Alphatuosity

It is impossible for a narcissist like me to avoid clicking on the ‘stats’ tab of my blog’s dashboard, if not every day then at least every other. As a result, I know that ‘The Alphatuous Course’ is by far the most frequently accessed piece that I have written so far. Is this because blasphemy, even in our secular world, still sends a delicious shiver down the most materialistic spine? Or is it because evidence of my mental condition rises closest to the surface in this piece?

Whatever the reason, I feel that my tiny but outré audience deserves an update from the Theological Committee hard at work commensuralising the worlds’ religions. Inadequate to the task of holding to account the Committee members, I asked Jeremy Paxman to interview them instead and he graciously acceded. The following transcript, lightly edited, is the result of his investigations.

Archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan Williams

Paxman: ‘Archbishop, your colleague Bishop Gene Robinson (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331530/Archbishop-Canterbury-abducted-aliens-says-bishop-battle-gay-clergy.html?ito=feeds-newsxml) alleges you have been abducted by aliens. Is this true?’

Archbishop of Canterbury

An alien

Williams: ‘Well Jeremy, that’s a very interesting question but might I just say that I think you are overlooking the most important issue of our age, namely the question of whether having a vagina precludes a person from administering the sacraments. My own view on this critical question is that, on the one hand yes; on the other hand, no.’

Paxman: ‘Yeeeees. I see. Have you been abducted by aliens?’

Williams: ‘I think the important thing to recognise is that we need to pray for guidance at this difficult time for the Anglican Communion.’

Paxman: ‘So, what was it like on the alien spaceship?’

Williams: ‘I pray for Gene Robinson every day…’

Paxman: ‘He says he prays for you every day. Who’s prayers is God listening to?’

Williams: ‘Jeremy, God listens to every prayer. That’s what’s so lovely about him.’

Paxman: ‘Perhaps I should have asked whose prayers God seems to favour?’

Williams: [laughing] ‘Oh Jeremy, you are a card. God listens, but he doesn’t very often answer. Only children and seminary inmates expect their prayers to be answered, these days. We in the Anglican Communion are realistic about these things.’

Paxman: ‘Which brings me on to the main purpose of this interview. What are you going to do for the Theological Committee’?

Williams: ‘Well, Jeremy, I think the Committee has been far too focused on issues like poverty, hunger, misery and suffering. What I think we really need to do is get the members of the Committee to focus on the central issue of the ordination of women priests. I’ll be working night and day to bring this about.’

Paxman: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, thank you very much.’

Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i

Paxman: ‘Ayatollah Khāmene’i, your predecessor on the Committee met with an unfortunate fate, after issuing a fatwa condemning his fellow committee members for saying that Islam is a violent religion. Is Islam a violent religion?’

Leader of a peaceful religion

Khāmene’i: ‘When I assumed office I vowed to eliminate deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists. And I wasn’t thinking gentle persuasion. Most Muslims, however, think I’m barking mad, so I wouldn’t worry, too much.’

Paxman: ‘Does the Koran condone violence against innocent civilians?’

Khāmene’i: ‘No, only against niggers, women, gays and Americans.’

Paxman [smiling superciliously]: ‘So I assume that the Archbishop of Canterbury is one of your closest allies on the Committee?’

Khāmene’i [smiling unctuously]: ‘Well, let’s just say that I have been able to recommend some techniques to him for dealing with recalcitrant Bishops.’

Paxman: ‘Ayatollah, thank you very much.’

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Paxman: ‘Your Holiness…’

Benedict: ‘You can call me Joseph.’

The antichrist

Paxman: ‘Thanks, Joseph. What do you understand by Jesus Christ’s injunction ‘suffer little children’?’

Benedict [smiling]: ‘I can think of many delightful ways to make little children suffer, Jeremy, but these days I am too busy attending to matters of State to indulge such worldly pleasures.’

Paxman: ‘Were you really in the Hitler Youth?’

