The Field

Right!  This is it!  I’m serious this time.  I am absolutely not going to buy any more new books until I have read the ones I have bought but not read yet.  

That includes the ones that I purchased because I was going to read them on holiday.  In 2011.  Not only do I have a variety of books lying unopened and unread that I am looking forward to reading, I have also received books for Christmas from generous family.  I need to institute a strict reading programme and not get distracted by going into bookshops, coming over a bit giddy at the smell of the print, and exiting with an armful of new paperbacks.  Nor will I get pissed and go on Amazon.  These are distractions.

But that doesn’t apply to buying magazines, does it? 

No? 

Great!

That’s why it was quite legitimate to buy a copy of ‘The Field’.

‘The Field’ is an absolutely astonishing magazine.  It is all about hunting, shooting and fishing but, and this is the astonishing bit, it is unironic and unapologetic in its coverage of these matters.

I’ve long believed that because of a combination of desktop publishing and the cheap costs of printing, there is pretty much a magazine about every subject. 

Back in the day, there used to be things called ‘fanzines’, small circulation magazines produced by enthusiasts about various subjects (most famously music but also genre literature) printed on hand-operated presses using chemicals that, if used today, would get you onto some sort of watch list and, as I recall, used to result in an experience that made reading a fanzine one step away from glue sniffing. 

The advent of the internet allowed many people to move their interests on-line while the advent of computer composition for magazines enabled there to be more than one magazine published about, for instance, quilting, when one might reasonably assume that the natural number of magazines about quilting required in the world is one.  If that.

Depending on the social circle you move in, hunting shooting and fishing are either cruel, a bloody good weekend, or an excuse to wear a lot of tweed and drive a 4x4.  ‘The Field’ is for people who like their lives uncomplicated by moral choices about killing things.  This is because the people who read ‘The Field’ probably live in the country, and realise that in the county, things are red in tooth and claw to say the least and everything is out to get you.  When faced with an angry badger, shoot first, or the little bastard will savage you long before he manages to cough on you, infecting you with bovine TB and condemning you to life as a poet.

It is a little odd to read tales of slaughter told with such relish, and yet somehow attractive too.  It might be something of an exaggeration to describe a brisk bout with a trout as a ‘battle’, but it does readily convey the image of three hours in the blazing sunshine flogging yourself up and down a river with several pounds of angry fish on the other end of the line and nothing but upper body strength and, if all else fails, something your mate brought back from Afgan for you to fall back on, but it paints a picture.

My favourite article, even better than the pictures of naked posh birds taken from the type of charity calendars that young farmers like to crack one out to, is the reviews of the guns.  Guns are reviewed in ‘The Field’ the same way that cars are reviewed in other magazines, and cost about the same.

Reading about something written by an enthusiast is always a joy, and there’s a neat counterpoint when it’s written by people who think (rightly) that their way of life is under threat and yet shows, at the same time, that huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ are as alive and well today as they always have been, at least between the pages of the magazine.  One gets the feeling that people who own guns are rarely ambivalent in their opinion.  When you’re facing down a charging boar, it’s deeds, not thoughts, that count.

Merry Christmas

This should have been all brussel sprouts.  Instead, it's mostly trout.

With the flooding hitting so many people and so many travel plans, it’s clear to see that for many, the pre-Christmas periood is about getting home to see your family, because wherever you live , your home is where your family is.

This migration home was evident on the motorway at the weekend.

One of the best train journeys I ever had was on a Christmas Eve, the carriage looked like a scene from a seasonal Hallmark made for tee vee schmaltsfest, with the luggage rack silver and gold and green and red with wrapped presents poking out of plastic bags, and the travellers either glad to be going home, or glad to be going home for Christmas.  Possibly the general atmosphere of goodwill towards all men was assisted by the noble English tradition of opening the booze at twelve sharp on Christmas Eve, especially if intending to use public transport, but so what?

On the motorway, instead of the usual lone traveller in their car, one could peek into mobile bubbles of Christmas, making their way to relatives.  Back seats were crammed with kids and boots were crammed with presents.  The journey gave rise to an impromptu game of awarding the best presented back sill of a car.  If you are going to totally obscure your rear view, you may as well do so with some jolly packages.

