Nature loss – not good says DEFRA
“Nature loss is a national security risk, intelligence group warns”. The DEFRA (DEATHRA) report according to the BBC states that “The decline in the health of nature around the world poses a threat to the UK’s security and prosperity.” The document warns of “cascading risks” from the degradation of some of the planet’s most important ecosystems, including conflict, migration and increased competition for resources.
I wonder how much the report cost. To use one my favourite phrases, no shit, Sherlock. Greenpeace was founded in 1971 for heaven’s sake, Silent Spring was published in 1962. But governments haven’t listened. Of course data and analysis are important, but we know what the problems are, we know what’s at stake. What we need is action and action that isn’t postponed by means of needless transition periods to satisfy the lobby groups who pretty much run the country. As the interesting head of Ecotricity, Dale Vince, although a donor himself to the Labour party, has said, political donations should be banned altogether. Money should not buy influence in that way. Talking of which, Keir Starmer (aka Max Headroom), now the most unpopular prime minister since records began, has, according to The Sunday Times, “not lost confidence – his self-belief remains unbreakable”. He “desperately wants to continue … ” I find that very worrying. If he isn’t suffering from self-doubt at this point than surely he never will. It suggests a personality disorder.
The ogre
And talking of that, we are spoilt for choice in denunciations of Trump, a man with a boundless capacity for cruelty, but this one struck me as particularly devastating and comprehensive.
I have good American friends and have loved my visits to and travels around the USA but I would not go now and it seems nor would many others. It must be awful for sane, liberal Americans to witness what is happening and they must be wondering if the rest of the world will ever forgive them. Even some of those friends insist on America’s having the biggest and best of everything, a unique ‘can-do’ attitude and assumption of excellence. I was being driven in a van around Brooklyn once and made a light remark about those traffic lights hung high over the road which we don’t have here. Having observed my friend run a couple of red lights I suggested that perhaps they were easier to miss than ours. “Remember you’re a guest in this country,” he uncharacteristically snarled.
I do not wish to alienate my American readers but not everything is “great”. Perhaps things have changed, but last time I went the bread, coffee and chocolate were still terrible. And for such a technologically advanced nation, the household plugs and sockets are extraordinarily flimsy and dangerous.
And see:
I lived in the US – the meat was so bad, I went vegetarian
Dairy farming
Prompted by a pub discussion I was thinking about dairy produce as I often do, racked with guilt. I recently visited a farm and saw the calves, wrenched from their mothers, sitting listlessly, hopelessly, helplessly in barns, the females to be kept for milk, the males, separately enclosed, to be sold for meat. But there is another way and I remembered a farm where calves stay with their mothers for six months. The farmer claimed happier animals and staff, higher welfare standards and increased profitability.
The pioneering dairy farmer keeping calves with their mothers – BBC News
Headlights and parking
In other news this weekend, I read that the government is considering legislation to deal with the problem of headlight glare, which can dangerously impede drivers’ vision at night. The older I get the less comfortable I am driving at night and super bright headlights are a particular problem. There are solutions. One piece of advice is simply not to look at them, which seems too simple but does work. You can also get yellow-tinted clip-on glasses which help enormously. I strongly suspect that my own car headlights are dazzling, but of course one never knows what one’s own car lights are like. The worst are those on Land Rovers, Defenders and other giant cars because of their height. There are an awful lot of cars round here like that with most of the owners having no concept of their widths or being too arrogant to care. They really do not need vehicles like that.
Councils are going to be significantly raising car parking charges on high streets and elsewhere, in some cases doubling them. They have to do something to mitigate their deficits but the people this will hurt most are surely high street retailers, already struggling terribly.
Phone culture
I’ve also been thinking about phone culture and the like, applauding the recent move in Australia to ban under-16s from social media. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that above all taking a phone call or texting in company is incredibly rude. I will never forget the first time it happened to me. I was out for lunch with another bookseller whom I have previously described as the second most pompous and by far the most duplicitous person I have ever met. I was paying and I was in mid-sentence, at the table, when his phone rang. “I really must get this,” he said, which I am sure wasn’t true. He was trying, pathetically, to show me how important he was.
Stained glass
I rather like the idea of a poll organised by the Association of English Cathedrals to find the most popular stained glass window. I have loved these ever since I first saw the resplendent rose window at Notre Dame in Paris. Here, from previous posts, are a few I have particularly admired in the course of my canal trips last year.
The chapel of St Mary, Tory, Bradford on Avon
Holy Trinity Church, Bradford on Avon
Two from St Mary’s, Great Bedwyn
Police and border encounters
Sandy Balfour’s Pretty girl in crimson rose (8) has again prompted memories. He recounts unpleasant encounters with police and border officials in various countries. I have only ever had a gun pointed at me once and that was in France. Two fellow students and I drove around France and a little bit of Italy for a few weeks on very little money, usually sleeping in the car, on beaches (not legal) and on one night in the middle of a vineyard. We were waved down by police and told to show our papers and so on. Behind the roadside hedge though were armed officers with guns raised and aimed straight at us. I have always wondered if they were acting on a tip-off and we somehow fit the bill.
I was driving to see a client to collect books once with the car full of empty cardboard boxes. I ran out of petrol just outside Aldershot, home of the British army. I didn’t bother to lock the car since it couldn’t be driven away and the boxes were all that was in it. I walked into town to get petrol. When I returned and approached the car, two armed military police appeared seemingly out of nowhere but from the woods at the side of the road. Not great. Why had I left it unlocked and what was with all the boxes? I suppose I can’t blame them.
