Snippet of Savory

From Grain and Chaff from an English Manor (1920)

The only real objection to peacocks, under ordinary conditions, is the discordance of their cries, especially in thundery weather, when they scream in answer to every thunder-clap. Cock pheasants, relatives of the peacock, crow loudly at any unusual noise; and I have known them expostulate at the report of a gun; they took flight, after running to a safe distance, and their crow appeared to be in the nature of a challenge or defiance, just as a barn-door cock will exult if you give him the idea that he has driven you away.

When the vessel which carried the coffin of Queen Victoria was crossing the Solent, in 1901, some very heavy salutes were fired from the battleships, and, the day being still and the air clear, the detonations carried to an immense distance. They were distinctly heard at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, only fourteen miles from Aldington and a distance of nearly one hundred miles from the guns, in a direct line. The reports were so loud at Woodstock, near Oxford, that the pheasants began crowing in the Blenheim preserves.

I love that last sentence particularly

Funeral

I came home. I should have gone to the big gathering of mourners at King's College, but my car had a flat tyre and my goshawk had to be fed. I've been cooking, then, and fretfully checking my mail, and sobbing a little in between. I needed to be quiet, to spend time thinking more on grief, and loss, and love, and as the goshawk-caught pheasant bubbles slowly on the stove in its rich stew of pancetta and chestnuts, I realise I'm not going to be able to eat anything at all. I'm just too sad.

Our Head of Department, Professor Peter Lipton, died on Sunday. He was terribly young. It was terribly sudden. Our department is as close to a family as a university department can be, and we are all in pieces. The funeral was this afternoon. Hundreds of people. Our cars blocked the A14. My own professor had discharged himself from hospital the day after a serious operation, against all advice, and stood there palely with his wife, looking more distinguished than ever with a gold kippah on his crown. A dark, bitterly cold afternoon, with flashes of blue sky pooling, submarine, between rolls of squirrel-coloured winter clouds. And we stood by the open grave, on the rough turf, a great crowd of black coats and suits and wet eyes. I'll never forget the sound of alder leaves rattling in the dry wind as the Kaddish was recited, and the thump of earth on the coffin as people took, one after another, the spade from the heap of cold Cambridgeshire earth. As the last mourners paid their respects, the sun broke, finally, through the cloud, holding the whole scene like a caught breath of poignant, delicate golden light. It was a devastating afternoon.

He was a great, great man. There is an obituary here.

Stiff Upper Lip

appalling genius

Rent

So I'm wandering around Cambridge's many property websites searching for a house to rent. Not buying a house after all. Not at the moment anyway. Back into the land of tenants and landlords. My god, but someone should tell these people about web design. If I see another spinning pen, another photograph of Kings Chapel and one more ineptly-kerned title in mad gothic script, I'll scream.

So many of them are ruled out straight away: NO PETS. Should I use the Lord Byron excuse? "It's not a pet: it's a wild animal!". Something tells me that won't wash.

The problem is, I have to find somewhere to moult out this gos, come spring. And the fact that I'm going to be in a situation where erecting an aviary is probably out of the question is rather worrying. I wonder if any falconers out there have a spare pen and the desire to caretake a goshawk for a few months. Hmm.

Thinking....thinking....

The Fear II

Mabel caught a pheasant today. It wasn't an impressive flight. Hardly a flight at all. She merely dropped from my fist to the floor, for the pheasant was already dead; a rain-soaked gold and emerald corpse half-hidden by wet thistle-stems, his tail feathers strewn like jackstraws around him. Perhaps a day dead, no more. He was plump, cold; his rump had been gnawed away by a nameless predator or scavenger, his blue-grey spurred legs were bright and wet.

Mabel was a little perplexed, and danced around on the body for a while before jumping up to the fist for a quail. She'd flown plenty today, anyway. I hauled the pheasant up from the undergrowth and stuffed him in my waistcoat back pocket.

I am terribly sad to have found our old adversary dead. Each time we came across him, in the past few months, he so easily evaded my clueless goshawk that I suspect we caused him little more stress than the local dog-walkers.

I'm a little puzzled though: was he grabbed by a fox? Was the fox disturbed—hence the minimal damage? He was plump and seemed in fine condition, though dead. Did he die naturally? Was he pricked? Sick?

Of course, by the time we got back to the house I had remembered there'd been several recent outbreaks of H5N1 in the next county. And even though the bloody bird flu is clearly being spread by the poultry industry, a little part of my brain rang warning bells.