And while a strong contender for most Christmassy car was the one where the lady in the passenger seat had a large, beautifully wrapped box on her lap, the winner without a doubt was the large car with the parents in the front, the kids in the back and the presents and a dog in the large rear boot space.  The dog was well out of sight and reach of any humans and was just beginning to realise this, as it started to carefully shred the wrapping on the box nearest to it.

Loaded cars are part of Chjristmas.  I have friends who make a journey between various family members, clocking up many miles and many hours of radio listening.  They call packing the boot ‘loading up the sleigh’.

With the floods and the rain and the weather stopping trains in the south and ferries in the north, it’s taking some people a lot of effort to get to their loved ones. But weather your present is beautifully wrapped, or in the dog, or just their presence, it’s worth it.

Here's to all the travelers - may they arrive safely to a warm welcome.

Merry Christmas!

No funny. At all.

The coverage of the tragic school shooting in Conneticut, combined with the ongoing coverage of the suicide of the mother and nurse who was the victim of a ‘prank’ call by two tossers who ‘worked’ for an Australian radio station, makes watching the news or reading a paper a fairly depressing activity at the moment.  Essentially, if Angela Merkel pops up and you think ‘thank Christ!’, you know things are grim.

What’s striking about the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call is just how mind-boggingly insensitive they truly are.  When they gave a press conference, their first public appearance following their actions that had led to a woman taking her own life, they talked of how ‘shattered’ they felt.

Let’s be quite clear here, nobody cares how you feel.  Nobody.  After you have driven a woman to her death, you do not go on national telly and talk about how it has affected you.  You go on telly, and you say ‘I am sorry’.  You say that and only that and you keep on saying that until the camera crew have packed up their lights and gear and shit and have left the room, left the building.

Following the death of Jacintha Saldanha (charmingly described as ‘Kate nurse’ in the media) the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call had to take down their Twitter accounts.  This is probably because being self-absorbed media wankers (question, does working for a radio station in Australia qualify as being a job in the media?) check their Twitter accounts before they take their morning dump, although sitting on the loo is probably a great place to discover that everyone in the world wants to kill you.

There have been a few protestations that the level of abuse heaped upon the tossers was out of proportion, but I’m not so sure.  First of all, it’s not like anyone has actually seriously made any sort of death threat against them, knowing the internet community, it’s more likely that people have been tweeting that the pair should meet an unpleasant fate in an unlikely fashion, like being gored to death by goats, or struck by a hot air balloon making an emergency landing.  Essentially, a non-specific remark that the planet would be better off without you.

Certainly, the world would have been a better place if they had not made that call.  I have to admit that I have never appreciated practical jokes or hoax calls.  Maybe somebody can explain to me the humour in ‘phoning up a hospital to get confidential medical details about somebody and then broadcasting it.  I can’t see the humour but can see that in terms of filling air time this is a lot more economical than paying a writer to sacrifice an entire summer and develop a coffee dependency in order to come up with six half hour radio shows that only receive a luke-warm reception and will never make the jump to television.

Contrasting the tossers with the television footage of Jacintha Saldanha’s daughter giving a statement to the press about how much she will miss her mother was quite revealing.  Composed and dignified, it demonstrated the gulf between those who have something to say that’s worthwhile listening to, and those who want to talk about themselves, without having anything interesting to say.

Without wishing to add to the sum burden of human misery in the world, and without wishing to make a judgement about somebody based upon reading a few words and seeing a few seconds of television, it’s pretty clear that even if the tossers are not terrible people (and I suspect they are, sometimes you don’t need much information about somebody’s actions to make a judgement about them, like if you knew somebody spend their evenings peeing on choirboys and that’s all you knew about them…what more do you need) they are at least terrible broadcasters.

I know this because at a time when dee jays and radio presenters in England were being arrested as sex offenders and more accusations about peados on the radio came out, these were the two people that the internet (for which read: The World) decided to hate.  Says it all.

This sporting life

One of the lasting legacies of the 2012 Olympics was to get the great British public interested and enthused about sports other than Association Football.  There is no doubt that the Olympics raised the profile of cycling in the UK, which was already riding high after Wiggo had won the Tour de France, not just a tremendous sporting achievement but that achievement that the English cherish above all others – Beating The Foreign At Their Own Game. 