I have never been pounced on at customs as aggressively as I was when I arrived at the Channel Island of Jersey. I explained that I was there to carry out a book valuation, but the interrogation was intense and deeply hostile. Crossing the Swiss border with my mixed race family was profoundly unpleasant too.
Being stopped by traffic cops in America was never good. Once for a minor speeding infraction: I started to get out of the car as my father taught me to do in the UK, as a sign of respect. Not wise in the US – the officer’s hand immediately went to his gun. “Stay seated, sir, stay seated.” Driving back into San Francisco, where I was staying for a book fair, from a reggae gig in San Jose (a disappointing performance by The Itals), I was extremely tired and jet-lagged having only arrived that morning. This time I was followed and pulled over by two officers in a car. They lit up a light on top of the car as impossible to look at as the sun as the female officer approached from behind. Apparently my lane control “back by Monster Park” has been less than brilliant. I had also thrown a cigarette butt out of the window as was normal then in the UK but quite rightly not in America. Plus the butt had hit the roof of their car. I did my best Hugh Grant impression and said that I was mortified. I did the eyes following the finger without moving my head test and was allowed to go. She was actually not unfriendly but I was very shaken. I told an American bookseller the story and said how frightening it had been. “Why?” “Well, because I might have been shot.” “Oh, that doesn’t always happen.”
No police encounters, but my wife and I once stayed, very briefly, in Las Vegas, just to see what it was like. We gambled less than a dollar in total. I don’t understand the appeal of gambling which is probably just as well. It is a vile place. The one casino I walked into (to get some cash) gave me an instant headache. There’s a wonderful description of it in the brilliant A Quest for Kerouac, by Chris Challis, Faber and Faber, 1984 – I was very into the Beats at the time. The friend just mentioned once asked me why I liked driving in America so much. I told her and she replied, “Oh God, he thinks he’s Jack f***ing Kerouac.” The cover of course is a mock-up Beat version of Mount Rushmore where he whose name I can scarcely bring myself to mention now wishes to be immortalised. I don’t disown that youthful version of myself, but I was also in the habit of eating at the vegetarian café in Neal Street in Covent Garden, smoking roll-up Gauloises or Gitanes and sporting a book by Camus perhaps, ostentatiously poking out of my jacket pocket.
Challis calls it it the city of Lost Wages and scintillatingly and scathingly writes: “For every genuine mafioso, Maverick-hero or adrenalised high roller riding the glittering honed edge of his luck … there are a thousand paychecks and retirement pensions disappearing across the baize into the pouches of the keno girls, in their heels and leotards and tights, or into the metal entrails of the bandits. Built on vices which the rest of America tries to ignore, or at least to suppress (the blazing streets are lined with vending machines, selling for 50 or 75 cents, sheets which are two half-assed articles; a thousand ads for massage parlours, outcalls, dominatrices or submissives, black girls or golden girls, and five hundred photographs of Hollywood models, in garter belts and boots, shot in studios a long, long way away). Las Vegas is a phoney destination. No conventional reason to found a city there exists. No commercial or trade routes; no center of scattered population; no natural resources. Just the imported commodities of the loss of money in an adrenal rush and the illicit thrill of a secret, commercial, vacation blow job. There is no reason for Las Vegas to exist – in the middle of inhospitable desert – except man’s inexhaustible need to con himself, to fork over his lucre to the artificial lusts which he created out of his own natural urges. As such, it assaults the senses in a particularly sinister way. To arrive in the tawdry façades of Las Vegas in the heat of the Nevada noon, out of a landscape better suited to a Peckinpah movie than the New World’s version of the Golden Mile, is to comprehend, in a flash, why Hunter S. Thompson was compelled to gulp such vast quantities of pharmaceuticals in order to cope with the town.”
That book in turn brings back another memory, since kept inside my rather browned copy is a letter from and a dot-matrix printer image of a phenomenally pretty and lovely German girl, Sabine, who came over and sat with me in a coffee shop in Amsterdam. It was a real ships that pass in the night or Brief Encounter moment. She shared her ‘jazz cigarette’ with me and talked wryly of the “miraculous German efficiency”. We did correspond for a while afterwards. I can’t help wondering if she remembers. When I left to go back to the hotel I found myself utterly disorientated – and there are parts of Amsterdam which all look very much the same. I had a folding map in my pocket but when I looked at it I realised that I could no longer understand what the correlation between a map and the surrounding world was, at all. I decided to walk into the first shop I came across and ask for directions. This happened to be a pretty hardcore gay sex shop where a number of very large Dutch men took a great interest in me. I backed out quickly. It took me a very long time to get to where I was supposed to be.
A leaving gift from colleagues after a month working in New York was a small but perfectly formed jazz cigarette. I put it in my top jacket pocket and forgot about it and blithely and unwittingly walked through customs with it at JFK. Then I remembered. I would never dare do it now but it seemed at the time (I was 18) my best bet was to smoke it in the restroom before boarding. It was quite a flight.
All of this is light and trivial in comparison to what is going on in America now as the state uses military force against its own citizens and demonises its immigrants but my fears when being stopped there were not unfounded over forty years ago. Bruce Springsteen’s potent ‘American Skin (41 shots)’ springs to mind and that was written in 1999. Can it really be that the country where I have always been made to feel so welcome is teetering on the edge of anarchy?
I know there is too much anti-American sentiment in this post. But … a fellow guest at a hotel in an Islamic country expressed his surprise at the hostility he had sensed at a local market when he said where he was from. Just after the American invasion of Iraq. I suggested that he might be better off pretending to be Canadian. So, I am sorry, America, but you really need to get rid of that guy somehow. Now-ish.
Leave a Reply