Rain, Rain, Rain…

It rains a lot here and we talk about it raining even more. The weather dominates our lives and our conversations. We hate the rain, we hate the sun, we hate the summer and we hate the winter – and they can all happen in one day here. Actually we see the sun so infrequently that it has been a thing of awe, wonder and worship throughout the ages. “What is that big white thing in the sky and why has it made all the skin peel off my nose?”
“No idea, but let’s build a big stone circle for it: give it a little slit to shine through on the Spring solstice – if the fog lifts…”

The seasons here are actually quite well defined: Winter – cold rain; Spring – squally rain; Summer – warm rain, and Autumn – rain with the kind of winds that bring down chimneys and find the gaps in the double glazing that the salesman assures you are not there. This is a country where rain is a constant companion, yet we are never ready for it. The UK is perpetually filled with dripping people who never thought to bring a raincoat. A man carrying an umbrella – other than on a golf course – must expect the most detailed scrutiny of his manhood. Keeping your head dry can lead to public ridicule and, ultimately, the sack – ask Steve McClaren (a former England football manager who, despite never actually being remotely up to the job, eventually got the sack as a result of standing under an umbrella in a downpour.)

Despite the volume of water that falls with monotonous regularity onto us on this emerald isle, we teeter constantly on the verge of drought. It takes no more than 48 hours without a drenching before the newsreaders start predicting a hosepipe ban. These islands are formed not of rock, but of colander. Each house has as many rain barrels latched to it as it has downpipes. It really wouldn’t matter if we were told that we could not take a shower as long as we have something green and slimy to pour over the hanging baskets in the evening. Having withered floral arrangements outside the house is tantamount to pleading guilty to genocide around these parts.

And we are just emerging from ‘the driest Spring in sixty-eight years’: it is probably hours since it last rained. (I am, incidentally, totally convinced by global warming, but at the same time intrigued by how much hotter/wetter it appears it was in the middle of the last century. Each time I hear ‘this is officially the hottest summer for a decade’ it immediately strikes me that it must have been even hotter ten years ago.) We find ourselves scouring street corners for the appearance of ‘stand-pipes’ and combing the skies for waterboard drones on the look out for unusually verdant lawns. We will almost certainly have a summer that will find me building an ark. We are quick on our feet here: we can switch from drought to flood in seconds.

The climate is definitely changing: when I was a child winters were cold, it snowed. We rarely see snow these days. We get a slightly colder rain. We are all dreaming of a white Christmas as we make our mild and mizzly way to grandma’s on Christmas Day.

I have red hair and the kind of pale skin that, naked, make me look like an overweight match. The sun – although I love it – is not good for me, but I loathe the cold. Being cold is always miserable, but being cold and wet is the absolute pits. You can put on as many layers of clothing as you like, but as long as you are wet underneath them, you will always be wretched, like the sandwiches under the Perspex dome on a midnight bar – dry on the outside but gently putrefying underneath.

I am not cold today. I am sitting at a little table in the conservatory watching the sky open out into morning. There is no prospect of rain today. The radio tells me that the drought is set to continue and I begin to worry about the garden. It has not started to wilt yet, but I am alert for the first signs. My rain barrels are filled and ready for action, and I need to make a little bit of room in them before it starts to rain again…

Whatever’s For Certain’s For Sure

It’s as close as things come to a nailed-on certainty: several days of unbroken sunshine tempts me into making preparations for an all-day outside task and bingo! down comes the rain. Light rain according to the BBC, which may well be right, but in sufficient volume to double my weight within five minutes and leave me wet to the lights. It’s a strange thing about age; I’m sure that you get less waterproof as you get older. Jump into puddles as a kid and the worst I expected was a clip around the ear for getting my socks muddy. Jump into a muddy puddle now and I find myself drowning through the soles of my feet. The water somehow leaches up to my armpits. When sunshine follows a rainy day I am accompanied by fog where’er I go. Not, of course, that today’s children would expect a clip around the ear. Not unless their parents fancied a spell spent at His Majesty’s Pleasure, sleeping on a metal bunk bed, crapping in an enamel bucket and fending off the amorous advances of a Latvian mobster roommate. Times have changed for the better (less so if you want to see eg a dentist without paying through the nose for the privilege.) But, I digress. (Not an aside, but a singular statement of fact. It is what I do for a couple of thousand words a week. If I’m honest I don’t even need anything particular to digress from…)