That’s why the news that the Big Departure for the 2014 Tour would be in Leeds was greeted with such enthusiasm, as Brits who for years had associated bicycles with spindly rickets-ridden grocery delivery boys toiling up northern cobbled hills or district nurses built like the figurehead of a tea clipper sailing magnificently through country lanes atop a noble iron steed would instead be treated once again to the thrill of the road race and a sporting event which, when watched live, whooshes past you in a few seconds, allowing the rest of the afternoon free for drinking and talking about pies.

When the Olympics were in progress, unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the overpriced nancy-boys who, the public slowly realised, had not won a major international competition in their living memory, and Team GB who all appeared to live with their mums, went to bed at four in the afternoon and were assembling a hoard of gold that would put a dragon to shame.

Once the Olympics ended and the soccer season started, the normal order quickly reasserted itself and soccer dominates the media once more.  Although it’s probably fair to say that this domination is not as total as it once was, as editors realise that if the BBC were able to dedicate whole channels to single sports, like canoeing, the least they can do is dispatch a hack to a riverside in spate in Wales to record the activities of a bloke in a fibreglass shell trying to paddle up a waterfall.  Dickie Davis was decades ahead of the game, there is a World of Sport out there, beyond even the seasonal favourites of soccer and rugby.

They used to say that soccer was a game for gentlemen played by thugs, and rugby was a game for thugs played by gentlemen.  That’s no longer true, it’s fairer to say that, professionally at least, soccer is a game played by foreigners whilst rugby is a game played by blokes who, if they are going to punch an opponent, at least have the courtesy to do it in front of the ref.

More than anything, soccer is a tribal thing.  For many fans, the order of preference is Club, Country, Bird.  And it’s played everywhere, all you need are two boys, each with a jumper and you have the set up for a goalie, a striker and some goalposts, in short, a game.  It’s more difficult to organise an impromptu game of rugby, where you need at least two public schools with a bitter rivalry.

And while it is very easy to knock soccer, let’s not forget in these tough economic times the role that soccer plays in stimulating the economy.  Clubs change the design of their strip seven or eight times a season, necessitating their fans to visit the club shop on a regular basis to enable them to dress like a fat version of their sporting heroes.  At a local level, the players themselves spend money in bars, clubs and restaurants in a quest to maintain goal-scoring fitness levels.  At an international level, with so many players now being so foreign that they have to hold their arms out straight not just to celebrate goals but to properly display their twenty-seven syllable surnames, they are sending home a portion of their wages and so re-floating the Euro.  And of course let’s not forget their contribution to certain professions, eminent QCs with a good record of getting their client off charges of racism or sexual assault in time for Saturday’s match do not come cheap.

In rugby, of course, the players at least have the courtesy to commit sexual assault right in front of the ref, usually in the scrum.

Not again!

Sickening news from the US, where it appears some nutter with a gun has committed an atrocity against innocents.

The coverage of this US shooting is essentially on two fronts.  The first being shots of (rightly) very upset people in a small town in Connecticut trying to articulate their grief and shock in a way that a news editor has deemed suitable for broadcast, when the actual but unbroadcastable reality is probably somebody sitting on their sofa, clutching a cup of tea, or a beer, and occasionally muttering ‘but…why?’ for several minutes, hours or days based on their proximity to the event, or empathy.

The other front is reporting the issue of gun control. 

This is very much an American thing, where the media clips that run with the story are invariably of automatic weapons, handguns, and row upon row of guns for sale in, apparently, ‘Guns R Us’.

The British attitude towards gun control was settled years ago, in tragic circumstances.  We had our tragedy and the Government quite rightly acted swiftly and decisively.  Anyone who bleated about an infringement of their ‘right’ to own as many bloody guns as they wanted was quietly taken aside and asked to stop talking, preferably about anything, ever, again.

But it’s more complex than outright prohibition.  If you are a responsible citizen, or have a use for them, there’s nothing wrong with owning a gun, or guns.  Certainly, if you shoot game, you’ll want to be able to select the right gun and the right shot to bag something for the table or hopelessly outclass the chap at the next peg, depending on the sort of day you have in store.  If you are keeping down pests such as rats or foxes, you won’t want something that is going to result in a cloud of shot and sudden air-conditioning in the barn.  If you want to deal with an urban fox, I suggest a thermos of scotch, a head light and a shovel.  Lastly, when dealing with the Taliban, one will need a rifle, a suitable sidearm as an auxiliary weapon, and, favourite of all, a mobile ‘phone with your mate who controls the Predator Drone in the area on speed dial 1.

