened my eyes to sound, its capabilities, its ambiguities. I cannot claim understanding, of course, after such limited exposure, but at least I can verbalise the difference I had always assumed between the nobs’ music and pop. Basically, there are sensory reasons at its root.
Languages often differentiate between sensory options. Sight, being the most routinely used has the widest vocabulary. We can ‘see’, ‘look’ or ‘watch’ for a start, and we haven’t even reached a second syllable. While seeing is always general, looking is seeing with inherent intent, while watching is seeing with concentration, even more interest, and perhaps even with memory in gear rather than maintaining its usual disengaged freewheel through experience. A crucial observation here is that, though we may absorb multiple visual stimuli, we may invariably respond only to one at a time. It’s the one we watch that becomes the object of our interest.
Taste in the physical rather than the aesthetic sense is a little-developed faculty, especially amongst Kiddingtonians whose diet, as has been repeatedly observed, used to consist of only fish and chips, bread and jam or bacon and eggs. Nowadays things have changed: their daily fare now consists of burger and chips, deep-fried pizza and Thai green curry on toast with a drizzle of olive oil, mango chutney and guacamole dressing with a hint of lemon and thyme bought ready-made in plastic trays from Tesco, or from M&S for those with middle-class pretensions. For the whole of human existence we have lived with just four tastes - salt, sour, sweet and bitter - until the twentieth century added umami with the detection of the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid, otherwise known as the Chinese take-away. It was also a century that eventually tried to extract salt from the list, advising tasters to reduce its intake, as
if generations for millennia had been poisoned by it. The product of this advice has been no improvement in people’s health or diet, but it has added yet another layer of neurosis onto the overloaded British guilt complex and probably caused thousands of nervous breakdowns leading to increased claims for disability benefit and vast profits for the multinationals that make antidepressants part of our daily diet. “We mustn’t salt our potatoes any more,” I remember Suzie saying one day, “or eat sugar. I suffer pangs of conscience when I see meat and can only think of extinction at the fish counter. I check that everything green is inorganic and I count all my food miles. I even chuck everything out a week before the use by date, just to be sure it’s safe, and still... I don’t know what we can or can’t eat these days. First they tell you this and then they tell you that. Eat five portions of veggies and fruit a day, but make sure they aren’t all carrots or you’ll turn yellow and... And then someone says eat piles of meat and protein, and someone else says cut it out, go veggie and worship lentils. They tell you your body craves carbohydrates, but when you pump them into the atmosphere, it causes global warming! Pass the biscuits, Donkey.”
Tasting two things at the same time might be an impossibility, hence the dash of this, the hint of that, the drizzling of an additive alongside the main feature. For the sense of smell, however, multiple stimuli are definitely immediate confusion. One at a time is sometimes possible, but outside a limited effluence of chemical inputs - and most of those at mere trace levels - our smell hardly operates, except, of course, on London underground trains when the very act of individual strap hanging causes half the carriage to faint whilst mouthing the phrase ‘BO’. Lifebuoys to the rescue! We know, of course, that a banana is tasteless if eaten with a peg on your nose. Personally, I don’t go to that kind of nightclub. We also know that you can’t eat a burger with a peg on your nose because the prongs get stuck in the bun.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 23
