A.A. Gill, old age, the Space Race
I am reading A. A. Gill’s A.A. Gill Is Further Away helping with enquiries, and I will come back to it here, meanwhile the scintillating prose, the breadth of knowledge and subject matter enthral me. I find myself ensnared and arrested by brilliant observations of the mundane, for example those terrible biscuits you find in hotels but nowhere else, and the profound. His piece on old age is painfully perceptive. We are culturally unusual in the UK in that rather than living with and respecting them we lock our old people away, out of sight and mind. I am sure he is right – we fear them because they are reminders of our own futures. His descriptions of all kinds take me right to the place or put me directly in front of the objects he superbly delineates.
He is not afraid to knock down sacred cows either, including one of mine, Carl Sagan, about whom he is withering. It is hard to argue though other than that the time capsules he sent into space were projects of immense human vanity and that the great space race has mostly been a complete waste of time, effort and the planet’s resources. How appalled he would have been by the phallic rockets of the super rich blasting off into the heavens or the Gemini II trip around the back of the moon which seems to have had no purpose whatsoever.
Bearskin caps
He also sets my mind off on tangents, for example about the bearskin caps worn by soldiers here and elsewhere. To my surprise, busbys are something a little different although they are still military fur caps. The tall ones we see at Buckingham Palace and Horse Guards Parade each require the fur of an entire Canadian Black (for foot guards) or Brown (for officers, bizarrely dyed black) Bear, usually lured in by food and then killed with a shotgun or crossbow. In spite of PETA protests and common sense, the British hatmakers involved buy between 50 and 100 bearskins per year. The Ministry of Defence has denied that there is a suitable alternative which is nonsense. They purchased 498 bearskin caps between 2017 and 2022 and between 2013 and 2023 spent more than £1 million on them.
Like so many traditional costumes as seen at the coronation for example, the caps look absolutely ridiculous.
My father once took me to see Trooping the Colour. He was a gentle man with contradictions. Having told me that war was a terrible, terrible thing, he was enthused and excited at news of Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. After the Trooping the Colour he asked did I not think it was a wonderful thing to see men so well-disciplined and moving as one. Even at that tender age I would have none of it. They were slaves to the military machine, turned into automata, shedding any vestige of individuality.
The princes and Pippa’s car park
I can hardly be bothered even to write about it and perhaps should stop getting The Times on Saturdays and Sundays but I have been truly dismayed of late to see so many acres of newsprint devoted to the relationship between the two princes and whether the spare one will or won’t return to the UK. Who cares? I certainly don’t, much as I disapprove of the way Meghan Markle has been treated by the media with all of the none too subtle racist undertones and overtones. I used to quite like Camilla Long as a journalist but she long seems to have been spitefully obsessed with the subject.
There has been some delightful news locally however on a tangentially related royal subject. Pippa’s ugly car park. The village is still waiting for a verdict on the footpath to which the Princess of Wales’ sister and her husband decided to block public access. They also built a car park for their fly-fishing friends in a marshy field previously home to the shire horses used for horse-drawn barge trips (their owner is a kind man, I have seen how he is with them), right by the road at the entrance to the village. West Berkshire Council refused permission for it. With that special kind of arrogance which is the product of extreme wealth, they had already had it built last year and sought retrospective planning permission. They appealed WBC’s decision but a government planning inspector has endorsed it: “Due to its size and engineered appearance the development has introduced a visually intrusive and urbanised feature in to an otherwise open meadow.” Now they will have to dig up the car park and reinstate it with appropriate replanting to boot. Providing zero evidence, the Middletons had absurdly claimed that fly-fishing provided an important source of income for their rural business providing for the upkeep of the river and proper husbandry of the surrounding land. Pippa’s husband, Matthew James (or is it James Matthews, can it be worth even checking? Ah, it’s the latter) is a hedge fund manager estimated to be worth between half and a whole billion pounds. If they lose the footpath enquiry too, that will be cause for a double celebration.
A Stag Beetle
There was a Stag Beetle flying around the room at a busy pub quiz the other night, who ended up on his back after landing which could have been a sign that he was approaching the end of his short life above ground or just that he could not get purchase on the polished wooden floor to right himself. To my dismay, one customer, the deliberate producer of inbred dogs featured a number of times in this blog, walked over to it and repeatedly jabbed at it with a finger in an attempt, he said, to set it the right way up. This is the same guy who accused me of loving animals only conceptually rather than in reality when I remonstrated with him after his puppy had urinated all over my trousers, yet he seemed squeamish about actually picking the beetle up. Then he lost interest and simply walked away, leaving it on the floor almost certainly to be trampled before long. The beetle took off and landed again, once more on his back. I had had enough and walked over before he was squished, gently picked him up and took him to a place of safety outside where he would at least have a chance of survival and failing that be a potential food source for a wide variety of other wildlife.
Depending on species (of which there are many) and country, some Stag Beetles are classified as Near Threatened. When I was a child I used to see them all the time, now hardly ever. I loved them then and still do. On average they spend between three and five years as underground larvae living on decaying wood but only live for a few weeks after emerging. They spend most of that time drinking tree sap and looking for a mate.
They are in serious decline for all the usual reasons: habitat loss and fragmentation, over tidy gardening, the use of pesticides and herbicides and being killed on roads (they are drawn to warm tarmac).
I have used the image at the head of this post before but it’s Dürer so I make no apology for using it again.
Bird tables and the the British Trust for Ornithology
I am a subscriber and fan of the British Trust for Ornithology but have criticised and questioned them for not changing the title of their magazine Bird Table since they have told us all, quite rightly no doubt, not to use them any more. I am astonished and disappointed to see that they have announced a new podcast called … Beyond the Bird Table. What are they thinking?
Orchestras
On two completely random final notes, why do orchestral musicians, who I realise have to concentrate on what they are doing, never look as though they are enjoying themselves? Perhaps it is considered gauche.
ISO
Secondly I wondered what the letters ISO (which governs light sensitivity) stood for in the world of photography and consulted AI. It is an amusing example of inept bureaucracy. The answer is the very boring “International Organization for Standardization”. I pointed out that the letters in the acronym were not even in the right order. Since it would have been OIN in French and different again elsewhere, ISO was decided upon as the international standard which doesn’t really make sense anywhere. It remind me of one of my favourite cameos from the television series Auf Wiedershen Pet. The men have a vote about which colour to repaint the inside of their hut on the building site in Germany. They each cast three votes in order of their preference. When the result turns out to be yellow and someone complains that absolutely nobody voted for that, Barry replies, “Well, that’s democracy for you.”
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