Now I am grumpy. There's a perfectly good pheasant out there in the garage, and I could make a nice casserole with it. But some irrational part of my media-subsceptible brain is warning me off. "No" it says. "Don't go near it! You could die!"

Hurrumph.

The Fear

Today I drove behind a giant HazMat truck for about two miles. It was an impressive machine. It bore the legends "Get out Quick: Be Safe" and "Hazardous Materials and Environmental Protection" in friendly, huge letters along its bright red sides. The vast back doors were eye-dizzyingly strobed in chevrons of fluorescent green and red.

Also on the back doors: two "L" learner driver plates. And I had to keep my distance, because whoever was driving this truck was clearly freaking out, was driving terribly badly, and was clearly terribly afraid.

As I was. This was not a reassuring sight.

Bah

How are things going with the gos? Well, I have been amiss. I didn't really believe all those old books—and indeed, all those new books—that held forth about how goshawk manning never really ends. How you have to keep your goshawk tame by constantly taking it to scary things, while holding its attention with a scrappy bit of tiring on your fist. No. It wasn't that I thought better of such mundane activities. It's more that I didn't think of them at all. Two months ago I had a bomb-proof, car-proof, tractor-proof goshawk. I'd walk past a harrowing John Deere and she wouldn't even bother to look at it. I'd wander through town, and she'd find people unremarkable. "Yes, people, whatever. Where's my tiring?"

But circumstances have changed. My old house was a glorious one for an austringer. Sit the goshawk on a perch in the living room, and open the curtains, and there, all day, no more than ten feet away, processions of people and dogs and buggies and umbrellas and cars. No wonder she was so magnificently manned.

Now I'm living out in distant suburbia. It's nice to have a proper weathering lawn, even if the next-door neighbours have thoroughly spooked poor Mabel with vicious leaf-raking activities. She's scared to death of them, now, and even jumps when she hears their back door slam. Let me not even mention my being accused of "scaring away all the little birds". Gah.

But we just don't see people any more. Isolation during the day, and then a quiet walk up on an empty hillside. It's not that I've intentionally kept her away from people. It's more that she doesn't see any.

It's a disaster. I have a friend staying, and Mabel is terrified of him. She freaks out if she sees dog walkers two fields away. I have unmanned, as it were, my goshawk.

So what do I do? Well, the nearest place to this house with any number of people is Addenbrookes hospital. I am tempted to take my grotty bit of rabbit leg and my goshawk and go and stand outside the A&E department. Ambulances? Stretchers? People in fluorescent clothing? Crowds? Oh, that would do it. I might get arrested for some kind of public order offence, but what's an ASBO or a spell in a cell compared to a goshawk that's manned, again?

Smashing Time

I was gutted. I couldn't go. I had students to teach. And while I sat in my William Morris chair, with my students heads bowed over a passage by Barry Lopez about a Quechan stone horse, the clock on the mantelpiece ticking away, my old friends Jon Reed and Julie Howell were up at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, watching a film I haven't seen for years; a film that half the sixth-form at Collingwood College ended up being able to quote, line for line. Oh, it was all I could do not to burst into tears.

The film was Smashing Time. A 1967 send-up of Swinging London of enormous silliness. Jon's written about the screening and the film itself here. Now I'm even more gutted. I shall have to get it on dvd. Even now, my brother and I come out with lines from this movie at opportune moments.

Should I see it again, I know I won't be mired in that faintly ghastly snows-of-yesteryear feeling that you get viewing once-treasured shows from one's childhood. That sickening "Oh. This is terrible!" feeling that opens up the same, poignant gap in your heart as seeing how tiny the chairs were at primary school; how small in reality its once-cavernous assembly hall.

Smashing Time was always rubbish. That's why everyone I know loved it so much. Damn, I wish I'd gone to see it.

Random fact: in that first clip on Jon's page, those session musicians in their psychedelic garb are in fact members of the great and good group Tomorrow, which morphed, later, into Yes. Da da!

Tiny People and Food

Thanks to Xtin for the link to this photoset. Sublime.

Art

I wrote about Marcus Coates a while ago, delighted by his work Dawn Chorus, though saddened I missed the installation.

Today I've been chairing a series of talks at this rather lovely conference, including a talk by Coates himself. What a marvellous chap. His work is a sustained investigation into modalities of being, questioning in particular what it means to be human through exploring animal sounds, animal identities, animal territorialities. It's often funny, always thoroughly thought-provoking, and often sublime art.