Anyway, the weather cleared later in the day and the sun came out just long enough to burn any small area of skin I had been foolhardy enough to have left exposed. My task du jour was duly completed to my usual high standard and the next-door neighbour will return my hammer as soon as he stops laughing. I live to fight another day, although I was never much of a fighter in the first place. Losing was my speciality: traipsing home with a fat lip and the vague feeling that the only way I ever would have laid a glove on my assailant would have involved waiting until they fell asleep and then crawling out from under my stone. I have been a lily-livered liberal all my life, if only because I love alliteration and I am not keen on the alternatives offered up by being conservative. Which is, of course, beside the point. The point being that whatever learned opinion is currently made available to me, it is inevitably wrong. I check the weather app on my phone, lather myself in sun cream based upon its unequivocal advice and find myself knee-deep in hail with all outer extremities turning a very fetching shade of blue. Alternatively I deliberately nay-say the technology and – assuming it to be completely wrong – go out in three layers of something woollen, a jacket with a tog-rating higher than my age and a hand-knitted balaclava, whence I will contract the kind of heat-stroke that will have me seeing Andy Pandy on the TV, young people giving up their seats on the bus and bobbies on the beat again.

It was all by the by because, after all, the app did warn of rain – at least it said there was a 50% chance, which I took to mean maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t – and it was simply my own capacity to absorb it in such volume that had been unforeseen. The fact that my once water-repellent dermis had over the course of forty years, in response no doubt to climate change that will, we are told, precipitate drought/flooding/neither or both (look out of the window and delete as appropriate), evolved to soak it up like blotting paper. Not, I expect, that one is able to buy blotting paper these days. Reserved for royalty and heads of state I suppose: anyone who habitually signs stuff with a fountain pen rather than the click of a mouse. And there’s no point in moaning about it all; things will, as they inevitably do, become irretrievably worse. It’s pretty much a nailed-on certainty…

The Ocean

My vision is folded – well demi-folded as only one contact lens has decided to jacknife in my eye – some distance away from a decent mirror and something with which to wash my fingers before poking them into my watering orbs. I’m not overly concerned, sooner or later I will blink and the offending lens will catapult itself forth, never to be seen (or see) again. My world will be hazy, but without a crease in it. At least an artificial one…

The way I see things has always been a little eccentric. My vision has always been a little bit like those mystery photographs of everyday objects you used to get in magazines (usually a corkscrew): I see the same as everybody else, but not necessarily in the same way.

Do you ever look at the horizon and wonder why, wherever you are, it remains in the same place and why if it doesn’t move, you can never touch it? Funny thing, the sea, don’t you think? It is fed billions of gallons of fresh water from rivers every day, yet it remains determinedly salty. Why? It can’t all be due to toddler wee. Conversely though, why are rivers not salty: they are made up from the same rain, they run over the same rocks (fundamentally) and the flow must make them every bit as astringent. I know – I believe – that climate change is causing sea levels to rise, but I am struggling to understand some basic principles. Thermodynamics are not my thing, but I’m pretty good at gin & tonic. I realise that ice-caps are melting, but I’ve seen ice melting in a full glass and it doesn’t overflow. I also know that the drink gets colder. If this is up-scaled, the oceans will not get higher but they will get colder. I might just have stumbled on the solution: the sea needs more gin.

The sea here is definitely warm, but I have no idea of whether it has always been that way. At home I live just a few minutes drive away from the east coast and the sea there is not warm. The sea is never warm. The Skegness foreshore is cold enough to cool the whole planet. People do swim there, but they are certifiably mad. There is no sane reason for entering water that is only survivable if you are covered in goose fat.

It is part of the human condition that we seek to create boundaries where none exist naturally. When I was at school there were five oceans (I think: my geographical knowledge has always been best described as ‘extremely dodgy’) Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic, but it’s all really just one body of water isn’t it? So, who decided to split it up and where to do it? Was it a few powerful nations saying ‘This is my fish. Go to another ocean to catch yours’, or is there some more scientific rationale – which would explain why I don’t know it?

In any case, it is hard to argue against the ocean itself being the mightiest of all powers. It is vast and its strength can be devastating. It will be the true ruler of the Earth until the Sun decides to throw in the towel and evaporates it all – and I won’t care by then as my view of the world will be exactly the same as everybody else’s…

But here comes the waves
down by the sea
Washing the eyes of the men
Who have died… The Ocean – Lou Reed

I am writing this piece whilst overlooking a section of coast that was devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 which caused an estimated 165,000 deaths. Whilst here we have spoken to people who experienced the destruction and we have seen photographs that will haunt me forever. Today the sea is a vast aquamarine millpond and I hope for the sake of these beautiful people that it will long remain so.