What baffles me is the American fondness for automatic weapons.  Hand guns in particular.  What game are these used to bring down?  And in terms of home security, are they really as good as, say, a new front door with deadlocks?  Of course, I appreciate that many Americans do go hunting at the weekend, blending into the countryside in their camouflage trousers and high-viz orange vests, looking for all the world like elves who work for the Highway Department, and they take their automatic weapons with them.  And I know that fearsome beasts lurk in the American woods, bears, wolves, hillbillies, oh my.  But, seriously, automatic weapons?  For hunting?  Are the bears wearing armour?  If you are so shit at hunting that it takes you a clip and a half to put down Yogi, then you need to do three things.

First, you need to get your ass to the Highlands and learn how to stalk.  This is not the same as that thing you did with that cute girl from accounts that resulted in you having to move to another city after the court case.  This means stealthily tracking your prey.  First lesson is free – don’t crush your beer can while burping when a few yards from anything with more teeth than you.

Second, learn to shoot.  One shot with your eyes open is better than several hundred with them closed.  Remember that bit in ‘Predator’ where Arnie’s team level half the jungle?  Yea, good wasn’t it?  But they didn’t kill the Predator.

Finally, get your fat ass to Norfolk, find a decent gun shop and buy yourself a proper, man sized, grown up hunting piece.  I mean something put together by a craftsman.  It is not designed to make you look like a hard-ass in your Facebook photos.  It is deigned to bring about the sure and certain destruction of anything you point it at, which you better know how to cook.  And while you are there, get yourself a decent fishing rod and a tweed jacket.

There’s nothing wrong with owning a gun.  Or guns.  There is something very wrong with owning a gun, or guns, without good reason.

What happened in Connecticut was horrific.  And while gun control is not a UK issue, and it’s certainly not up to the UK to tell the US how to run their own affairs, it doesn’t, it can’t, stop us looking at the images from another school, another facebook photo of another nutter, and thinking, along with the throat-drying, heart-numbing horror of it all, ‘what the hell will it take?’.  Maybe the best way to protect innocents isn’t guns, it’s gun control.

A matter of taste

As anyone who belongs to an exclusive club will know, the point of belonging to an exclusive club is to shut the door on the people not in your club, and feel a little bit smug.  This is why for every one person who celebrates the success of a band or singer by spouting on about how they have been saying for years how good she was, there are nine people who will respond with ‘yes, but I was a fan before the John Lewis advert’.  This is the equivalent of being a member of the club in the days before it admitted women.

Exclusivity is all very well, but as we head into Christmas (traditionally a season of goodwill, Christian celebration and a huge increase in sales of indigestion remedies), adverts try to sell exclusivity for the mass market.  Perfume may be marketed as being worn only by beautiful and glamorous people, but something tells me that they brew it up by the bucketload on some industrial estate in Halifax, rather than, as the ad would have you believe, in some artisan dwelling somewhere exotic, or maybe just extracted directly from the bodily fluids of the celebrity flogging the pong.  Bombarded by choice, it’s increasingly difficult to make your own mind up.

Like salad cream.

Salad cream. 

What is salad cream?

Salad cream is the working class equivalent of mayonnaise or salad dressing.

Salad cream is what, in the nineteen seventies, you squirted in quantity over your salad to try and make iceberg lettuce more interesting, a feat that would actually require you to douse the stuff in LSD.  Like many products of the nineteen seventies, the application of science to a problem resulted in something that could and should far better have been resolved through the use of a natural solution.

This applied to life generally, but to fibres and food specifically.  Witness, for example, nylon, which was used not just to make fabrics for carpets and curtains and furniture, but also for clothes in a period, despite the appliance of science that resulted in nuclear energy, that with breathtaking irony suffered power shortages.  Presumably not in the home of anyone building up enormous static charges as they walked, sat or merely fidgeted.  In food there was the discovery of man made flavours.  I will concede that the invention of the pickled onion monster munch is probably one of the greatest achievements of mankind, but angel delight was, surely, a dessert creation too far.  And then we have salad cream.

Salad cream certainly perked up any salad, by completely overwhelming any other flavour, that flavour being a mixture of tangy and petrochemical.