"Most artists portray nature, Marcus Coates becomes it." explains one arts site. "He’s run through the Hayward Gallery dressed as a badger, performed primitive shamanic rituals on a Liverpool housing estate wearing stag antlers and he’s hung himself up a tall tree to experience what it’s like being a goshawk."

He might be coming out hawking with me and Mabel — how cool is that?

Here he is up a tree being a goshawk

And here he is doing his shamanic thing.




Also looks like I might be taking one of the top bods of Friends of the Earth out hawking too. Spreadin' the falconry word....

Logorrhoea

Not content with flagging articles on zombie archaeology, Chas has also pointed me towards something that is—to me anyway—a combination of tetris and crack cocaine.

Here it is

I'm helping people by doing this, so it's fine. In fact, it might be the single most useful thing I've done for the world in years.

The hook? Once you get to the magic score of 50, the pressure only increases, because one wrong word—just one—and you're knocked back down again.

Or maybe that's the best thing. Either way, can't talk now. Got to get back to the rice.

A contingency plan for a Solanum outbreak at Hierakonpolis

"This may seem absurd, but you won't think its funny when you are feasting on the corpses of your friends and fellow researchers. In fact, you won't be thinking at all."

Ta for the headsup, Chas. It's important to know this stuff. Just in case.

Is this for real?

Guillermo del Toro is remaking The Champions.

There is a terrible inevitability to this...

Next, Robert Rodriguez will remake Sapphire and Steel. Then it will be announced that Alfonso Cuarón is directing Blakes Seven: he's good at the dystopia thing.

Because we are slouching toward a world where all movies will be remakes of 1960s and 1970s tv science fiction series...

Just say no

P.J. O’Rourke is up there in that special part of my brain, along with idle fantasies about fighter jocks and a wish to own a very, very fast car. It's the part of my brain that encourages me to eat very rare steak, cut people dead in the street, and sneer at Jane Austen. The part of my brain that sees itself as Grace Slick meets Genghis Khan, and the part that the other parts of my brain consider to be more a rather scary combination of Patrick Bateman and Sylvia Plath. Eugh.

Ah well. Who cares? Where’s that steak?

I do like P.J. O’Rourke, though. Not his political intuitions: his genius pen. And I'm talking about pretty much only his early stuff. The essays in Republican Party Reptile are works of genius. This man writes like the mad, bad, older brother of Dave Foster Wallace. You can just see the family dynamics: youngest son Wallace off on pro bono work for charities, worrying about his caffeine intake, and O'Rourke running red lights to get to a cocaine binge at a lap-dancing club.

Both Wallace and O'Rourke are exceptional journalists. And both come a cropper as soon as they drop the arch humour and start taking themselves seriously as Great Authors or Social Commentators. O’Rourke! Leave your bloody free-market think-tank and return to dispensing advice on how to drive fast on drugs while having your wing-wang squeezed and not spilling your drink. Wallace! Enough with the torturous short stories. Get back to writing about how much you hate Balthazar Getty, or how it feels to be being beaten at chess by a malevolent twelve-year old on a luxury cruise liner.

Rourke, hell-raiser, wrote an essay in the 1980s on a new drug doing the rounds. It was called Ecstasy. True to his gonzo principles, decided that in the interests of reportage, he should try it. He did. He thought it was...nice. Jolly nice. That's about all. A yuppie drug. A wussy drug. A drug whose come-down wasn't worth the high. He breaks into full-on soliliquy:

Man, I came from the days when drugs were drugs. We had dope where one toke would turn your hair long and your folks into raving maniacs at the dinner table. Some of that stuff, why, a single hit could transform a Catholic schoolgirl into Gomorrah on all fours, snuff your ego like a light, rotate the tires on the Great Wheel of Being, and make your eyes lay eggs. See God? Shit, you could get Him down in the hot tub and wash His mouth out with herbal soap. And that was if you split the blotter paper four ways. As for insights, try yage and psilocybin mushrooms mixed with mescaline and Anchor steam beer. Gautama Buddha his own bad self comes over to your house and writes out the Eightfold Path in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. We had drugs that would give you immortal life for up to thirty-six hours. And what about the time the nine-assed peyote demon peeled the top of my head like an orange and vomited the Encyclopedia Britannica into my empty skull? That's what we meant when we said high in the old days.

It is in this spirit that I have a bone to pick with GlaxoSmithKline.