Benedict: ‘Yes. But I didn’t inhale.’

Paxman: ‘What are your hobbies?’

Benedict: ‘I beg your pardon?’

Paxman: ‘I said, what are your hobbies?’

Benedict: ‘Dressing up, waving, defending the rights of retroviruses and harbouring paedophiles.’

Paxman: ‘Your holiness, good night.’

The Dalai Lama

Paxman: ‘Dalai Lama, why are you named after a small, South American camelid?’

Dalai Lama: ‘That is a common misconception. The lama is in fact rather a large camelid. You are thinking of a Vicuña.’

A wise man on his night off

Paxman: ‘My mistake, sorry. Why do you think that many people who abandon monotheistic religions go on to embrace Buddhism?’

Dalai Lama: ‘Jeremy, and I thought you were a cynical, careerist, sneering member of the British Establishment. My sincere apologies.’

Paxman [sneering, cynically]: ‘Thank you.’

Dalai Lama: ‘We do not believe in God. Not really. But we offer a last resort for the spiritually desperate. We turn no-one away.’

Paxman: ‘Dalai Lama, thank you very much.’

Yoda

Paxman: ‘Yoda, you are unique among my interviewees today, in that you believe in an entirely mythical and obviously illusory world spirit, The Force’.

Yoda [laughing]: ‘Articulate you are, Jeremy, but wisdom, you lack.’

Paxman [arching eyebrows]: ‘Oh?’

Yoda: ‘When conquered, you have, your myths and your fears, a void will you find. This void, the Force will fill.’

Paxman: ‘May the Force be with you, master.’

Yoda: ‘And also with you.’

In my greenhouse

My greenhouse

In a turbulent world, everyone needs a sanctuary. My greenhouse is my sanctuary. The structure is a thing of beauty, designed and built for me by Hartley Botanic. The long axis is oriented east-west, to take full advantage of our anaemic northern light. Both north and south elevations are lined with brick cold frames, where I germinate my most precious or vulnerable seeds. Inside the only noise is the hum of the fans that run continuously, gently circulating the air and discouraging pests and diseases. The benches are provided with heating mats, although they are turned off for most of the year. The irrigation system hums into life according to a program that I vary through the seasons. There are overhead lights, which supplement natural daylight during the winter months and encourage winter-growing bulbs to prosper. Underneath the benches are deep sand beds where dormant plants enjoy a constant, cool environment. It is a marvellous luxury, for me and the plants that I love to grow.

Although large by most standards, space in the greenhouse is always at a premium and I constantly juggle the plants that I accommodate in these five star conditions. I am currently indulging a growing infatuation with the genus Arum and about a third of the longest bench is given over to pots of a dozen or so species. November is perhaps the nadir of the flowering calendar and it is satisfying to go into the greenhouse and be reminded that green is the dominant and most soothing colour in the plant kingdom.

I collected the plant below in south east Slovenia. It is a particularly attractive form of Arum italicum, which has not flowered yet for me. Who cares? The mottled foliage is reason enough to grow it.

Arum italicum - collected SE Slovenia

When I have figured out how to insert a gizmo in the right hand column of this blog, I intend to post a new picture of what's happening in the greenhouse as frequently as I can. Keep watching.

Taming the elephant

Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain

 She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. 

Shakespeare, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

Many of you, my dear readers, appear to think that I am wallowing in self-pity and that this is a bad thing. Of course I’m fucking wallowing. Wallowing in self-pity is to a depressed, alcoholic human being as wallowing in mud is to a hippo. It cools the blood and facilitates regrouping. That is not to say that I think life from now on should be one long mud bath. Eventually I expect to emerge from the gloop and re-engage with life on terms, if not equal, then at least tolerable indefinitely. Give me a break, will you?