Paper Tiger Burning Bright

Photo by Movidagrafica Barcelona on Pexels.com

So, contrary to my normal routine and against what we must, for now, call ‘my better judgement’ I have just read through Wednesday’s itinerant whinge and I feel it incumbent upon me to publish this short clarification: I am not a climate change denier. I totally accept that it is happening and that my generation is in no small part responsible for it – I was raised on tropical hardwoods and disposable plastic. These days I compost, recycle, buy loose, check air-miles, grow my own veg and don’t eat anything with a face on (unless you count that very odd looking potato that I had last week) but I am no paragon: I eat cheese, I eat milk, I eat honey and, from time to time, I do emit a fair amount of methane. And I use paper to write on. I don’t think that makes me a bad person: maybe not ideal, but surely not bad.

I use both sides of my paper – don’t be silly now: I mean to write on – and it goes in the recycle bin when it is done, but I do know that recycling paper (like the bottles I insist on buying my beer in) uses a lot of energy – although not, I hope, as much as starting afresh. I really want to do my bit, although I don’t expect to be carbon neutral until some time after the crematorium’s incinerator has done with me.

I am a man of my age: I grew up reading Fahrenheit 451 and I understood that book burnings were a regular feature in the history of authoritarianism: the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the French, the English, the Germans, the Chinese, the French (again), the English (again), the Germans (again), the Chinese (again), the Russians (who arrived late to the game but, never-the-less made a fair old fist of it), the Germans (who appear to have developed quite a taste for it), the Americans, the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims have all had a go at it and I think that, all in all, it is seldom seen as a good thing. Books are burned to stop people learning, to stop people understanding, to diminish opportunities and impoverish the mind. It is an act of mass, symbolic vandalism that cannot be matched by a government sponsored Kindle hack.

Even today there are societies where the inflow of information via the internet is so tightly controlled that dissenting voices are never heard, that those in whose name atrocities are almost daily committed, never know of them, but books, simple ink on paper, still find their way into lives and into minds and those whose minds they enter are forever changed, forever enriched. (I’m presupposing here that it is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody objects to the mass torching of Jeffrey Archer tomes.) As Montag learned in Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece, the printed word holds a truth and a power that nothing else can replicate. Books are too important to be reduced to a stream of ones and zeroes. Read books, treasure books and when you’ve done it, swap them for other books, because if we all turn away from the printed word they won’t have to burn it to stop us reading, they will just have to turn them off, one by one, a click at a time…

…If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure of where that came from, it is not what I intended today, but it is what I scribbled onto my little pad of once-used paper scraps and something you can only read via the magic of the internet, so if it saves you lighting matches, then at least I feel as though I’ve done my bit…

Paper Tiger

It has been quite a while since I have had to whine about my inability to identify anything suitable to whine about. It takes me right back to the dark days of Lockdown, and my fixation with pens, CD’s, very old sit-coms, and ice cubes. The certainty then, that except for the workers of Downing Street, nothing was happening for everyone, at least provided a starting point: there was no experience to write about except for the lack of it and that was universal. I spent so long gazing at my own navel that I now have a stoop. It was not even possible to watch the world passing by outside the windows as the world was banned from doing so. We took our thirty minutes daily exercise on a circuit that began and ended at home and involved crossing the road every time we encountered anybody else doing the same thing, we banged our pans with everybody else as we enjoyed the two minutes of weekly ‘community’, applauding the NHS on our own doorsteps, and it was there to write about and everybody understood it. My gift for the inconsequential was suddenly useful because the inconsequential was the only escape we had from the very consequential and, for once, we all needed it.

Tonight I have nothing and I am struggling to find a way in which to write about it. Having spent the last few hours staring through the window at the slowly encroaching landscape of new-build where, for forty years, I have looked out onto fields and trees has taken my mind away from everything. NIMBY it might be, but I cannot help but grieve over the loss of something which I have held dear for two-thirds of a lifetime. I will get used to it, much like I get used to my inability to smile without revealing un-bridgeable gaps; to spend a day with the grandkids without needing gin; to read the dire warnings on my medication without needing a strong magnifying lens, a bright light and even more gin. It is often easier to embrace change than to welcome it. I don’t want to be old, but I do want to get old.