First, in GSK's defence, I realise they're on a loser here. Not a financial loser, clearly. But they're on a hiding to nothing as far as public relations go. Because if you produce drugs for people who are miserable, damaged, and/or desperate for help, you’ve got to expect that quite a lot of the desperation and self-absorption will be immediately displaced onto the drugs themselves, and produce, like vast amounts of silly string, internet discussion groups with threads from here to eternity obsessing about medication, as if there's nothing else in the world to talk about but whether 10mg of x is better than 20mg of y, or whether taking y at night or for six months or three years is better than taking x at all or not at all. And because, hooray, people's responses to these drugs vary — and vastly; read the papers, guys — everyone's on a massive search for reassurance while experiencing all sorts of different effects; no wonder it's a self-perpetuating discourse; everyone wants to agree about the drugs, but everyone can't, because they're all different. Ah, the irony.

But the worst thing is this: when you read these discussions, you slowly, with a sort of numbing, annihilating horror, realise that the most critical thing about this discourse, the thing that underlies all the posts about dosage, or whether the doctor is right, or whether you can take analgesics, or not, or maybe, or God knows what, is the assumption that this is undeniably fascinating for everyone.

It's not. But ah, you might say. The reason you are so anti-community is that you are depressed. Got me! Got me all over like Orwell!

I must say, however, thereby being hoist into small pieces on my own petard, that these drugs are lame. Pace O'Rourke, I speak with experience. I can't see why these drugs are so popular. Shouldn't drugs make you happy and awake? Isn't that what drugs are for? Yes, I'm feeling less sad. But that's because I've not got the energy to even think about being sad. Or indeed, think at all. I'm incredibly nauseated and tired. I'm so tired I suspect I might have become a zombie, although am reassured because the nausea is clearly going to preclude me from cannibalism.

If I were a hardcore evolutionary psychologist with a penchant for stupid counterfactuals, I’d say that had these drugs been around in the past, they’d have been seriously maladaptive. They might be adaptive to going out and seeing your friends in the evening, or adaptive in the sense that they might improve your chances of getting laid, but they’re going to be pretty damn maladaptive to not being eaten by tigers or washed away by rivers or dying of exposure.

Ths morning I sank a couple of double espressos and some powerful cold-cure caps in the hope that the caffeine and pseudoephedrine would cut the tiredness.

It does, but only to the point where I just about trust myself to drive. And not walk into doorframes.

So here is all I have to say, and all I will say, about medication:

Damn you, GlaxoSmithKline, for being such wusses.


.

Damn these goddamn

Drugs! More on this later, in one—and one post only; I'm not falling into that dreadful trap of making this a medication blog, oh no. Boooring. But damn them, because the appalling nausea and fatigue that GlaxoSmithKline's finest antidepressants cause have stopped me hawking. Poor old gos. Oh well; a few days of sitting on a bow shouldn't hurt her, and the wind is terribly high today. But — bugger. Let's hope these side-effects diminish soon, because I need to get out there and fly Mabel....

Warbirds, again

Today's quote is from Ruth Benca, University of Wisconsin, Madison. She's being funded by the DoD to investigate how certain animals can function for long periods with little or no sleep. Hmm. I wonder why? I thought Provigil worked fine...

Anyway: Benca says there are significant parallels between troops on covert missions and migrating birds.

Special forces that have to go into enemy territory and accomplish a mission before returning have to do a lot of the same things migrating birds do. Birds have to go into unfamiliar territory day after day, they have to find food, avoid predators, and at night they have to navigate and cover ground. There are extreme physical and cognitive demands on them, because they have to solve all these problems as they go.

Tops.

Excerpts from A Good Read

Which is a Radio 4 programme in which a couple of authors sit down and chinwag about a "favourite paperback" each of them has chosen, and Sue MacGregor puts her oar in too.

Last night, the author bods were Jim Crace, Lionel Shriver. And Crace kicked things off by choosing The Goshawk.

I don't know about you, but I find this discussion extremely peculiar, and well interesting, as they say. I transcribed bits and am posting them here because it's going to provoke some serious pluvialis pen-chewing thinking over the next few days.


Jim Crace: I’ve chosen TH White’s The Goshawk. This was a book that was in my dad’s collection—his small collection of books—when I was a kid; it’s a natural history book, and a book which I loved when I was a kid and he hated. And my attitude towards it now has become more complex, as I read it more often.

[White] says that at that time he was "living like a cat". And what he means by that is that he was living a lonely life; he says that he doesn’t have any friends, only acquaintances. And so, in order to make a friend, which is typical of TH White, he decides to have another animal in his menagerie, and he sends away to Germany for a goshawk that he can train—in fact, that he can make submit to his will—it’s not a pleasant thing that he does to this beautiful bird. And the goshawk is actually just a description of how he deals with this much-loved bird.