One of the few constructive things that I am doing with my time in the slime is reading. On the whole, I don’t read literature, partly because the effort required to read it generally negates the pleasure I derive from understanding it and partly because I think there are more interesting things to read. Shakespeare is often cited by the authors of popular science books, presumably as evidence that they can use Wikipedia, as well as solve quadratic equations in their heads. There seems to be a phrase of his that puts in words no mortal can match every sentiment one might wish to express. In the lines quoted above, Shakespeare is describing, from a male perspective, the never-ending battle between the sexes. What might his powers of expression have achieved, had he been privy to some of the results of contemporary research in psychology? If I want to understand the basis of the relations between men and women, I’d read ‘The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating’ by David Buss over ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ any day but, if I want a quote, The Bard is The Man.

The book beside my bed at the moment is ‘The Happinesss Hypothesis’, by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve not finished it, yet, but it is such exciting stuff that I want to share it now. Haidt is an academic psychologist at the University of Virginia, where he researches the ways in which morality functions. Psychology has come a long way since the days when Freudians felt at liberty to lie (excuse the pun) in their couches and construct vast theoretical edifices on foundations entirely devoid of experimental underpinning.

Haidt and his colleagues do experiments that are designed to uncover how and why our minds operate the way they do. For example, by getting volunteers to stare at a spot on a computer screen and then flashing words onto the dot too briefly for the volunteers to register them consciously, researchers are able to influence the volunteers subsequent behaviour. By flashing words related to aggression, they can make the volunteers behave rudely; by flashing words related to old age, they can make them walk more slowly; if the volunteers are American (where the relevant experiments were done) and the words are replaced by images of black faces, they can see regions of the brain associated with dislike and fear light up like a Christmas tree.

I love books that summarise large quantities of recent, hot scientific research and present it in a fashion that neither presumes in a reader any familiarity with the underlying literature nor patronises him by leaving out all of the difficult ideas. Haidt’s book is a brilliant example of the genre. Its USP is the author’s device of discussing the psychological and moral intuitions of widely revered, mostly ancient, thinkers and evaluating them in the light of the fairly recent understanding of our minds as evolved devices that exist in their current forms because they benefited our ancestors. For example, how might the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) emerge from our evolved psychologies (a paraphrase of the answer is that ‘tit for tat’ is an unbeatable strategy in games conducted within the context of the sort of societies humans inhabit)? It turns out that even Christ had some good ideas – for example his intuition that we are all profoundly hypocritical (remove the plank from your own eye…) – although none of them were original.

Haidt’s ambition extends beyond just explaining why we think what we think, however. He wants to use that understanding to enable individual humans to subvert the imperatives that evolution has built into us, opening the possibility that we might make ourselves healthier, wiser and happier, in spite of our predilections. He shows, for example, how some eastern philosophies that teach detachment as the road to nirvana, while on the right track, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. His advantage over Buddha, say, is that whereas the enlightened one was going mainly on gut instinct, Haidt can do actual experiments on the students of the University of Virginia. If this sounds like fun to you, I doubt what you have in mind would get past the ethics committee.

Although I have read with attention dozens of beautifully written books about physics and cosmology (my favourite is ‘Six Easy Pieces’ by Richard Feynman), if I’m honest, I’d still struggle to explain, say, the theory of relativity at dinner party level, partly because I just don’t have the math and partly because none of the many metaphors designed to convey the gist of the theory has ever stuck. At the heart of 'The Happiness Hypothesis' is a brilliant metaphor, which I don't think I’ll ever forget.

He likens our minds to a rider on an elephant. The rider is our consciousness, the small part of our mind that evaluates our situation and attempts to influence it. The elephant is all the rest, comprising a vast majority of our mental lives, unconscious, stubborn, skilful and extremely powerful. All our ancestors until perhaps two million years ago and all our extant non-human relatives have no equivalent of the rider. She is a very recent innovation in evolutionary history and has been placed on a mount that picked its way through life without her, for aeons. It is a peculiarly human conceit and, as it turns out, a dangerous illusion, that the rider is in charge. On the contrary, she is an advisor or servant to the elephant. By subtle use of nudges and winks and careful tweaks on the reins, she can influence the direction the elephant takes, but if the elephant really wants to go somewhere, the rider is, well, just along for the ride.

