Heathcote Williams’ book about Boris Johnson duly arrived. Rather than Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit – A Study in Depravity, 2019, which was what had attracted me, I have instead the earlier Brexit Boris, from Mayor to Nightmare, Public Reading Rooms, 2016. I tired of it pretty quickly – too much has already been published about the man in the years between then and now and there didn’t seem to be anything much I hadn’t already read somewhere else. Williams is good on his propensity for violence, although he become rather repetitive to say the least on the Darius Guppy affair, and his complete lack of concern about the concept or notion of truth. Well, we are in the post-truth age thanks to him and of course the obvious others. Truth is the first victim when Blair, and especially Trump, Starmer, Farage and Boris simply say whatever the prevailing wind tells them will win them the most votes. Their tactics are not identical. Starmer weasels his way through, saying one thing one day then retracting it in the next, Trump doesn’t care and probably doesn’t even recognise truth, whilst Farage, no matter how wild his claims, simply challenges us to prove him wrong. “I don’t know this is a fact, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I am proven right” is the sort of thing he comes up with. All of them have done incalculable damage. To return to Zack Polanski (the new Green Party leader) he refreshingly states that the whole small boats distraction is built on a framework of racism and fascism. Michael Heseltine, an arms dealer with whom I do not tend to agree, has also called a spade a spade in this regard. Why does he compare Reform and the rest to the Nazis of the 1930s? Because that is what they are, he says, they are doing the same things, making the same arguments.
I much prefer Heathcote Williams’ free verse to his prose, the Boris book being written in the latter. It’s illustrated with colour cartoons by caricaturists none of whose work I have ever really liked, if that isn’t too iconoclastic: Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman et al. See Tolkien and cars and Heathcote Williams, Badgers, Reggae, Cranes, Michael Palin in Venezuela, Eating Swans, Sparrows, Deer, a Butterfly, Elephants, Parakeets and Zack Polanski – Animal Wild and Royal Babylon and an accounting error – Animal Wild for more on Williams.
I sometimes wonder how different what I write and indeed my life would be (possibly rather happier) if I didn’t tend to see everything through the prism of being upset by and so passionately opposed to cruelty to animals. The tv sitcom, if that’s what it is, Brassic, for example, is something I would probably have enjoyed but there always seem to be an element of animal abuse treated far too lightly for me to persist with it. What jumped out from Brexit Boris relates closely to something I wrote in Animal Wild:
And he [Georg Monbiot] remembers that Boris Johnson, then a backbench MP, wrote a column in the Spectator, urging hunts to “defy the police and the magistrates and the government.”
In the same piece Boris wrote of his love of hunting with dogs for the “semi-sexual relationship with the horse” and the “military-style pleasure” of moving as a unit. But then he also once said that the melting ice caps at the North Pole would open up new sea routes which would be good news for Scottish ports.
Also:
Perhaps there’s more to be learned though from an excellent collection of thoughts and quotations on hunting and hunters, and what, apart from the lack of a ‘compassion gene’ as a friend puts it, might be psychologically and in particular psychosexually wrong with them: www.wordsonlife.co.uk/hunting-is-a-cowards-pastime. I do wonder why the hunters and shooters always seem to be so obsessed with it all.
And here it is again in Brexit Boris: “Depending on your point of view, Boris Johnson’s beloved English ‘verities’ can equally be described as animal torture, self-harm and child abuse. He is pro-hunting and in promoting the cause he reveals how he has benefitted gastronomically from stag hunting on Exmoor where his father, Stanley Johnson, owns some five hundred acres. The stag in question was surrounded by the hounds in the middle of the river Exe. “I can see it now,” Johnson recalls, “stepping high in the water, eyes rolling, tongue protruding, foaming, antlers streaming bracken and leaves like the hat of some demented old woman, and behind is the sexual high-pitched yipping of the dogs … Then they cut out the heart and gave it to my brother, still beating he claimed ever afterwards … “”
The words of a deeply disturbed and disturbing individual.