But more than that—and this is perhaps why I like it, because I’m not at ease with falconry; I don’t like the idea of hawking; I don’t like to see magnificent raptors on a leather glove; I’m uncomfortable about that. What I am comfortable about, however, is the beauty of the nature writing. And also the touching way in which TH White deals with his own loneliness, because this was a man who was immensely lonely, immensely grumpy, and he always had a method of dealing with his loneliness, and that was to learn something new. So what we have here is a book about a man learning something new—falconry—in order to be less unhappy

Sue MacGregor: Lionel, was it your sort of a book? Had you read it before?

Lionel Shriver: No, and, um, I have to say I’m astonished that Jim ostensibly has read it several times. I’m on your father’s side. I couldn’t bear it. And I guess part of it is, I know Jim loves reading nature writing and I tend to be more impatient with that kind of description. But my frustration with it was really more plot: I think it may come from the fact that according to the introduction and something that White writes himself at the end of the book, this was originally a diary of a real, uh, encounter with a hawk. I don’t think it turns into a novel. Because not enough happens. And the character of the hawk, which is the most important character in the book, never quite comes alive for me in an anthropomorphised way. And I needed that, because there really are only two characters in this book.

Sue MacGregor: [...] The description of the frustrations and the fury experienced by White with this bird I thought were quite riveting. And his Romantic attachment to the bird, because he’s very much a medievalist, author, as you say, of The Once and Future King, I thought were wonderful. But I did have your problem, Jim—and perhaps the problem of a lot of listeners, with, now, in the 21st century—with somebody training a bird and mastering it and curbing its freedom. I did find that actually quite difficult to deal with and I don’t know whether, Lionel, that formed part of your dislike.

Lionel Shriver: No. My impatience was just my own boredom. I was only reading about this. I would hardly get upset about it on an animal rights level because it’s just paper, right? It’s not a bird. So, I’m happy to torture animals in print as much as we like. … he doesn’t romanticise that process; it does seem very unpleasant for the bird; in that sense it has a moral centre even in terms of animal rights, and eventually, the bird does … get away.

Jim Crace: Ah, you have given it away; and that’s the touching part, I think: that his training of this bird is a failure.

Lionel Shriver: Yes, it was the part that I liked about the book, and it introduced an element of realism, and I do think that’s where the memoir part-helped it as literature, because as literature you would probably want a happy ending; you know, a bonding between man and bird—or perhaps the bird soaring off into the sky, and, you know, you know that the bird is going to be happier now. And neither of those endings happens. And I think one of the reasons it doesn’t happen, is that it didn’t happen in real life.

Jim Crace: Lionel is quite right to find it a problematic book; it is a problematic book, and not least because it’s quite curmudgeonly and [inaudible] the treatment of the hawk, which I‘m not entirely happy with, but also the values of the book are to some extent quite difficult to take: White himself is an old Shires Tory; if he’d have been happy, when would he have been at his happiest? I think he’d have been happiest as a Knight of the Round Table, you know, with a greyhound at his side, a hawk on his arm, and no personal problems.

White himself didn't like the book. He didn't like it firstly, and less importantly, because he thought it showed him up as being a bad falconer. But mostly the reason he didn't like the book is that it revealed too much of his inner self. And I think that's where the pleasure in reading this book resides. It's about the view of a lonely man, a homosexual man, in a very repressive environment, who copes with it by being enthusiastic about the natural world.

[...]

Sue MacGregor: White admits that the bird probably hung by its jesses, which are the things that go round—I don't know what you call birds' ankles. But it's not the end of the book, is it; because there's a happier postscript.

Jim Crace: Well I think the postscript is a mistake, actually. The English countryside is thought of as being tame and rather talkative compared with landscapes in America for example. But actually the English landscape has got something really beautiful going for it. And that is, it has a melancholy at its centre. I mean, this time of year, if you travel through the counties near here, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, and see those mists hanging early in the morning, there's a tremendous sadness about our countryside that is also glorious. A glorious sadness. And I think this is what this book is great at. White writes about the British countryside in a way that makes it leave the pack rather than be at the bottom of the pack. That's why I recommend it. Not just because of the descriptions of the gos, but also because of descriptions of badgers, and rooks, and trees, and grass: he was the Ray Mears of his time. But it is a book which I mostly love.