In one sense, this is just a metaphor. In another it is a literal, thought vastly simplified, statement of the  brute facts of the matter. The moment the light went on in my mind was when Haidt quoted Ovid’s character Medea: 'I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.' Not only is this an almost perfect description of my current situation, it seems to me to describe many aspects of the lives of everyone I know. If you’ve ever made a new year’s resolution, you’ll know what I mean.

I confess that when I first read about the elephant and rider metaphor, my inner pervert immediately conjured up an image, not entirely attractive, of yours truly as a human-loxodont chimera with an elephantine schlong. Perhaps my mind would have run with the idea, had I not recently been inoculated against this peculiarly male form of self-deception. I have kids and one of their many charms is telling it as they see it. My daughter wandered into the loo the other day, while I was having a pee, and started laughing uncontrollably. ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked. ‘Daddy’, she giggled, ‘you have a very funny piemeltje.’ It’s probably not necessary to provide a translation of the final (Dutch) word in the last sentence but ‘little willy’ is close. When my daughter giggles, I giggle and, as at least some of you will know from personal experience, giggling while pissing has disastrous consequences for one’s aim. ‘Never mind, Daddy,’ said Elsje, ‘everybody has accidents sometimes.’ Wounded pride is a small price to pay for self-knowledge, as Buddha probably didn’t say.

But I digress. ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ is one of the best of a genre of recent books written by a generation of psychologists undamaged by years of immersion in the dead or dying ‘disciplines’ of psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Instead of swearing fealty to a school of thought taught by their college tutors and never questioning it, they have gone out, done lots of really neat experiments and drawn their own conclusions. One of Haidt’s brilliantly argued conclusions that has me sweating a bit is that the Religious Right in America might have a point, when it argues that liberals have lost their way teaching children that there are no moral absolutes and that they are free to come to their own decisions about right and wrong. Haidt is an atheist and a liberal but he is fearless in letting the facts do the talking.

Unalloyed joy

No, you did not misread the title, nor have I chosen it merely to manufacture an excuse to pour scorn on the feeble, delusional weaklings capable of experiencing such an emotion. I am simply going to report an unusual feeling that I experienced earlier this afternoon.

Since I moved out of my home a couple of weeks ago, I have seen my two young children only a handful of times. The agreement with my wife is that the kids will spend Saturdays with me and that I will collect them from school on Tuesdays, take them swimming and cook them supper.

I still go to my former home every day, however, to work in the garden, my gossamer-thin link to sanity. This afternoon I saw my kids there unexpectedly, when our child minder was getting them out of her car. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that they saw me. As soon as they did, radiant smiles broke out across their beautiful faces. 'Daddy!' they cried and ran to me, arms outstretched. I swept them up, one in each arm (no mean feat given that their combined weight is 35kg and I'm fat and unfit), and hugged them hard.

Unalloyed joy is what I felt and its echoes are still ringing inside me, hours later. Thank you, Elsje and Pieter, for making your old man's week.

Happier days

The Alphatuous Course

Usually, when I walk past one of those giant posters outside a church, posing the question ‘Does God Exist?’ followed by three boxes representing ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’, I am seized by an almost irrepressible urge to buy a can of red spray paint and write, Bart Simpson style, ‘OF COURSE NOT, YOU STUPID, CREDULOUS MORONS’, in letters a foot high, all over the walls of the church.

Recently, however, it has occurred to me that, if charlatans are actually allowed by law to advertise their services in this way, why not get in on the act? After all, if the cretins who attend the Alpha Course are capable of being separated from their hard-earned cash simply by being given the opportunity to speculate on the meaning of life (clue: it begins with an 'n'), how much money might one be able to extort from these same, poor creatures if one actually promised them some concrete, hedonistic benefits, as well as spiritual enlightenment?