That prism marred my enjoyment of Rob Bryden’s excellent tour of the southern states of the USA to give a potted history of country and country and western music, Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Road Trip. The fourth in the series was the best for me, concentrating on the music’s Black origins, performers and exponents. I am not a huge fan of the genre generally and have always felt conflicted about the guilty pleasure of Lynyrd Skynyrd – no matter how great the music, there was always that confederate flag hung at the back of the stage. The racist and profoundly ill-informed opprobrium and hatred to which Beyoncé was subjected on the release of Cowboy Carter was unforgivable. I am a huge fan of Dolly Parton, not for her music which I find slightly sickly, but because she seems to be a decent human being who has never taken any crap from anyone, especially memorably on one occasion when she demolished a particularly sexist and patronising interviewer which I happen to have seen. Some of the C&W lyrics though – there’s a reference to a muleskinner and the singer’s ability to “pop my initials on a mule’s behind”. Nothing from Brydon on how that trivialises the painful and barbaric practice of branding. And he was truly pathetic on the subject of bears talking of them as simply scary and dangerous with no apparent curiosity as to their true nature or ecology.
Top Gear and the Grand Tour came to mind recently. Much as I despise Clarkson (and Hammond although not May), I did use to enjoy these, being a bit of a petrolhead myself, but as I read from another viewer the other day, they always left me feeling “just a little bit empty inside.” As when I occasionally used to grab a McDonald’s on my way home from work if it was late, many years ago and something I would never do now – that emptiness and also feeling rather squalid and guilty.
Enough of the prism. There’s a Nuthatch on the bird feeder right now – he, she or they have become regulars once more, although without young to feed they and the tits and sparrows are of course needing only a fraction of their springtime intake. What a beauty! And just one Jackdaw now and no sign of the sickly juvenile. They are such a successful species. Have they had an especially good year or am I just noticing them more? For further good for the soul nature, I cannot recommend highly enough Hamzaa Yassin’s four-part documentary on the BBC, Hamza’s Hidden Wild Isles. He is such a gentle and wise soul. Everyone he touches seems to know this and be better for it. For more on him see Books Old & New January / February 2024 – Animal Wild.
Also from the garden, the photo at the head of this post shows part of a patch of grass with about fifty of what look like wispy bits of fluff. Closer inspection reveals something much more complex.
I did briefly wonder if they might be fungal in nature, not entirely unreasonably, but they seem to be Grass Spider webs.
These fungi are growing on moss in the gap between the bottom of the shed and the ground and they took me down an identification rabbit hole from which I have surfaced absolutely none the wiser. I tried AI of course. Gemini confidently stated, seemingly based entirely on their growing on moss, that they were one species which they don’t even slightly resemble, Google’s AI came up with Lobster Mushroom, likewise. The latter are interesting though, apparently delicious and parasitic, taking over and transforming certain other fungi. I was puzzled at first that they did not appear in Collins Fungi Guide until realising that they do not occur in Britain and Ireland. My best guess right now is that they are Fistulina hepatica, but I am very far from sure. It’s hardly surprising given how many species there are and that, I have just noticed, Collins has five pages of appendices in extremely small print giving recent changes in Family and Order classification of Basidiomyecte Genera.
I think mosses are one of the many subjects about which there is far more to learn than we know already but I do know that they are not parasitic, so I was, like other solvers, very mildly irritated by the clue in The Guardian cryptic crossword: “Tree choked by parasitic plant in miserable state”. The answer is “mopiness”. I have been working my way back through that paper’s crosswords and am now back in October 2021. They are for me the best thing to get the day and the mind started with over coffee and the comments are always a delight. The compiler Paul can be the most annoying with themes that are just too niche and clues that are sometimes inelegant or just too convoluted. My favourite I decided just the other day is Brendan. His puzzles usually have a theme and the way he can work it into so many or all of the clues can be nothing short of sublime.
I am looking forward to getting out to look for fungi again this year (I’m just struggling to adapt to the cold and dampness in the air) and it’s a mast year to boot. Apparently we have very little idea how the trees involved all know to do it at the same time, although spring weather may possibly be a factor.
Chris Packham’s presence in Cyprus to further expose the slaughter of songbirds there and elsewhere in Europe and support the work of protection group CABS is bearing fruit in the form of an intensification of police raids on the hunters which has tended to be little more than a token effort in the past. The badger cull debate in Parliament seems to have left those in favour of it with nowhere left to go – but I expect they will come up with something.
Leave a Reply