I have tried, for a bit of a change, to put my pen to one side, to stare at a blank laptop screen, hands poised above the keyboard like arthritic spiders, waiting to pounce upon any notion that might pass their way, but it doesn’t work for me. I crave paper. I can’t doodle on the laptop. Deleting is nothing like as cathartic as ripping it up and starting again – although it is more sustainable. Everybody, from the bank to the window cleaner tells me that I should go paperless, but I’m not quite fully on-board with the logic yet. You see, I remember from my youth when huge forests of coniferous trees were planted to provide us with paper, and I am aware that scientists now believe that these are detrimental in our fight against climate change. In short, they need to chop them down and replace them with broad-leafed trees. Having chopped them down, I’m sure they can’t just leave them lying there can they, so they might as well make paper out of them. At my best estimate, I don’t suppose I’ve got much more than a couple of trees left in me now and my oak planting record is a good one, so I’ll keep on jotting my whines to paper (as soon as I can find something to whine about) – even if it does mean that, for now, the world is just that little bit more full of hot air than it used to be…

So, What Are They Actually For?

We have lived in this house for forty years now and we have always had slugs, but never before in these numbers. They have appeared in a huge variety of black and orange, smooth and scaly, spotted and striped, big and small – and all looking like they have been regurgitated by a gull. Where are they all coming from? Behind us is farm land. It has been fallow for a couple of years, during which time, I suppose it could have become a gastropodal nursery. It is about to have houses built on it. Are the slugs fleeing the scene in numbers which I can only describe as biblical? Well, I’ve looked over the back fence and I can see no evidence of an encroaching slimy tsunami. The carpet of green and leafy weed does not appear to have been ravaged in the same manner as the foliage in our own (formerly) verdant plot. Besides, the builders haven’t arrived yet – is it even possible that slugs have foresight? I am certainly unaware of any eminence they may have in pre-planning circles. I question this perspicacity.

So, if they haven’t migrated here from the soon-to-be building site in anticipation of an imminent eviction, why have they suddenly decided to foregather in such numbers – and why in my garden? Have I, perhaps, introduced a new gastronomic morsel to my garden that is irresistible to the gastropod palate? Have I, perhaps, stumbled upon the slug equivalent of mashed avocado on toast? In short, I think the answer is ‘No’. It is a long-established garden and, save for the pots and baskets, filled almost exclusively with perennials. No new dishes have been added to the menu. There has been no spike in my Michelin rating.

I am certain that climate change is a factor – wet and warm does seem to suit the terrestrial mollusc rather more than it suits its natural predators: the hedgehog and the thrush. Both of these beautiful creatures are increasingly rare visitors to my garden now, and it’s a real shame because boy, could they plump up for winter. I resist the lure of slug pellets, lest they have a second-hand effect upon the slug consumers. In their absence, my efforts at slug control are definitely beginning to flounder.

I was once told to salt slugs, but the effect was so dramatic and so grotesque that I have never been tempted to repeat it. You would need a heart of stone and a cast-iron constitution to tackle the problem in that way. Anyway, the sheer numbers would pose a severe threat to the salt supply for the Highways Department in the winter – not to mention the blood pressure of any hedgehog that might happen to stumble upon the over-seasoned remains. So, a brush and pan is my main means of mass-collection, before bagging and dropping into the bin, from where they can be transported to their new home at the landfill.

I have noticed though, that whilst the slug population has boomed Chez McQueen, the snail population has diminished to a similar degree. Are slugs and snails, perhaps, competing for the same food source and the slugs, unencumbered by heavy household arrangements and therefore more fleet of foot (Foot? I’m not sure, I’ll have to check that out*.) getting there much more quickly than their principal competition? Perhaps I see shadows of our own society. I know that slugs and snails are closely related biologically. What if slugs are, in fact, snails that have not yet managed to get a foot on the housing ladder? That would explain everything. Except that I keep on finding empty snail shells and I keep on leaving them where the slugs foregather and, to my knowledge, not one of them has ever taken up vacant possession. Perhaps, like elsewhere in this world, they have discovered that they’re better off with mum and dad after all…

*Just did. A slug is a gastropod which means ‘stomach foot’. Not sure it’s how I would choose to imbibe my bouillabaisse, but hey, it’s nature…