With this aim in mind, I am working on establishing a new meta-religion, of which I will be chief prophet. Those of you who know me well may doubt my suitability for a position of such sensitivity and influence but I would ask you to contemplate the current head of state at the Vatican and ask yourself which of us scares you more.

Head of the Vatican Center for the Protection and Rehabilitation of Child Rapists

The Pope

 The obvious problem with all current religions is that they are incompatible with one another. For example, if you believe that human sacrifice is a perfectly legitimate means of attempting to influence the gods to intervene in your behalf, you are likely to dismiss talk of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you spend your weekends infundibulating pubescent girls because God obviously didn’t really want women to enjoy sex, you will probably have limited sympathy with the suggestion that the path to nirvana is lined with naked, writhing bodies conducting experiments in free love. If you are basically opposed on principle to eating human flesh, you may find the idea of consuming bits of a corpse every Sunday a bit icky. Pass the Yorkshire pudding instead, you may very well be thinking and I, for one, would throw in the horseradish sauce for free.

If incompatibility is the obvious problem, the obvious solution is to assemble an internationally respected team of theologians and have them thrash it out. Can a more appropriate collective noun ever have existed than the one for a group of theologians: apologists? I have brought together such a group and they are working flat out to render the incommensurable, ummm, commensurable. After some initial difficulties, when the ayatollah on the team issued a fatwa against all his colleagues for suggesting that Islam is a violent religion, things are progressing well (except for the ayatollah, whom we gave to the voodoo mystic for spare parts). For example, the committee has agreed that, although eating pork is basically verboten, bacon sandwiches are to be declared exempt from this restriction. Although women will no longer be considered actually unclean while menstruating, they will still be expected to confine themselves to performing essential domestic chores during their periods.

With such open minded attitudes given free reign to meet and merge, it cannot be long before we arrive at an internally consistent religion that admits all comers. Except atheists, of course. Those sickos are going to HELL.

So, how can you be a part of this brave new movement?

I have designed several short courses, aimed at introducing you to my new meta-religion. Not only are these courses likely to cause the scales to fall from your eyes, some involve opportunities to use a lot of firearms. You may think that the nominal donation we suggest you make, £250, is a lot of money but what price enlightenment? Naturally, we accept all forms of credulity card.

Option 1: Jihad Mini Break

Based at the idyllic Red Sea resort of Al Jazeera in Yemen, we will be exploring ways of exorcising our frustrations by killing innocent civilians. We wanted to hold the course in Somerset but the Health & Safety Executive would not budge on the issue of torture. With plenty of time allowed for freelance killing, we will study the history of homicide as interpreted by the prophet Mohamed (PBUH). We will supply tourists but please bring your own bread knife. Continental breakfast included.

Option 2: Sex With The Founder

While our theological committee continues to grapple with the thorny issue of whether God is male or female, and whether, having invented shagging, he/she actually approves of it, I thought it only fair to offer female readers under the age of twenty the opportunity to have sex with an actual prophet. There will be no charge for choosing this option but you might want to bring a paper bag.

Option 3: Taking The Opposition Seriously

This course is likely to appeal only to the most gifted among you, intellectually. You will be provided with a small cell, a computer and an unlimited supply of paper. Three days later we will let you out and expect you to have something interesting to say about the reason people still insist on clinging to organised religion in an age when there are clearer ways to see the world. If you don’t, we will disguise you as American tourists and put you on a bus to Yemen.

Shortly before I was ready to post this article I received from my apologists’ committee the following draft of a modified meta-religious Lord’s Prayer.

Allahu Akhbar!

But frankly, you can be a sanctimonious cunt at times.

Forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those who trespass against us

(Except ragheads and faggots obviously).

Thy Kingdom come, as will thy priests,

Through the glory hole in the confessional wall,

While seeking absolution for buggering choir boys.

We promise not to eat pork (except the odd bacon sandwich),

Or cows, or shellfish, or one another.