I am not, believe me, mocking or knocking or in any way belittling salad cream.  I have myself moved on culinarily, but not far.  I still use salad dressing and I am not fooling myself for an instant as I reach past the balsamic vinaigrette, past the Italian dressing, past the mayo and straight for the thick, creamy goodness of the ranch because, for me, salad is essentially a ranch delivery system.  Apparently standing at the kitchen counter spooning the stuff into your mouth is not acceptable behaviour but somehow the involvement of cucumber makes it alright.

I had salad cream in a sandwich recently and it triggered a flashback so profound that I expected to see, looking down, a pair of pipe-cleaner legs with scabby and grass stained knees ending in dirty feet stuffed into scuffed trainers.

Salad cream comes in a plastic squeezy bottle.  It is a particular yellowing colour somewhere between mayo and mustard most usually associated with decades old tins of what was once white paint discovered at the back of sheds, or anything in the fridge described as ‘off’.

And it’s bloody delicious.  I don’t need to be told what to eat, I don’t care if it’s common and I don’t want to be part of a foodie club that means I can only eat what I’m told.  The bottle makes a farting noise when it squirts which is bloody hilarious and it turns salad into an unexpected delight.  Truly, when it comes to taste, it’s a matter of just that.

Postcard from Winchester

The Christmas market, a feature of many European towns, as indeed are markets.  English markets are, traditionally, the place you go to buy fresh veg and knock-off DVDs, most other shopping taking place in the supermarket or on-line.  There is, however, a growing taste for Christmas Markets that may or may not be linked directly to a growing taste for hot sausage and mulled wine from November onwards.  If Sainsbury’s had discovered in 1974 that all you needed to keep customers coming back was to serve them alcohol and hot sausage while they shopped, the world might be a very different place, with lots less Tesco in it.

Birmingham has an enormous Christmas market.  The press used to have an annual story of reporting that the council has re-branded Christmas as ‘Winterval’, however, realising that a) nobody actually believed this for a second and b) even if they did, nobody cared, the press now report annually that Birmingham’s German Market is causing friction because it takes trade away from the rest of the traders in Birmingham.  I don’t know if this is true but I can make an assumption – it’s not.  This assumption is made not on the number of times I have visited Birmingham’s Christmas Market (once, I had a hot sausage, it was lovely) but on the number of times I have visited Christmas markets in general both here and in Europe and, unless Birmingham’s resident traders get rid of all of the stock they sell for the other eleven months of the year and stock wooden Christmas tree decorations, scented candles, warm wine or hot sausage, then I really don’t see that the German Market is going to be taking an awful lot of trade away from the Bull Ring.

Winchester has a Christmas Market, and it’s well worth a visit, also obviously the opinion of everyone that lives in the South of England.  Staying for the weekend in the centre of the city, I was lucky enough to be able to visit early in the morning and late in the evening and to get there on foot.  It was charming, it was lively and if you wanted either scented candles or wooden Christmas tree decorations, it was the place to be.  I’m not sure it would have had quite the same charm if you had arrived after ten o’clock, failed to get parked, eventually got parked, walked to the Christmas Market and discovered a crowd roughly the size of the ones normally associated with the overthrowing of despots, but tetchier.

Winchester though is an exceptionally charming town and this year, as well as having that extra jingle-scented sparkle that comes with the season, there was an added attraction.

‘Sound II’ is a sculpture by Anthony Gormley that stands in the crypt of Winchester cathedral.  The crypt itself is devoid of decoration; white stone, with Normal arches.  Apart from the statue it is unremarkable except for having that sense of peace that buildings that measure their span in millennia acquire.  It is, however, prone to flooding and when there has been rain in the chalk hills surrounding Winchester, then a couple of weeks later the crypt first becomes damp, then wet, then home to a foot or two of standing water.

Which Sound II stands in, the figure upright and holding a bowl, listening to the sound of his soul, standing up to his knees in water.

I have never been anywhere quite like it.  The sense of quiet, of stillness, is quite extraordinary, as people automatically either lower their voices or edit anything unnecessary out of their conversation.  One could stand and stare for hours, or do the next best thing and take many photographs to look at later.

Above ground, the Christmas Market is hustle, bustle, and in fairness charming if busy, with the shopkeepers resident in posh garden sheds looking for all the world like elves running an arts and craft business.  Below ground, silence and stillness.  And all around, people moving from shop to shop and stall to stall, looking for a gift that will make a loved one’s face light up on Christmas Day, or at least a hot sausage.