Rant...and reading

Before you read this, please know that it differs from my usual stuff. I don’t do much in the way of heavy stuff on here, but sometimes, you’ve got to say what you’ve got to say. There is still book stuff at the bottom! And here’s some books I got this week:

This week I got angry and upset at the news. This is not like me. I try really hard to not expend my energy in a futile way. There is so much ghastliness that sometimes it seems the only way to cope is to let it kind of wash over you, to not be truly conscious to it. But one evening something snapped my pragmatic thread. And oddly enough, it was something that I’m not that interested in. It was FIFA and Infantino’s plans to turn football into a money-making, three-ringed circus. I know it’s already financially bloated and capitalism has been around the bigger clubs for a long time, but this came at the end of a news bulletin telling of such vileness that a cynical, money-grabbing attack on the thing that has given many of us (even those only interested every four years, like me) such pleasure just sent me into angry despair.

This particular bulletin started with wildfires. France and Spain, Scotland and Suffolk. Thousands of people moved out of their homes, thousands of lives threatened, thousands of species of flora and fauna killed, some maybe gone forever. I know the particular area in Suffolk very well; I’ve spent many happy hours on Dunwich Heath and exploring Minsmere RSPB reserve. It means something to me. It’s destruction pierces my heart. There was no following feature on climate change; no recognition that there are actions further back than the high temperatures that are causing this destruction. There were Drought announcements. Not with any concern, just as if it was the most normal thing in the world. A country known for its green-ness, its lush countryside—almost all of it in drought. Was there any information about what this means? How to mitigate it? What we should (or shouldn’t) be doing? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I remember the last big drought in 1976, when there was a Minister for Drought, there were leaflet drops and government statements, there were instructions on how to save water (Bath with a friend - remember?). It felt urgent…important. This time? Nope. When did ‘There’s nothing we can do’ become a reasonable response? This was followed by a woman and her partner who had abused and sexually assaulted her 2 year old daughter until she died. Her own child. Next up a woman’s body found in a suitcase in a derelict area in Greece. The local police were looking to see if foul play was involved…well, unless the woman put herself into the suitcase… There was film of a giant iceberg collapsing and flipping over off the coast of Greenland—reported simply as a spectacle. I could feel my anger building, the pointless questions spilling out “What’s wrong with these people?”, “What’s wrong with this world?”. And then the FIFA nonsense, just one of the effects of rampant capitalism with no checks or balances, a moral vacuum where checks and balances should be, where profit for those already earning (earning?) billions of bits of paper is more important than quality of life for billions of living things, including humankind. The ridiculousness of FIFA was the straw that broke the camels back and I wept angry tears for a world gone mad. I apologise for ranting. You don’t want to read this first thing on a weekend morning, but I’m tired. And it had to come out somewhere. (Note on Saturday am: the FIFA thing may have been halted for now.)

And then, as it often does, Substack helped. I read this by Melissa Harrison and this from jeanette winterson and then this from Calum Macintyre and this from Ian Dunt . People care. There are things I can do. I can’t stop the child abusers or the murderers, but there are small things. They may seem trivial in the wider scheme, but I can do them. Good things. I bought some books that will help me to change my garden into something that will handle the changes better and help wildlife at the same time. Watching plants frazzle in the heat is soul-destroying, but knowing that the only way some of them will survive is if I pour gallons of scarce water onto them is sobering. I waded into a conversation on a certain social media platform where someone was saying that glass simply can’t cause wildfires. I did the washing on the eco setting. I chatted to my neighbour when I bought the bins in and discovered that his mother (who he bought to live with them two years ago) has developed dementia and life is getting more difficult. I offered tea and a listening ear for him or his wife, anytime. My mom had dementia and I know the form. I bought a sketchbook—I haven’t drawn a line since I was in school more than 50 years ago, I couldn’t draw then and I probably still can’t—but I’m going to try. Every day. I don’t care if it’s crap. Sometimes it hurts to know that you can’t change the bad stuff just because you really, really want to. But I can do some things that might at least make me feel a little better, and if lots of people are doing something similar then they may make a difference. Enough. Thanks for listening. Now, onto better things.

I’ve been reading Jenny Uglow’s A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s not a conventional biography; Uglow follows a single year—1781—in the life of the Hampshire curate and pioneering naturalist, using entries from his daily journals to structure the narrative. As a result, it gives us one year and also a whole life as Uglow riffs on the journal entries to take us (relevantly) backwards and forwards in Gilbert’s life. She augments White’s brief diary entries with vignettes of his family, his friends and neighbours and the wider eighteenth-century world, but always keeps his curiosity about the natural world front and centre. It is beautifully illustrated (I loved seeing some of Agnes Miller-Parker’s elegant wood engravings in there) and somehow quietly comforting. I’ve never been to Selborne, but I think this year I shall make the effort. White was one of England’s first great nature writers and there can’t be many of us interested in nature who don’t have a copy of his The Natural History of Selborne on our shelves. I go back to to it to remind myself of the way in which he observed and recorded nature, at a time when precious few people were doing so. Jenny Uglow’s gift in A Year With…is to bring us a more rounded picture of the man at the centre of his work, and it repays reading. Gilbert White’s gift was to pay attention to small things—the return of swallows, the flowering of hedgerows, the habits of snails, and the changing weather. I can do that too. Maybe that’s what I’ll use the sketchbook for…

I’ve also been reading Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, the first book in a trilogy of the same name. I read this first way back in the early seventies, but could remember almost nothing about it. Anyway, the story of the two ‘country girls’, Cait and Baba, growing up in 1950s Ireland, absolutely enchanted me this time round. The relationship between the two girls—feisty, pragmatic Baba, romantic, dreamy Cait—the petty cruelties and point-scoring not getting in the way of supporting each other when the chips are down, their different families, the women around them, the boundaries of a life ruled by Roman Catholicism, all told with that rich, humorous lyricism tinged with melancholy that is the voice of Edna O’Brien. I felt for Cait, not knowing how beautiful she is, but very aware of growing up with gifts of high heels and nylons. Her romanticism countered at every turn by Baba’s cynicism, and by the behaviour of almost every man she knows—her father’s drunkenness, men who help her for a kiss ‘reward’—until her childhood fascination with married, urbane frenchman ‘Mr Gentleman’ becomes the delicious, illicit romance she yearns for, but is ultimately betrayed. When published in 1960 it caused a furore in the repressed, over-wrought post-war Ireland, was widely criticised as immoral and banned, even burned, in some places. Conversely, it was fêted in other parts of the world. Reading it now it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about, it’s not sexually explicit, but it did draw attention to the plight of women in a religiously constrained, traditionally masculine society, and in a way that was full of wit but pulled no punches. I loved it and have already ordered the remaining two books in the trilogy.

Thank the heavens for books. What would we do without them? Thank the heavens for writers.

It’s still hot here, but cooling down into next week. Friend Alan is coming to stay. It’s Folk week next week, and he always comes down for that. It’s a hurly-burly of singing and dancing in the street (not us, we just watch!), and in everywhere that might count as a venue, but it’s good fun if you don’t overdo it. Hopefully it will help me conquer my whole world anxiety. See you next week, take care, and I’ll write soon. Oh, and happy Lammas. Here’s to the early harvests!