Nor shall we accidentally inhale small flying insects.

Which obviously limits Your options a bit,

When providing our daily crust.

But we are confident this won’t be a problem

For an omnipotent being such as Yourself.

We shall endlessly debate Important Questions

Such as the ordination of women priests

Leaving the difficult shit like succouring the weak

And alleviating suffering to you, old chap.
Good luck.

Amen.

The seven shelves of man

Cometh the hour, cometh the special offer at Sainsburys. A mere £3.45 per 75cl equivalent on own label wine, packaged in one and a half litre bottles. I have finally discovered a use for those European bureaucrats whose job it is to instruct nations on the acceptable degree of bendiness in a banana and related labeling matters. They have enabled committed drinkers to estimate the most cost effective way of getting pissed, without recourse to a calculator. Ominously, the grape is not specified beyond being 'red' and the plastic bottle looks like its been recycled a few too many times. Those are small prices to pay, however, for dispensing with the inconvenience of having to locate the corkscrew after the first 75cl has been glugged. You watch, I'll be drinking wine from boxes before the year is out, possibly without the aid of a glass.

The trajectory of my path through life to an apogee that could most politely be described as 'nice try but decidedly sub-orbital' and subsequent ignominious fall to a place that I have a horrible feeling I'm not going to like when I get there, could be written in terms of the shelf to which I have instinctively reached when buying booze. I have ranged up and down seven shelves in the course of my life to date, an appropriately Shakesperian number.

All those years ago, when I started putting my liver through its paces, I didn't even bother to let my eyes wander above the Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon on the floor. Oz Clarke said it was OK and that was good enough for me. I think it cost £2.29 a bottle, which puts the £3.45 I'm spending now in context. Conveniently for the analogy implied in my title, this was the shelf responsible for the most mewling and puking in my journey towards oenological oblivion.

By the time I figured out that one's spending need not necessarily be limited by one's income, I allowed myself to stray occasionally to the knee high shelf, where wines whose contents were more valuable than their containers were to be found. I cringe to think that I probably thought myself quite sophisticated at the time. ‘Pretentious wanker’ is how my friends usually put it.

When I started my first proper job, I discovered to my joy that I was earning enough that I no longer needed to consider the trade-off between eating and drinking, when doing my shopping. This activity was conducted mainly on the shelf at pelvis level, where the categories available branched out from ‘red’, ‘white’ and ‘Chardonnay’. Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling entered my world.

The first time I spent ten quid on a single bottle while still sober I was, inevitably, trying to impress a girl. I took it (and the girl) to a party at my boss's house and she put it ostentatiously and immediately in a cupboard that clearly contained stuff she didn't want people to think she had bought herself. Damn, it must have been from the chest high shelf too.

I think I was probably 28 or 29 before I could regularly buy wine that I didn't have to stoop to read the label. This was also the era of when I bought the Good Food Guide, and used it regularly. My toes curl with embarrassment to this day, as I recall the first time I spent £50 on a bottle in a restaurant, La Tante Claire, on Royal Hospital Road. I do believe I actually asked the sommelier to steam off the label, so I could keep it as a souvenir.

Then came the glory years (or were they glory months, I can't remember) when I was able to reach, unembarrassed and unafraid, for the hitherto forbidden delights, dusty and generally corked, paraded across the top shelf. These were wines that came in boxes made of actual wood. All the porn in Lithuania couldn't hold a candle to the pleasures to be found there.

The fall has been an accelerated version of the rise and I may even have skipped a shelf or two on the way down. Frankly I'm happier drinking stuff hauled out of the wine lake in buckets than the crap on shelves two through four, but that is obviously just my bitterness speaking. They say you can’t find happiness in a bottle but few can have exceeded my diligence in trying.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops are the quintessential spring flower. Perhaps it is the long winter months of anticipation that makes galanthophilia such a tempting perversion. Every February, bored journalists write articles, marvelling at the thrall in which these small plants hold their devotees and expressing mock horror at the prices that the latest discoveries command (these are often the same journalists who would spend £500 on a handbag without blinking). Tedious and irrelevant comparisons are made with the Dutch tulip bubble. Some genuinely fine gardeners and plantsmen, who ought to know better, affect to be above such nonsense and claim to be able to distinguish only a handful of the hundreds of selections and cultivars now available.

One of the great joys of spring, for me, is walking around a really fine snowdrop garden in the company of an expert galanthophile. To do so is to witness not just a breathtaking display of flowers but also a tour-de-force of observational prowess. Although too many similar snowdrops have been named by enthusiasts, they are all subtly different and, once you learn to recognise the distinctions, beautiful in their own way. A real aficionado can not only tell them apart but tell you why they are different, without recourse to a text book. Look closely and you will see that they are right. I know of no better way, and certainly no more harmlessly pleasurable one, of enhancing ones powers of observation than succumbing to galanthophilia.

Galanthus nivalis in Montenegro

 Many genera of bulbs that flower mainly in early spring, also include a handful of species that sneak in a brief blooming period just before the onset of winter. Familiar examples include Crocus, Muscari and Scilla. In evolutionary terms, it is easy to see how plants that flower at a time when both insect pollinators and other flowers are scarce – early spring – might be pre-adapted to exploit the handful of pollinators still flying in late autumn. In some environments, mutant individuals of spring-flowering species that happen to flower in autumn might prosper or even enjoy a competitive advantage over their spring-flowering relatives. In these circumstances, barring accidents, natural selection would result in their persistence and spread.

Among snowdrops, there are at least three species that have autumn flowering populations. Two of these, Galanthus reginae-olgae and G. peshmenii are closely related to the familiar G. nivalis. The third is G. elwesii.

Wandering around my polytunnels and greenhouse today I was struck by how very few of the thousands of species I have growing there were flowering. A few Nerine cultivars still have flowers; some deliciously scented, early Iris unguicularis are putting on a show; but most of the landscape is green or brown. I was thrilled, therefore, to come across a neglected tray of pots containing bulbs of G. reginae-olgae subsp. reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’, my favourite selection of this species, in full flower. This is a plant that contrives to look healthy and happy in the most inclement weather and (although the photograph below was taken last year), so it was today.

Galanthus reginae-olgae subsp. reginae-olgae 'Cambridge'

Bulbs that flower in November should be given a medal for alleviating human suffering. G. reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’ is my nominee for the George Cross.

Czech nymphing

Sitting on the loo at the home of an old school friend’s parents and unable without reading material to perform the function that had brought me thence, I reached for a thoughtfully located stack of magazines. Had I been in my friend’s loo, these would likely as not have been back issues of ‘Asian Babes’ but, as I said, it was his parents’ gaff and they are fishing nuts. Thus I found myself idly reading a leading article in ‘Trout & Salmon’ on recent advances in fly-fishing techniques.

I was just on the point of concluding that this wasn’t going to be one of my longer sojourns in the bog when two words caught my eye: ‘Czech nymphing’. According to the writer, ‘nymphing’ is nothing more exotic (or erotic) than a means of catching trout using three flies designed to mimic nymphs – an aquatic, immature stage of certain insects – that sink rather than float, as conventional flies do. Apparently the technique was invented in the Czech Republic, hence the full, glorious name.

A Czech nymph

A Czech nymph

Given that fishing is a hobby almost entirely practiced by men and knowing something of the fraught relations that can exist between obsessive men and their female partners, I couldn’t help but wonder whether alternative terminology would have been safer. I mean, imagine the conversation over breakfast.

Her: ‘Darling, I thought we might go to that new Ikea today, you know the one conveniently located only 400 miles around the M25.’

Him: ‘Sorry, love, promised Dave I’d go Czech nymphing with him this morning. It’s supposed to be infallible. Might try a spot of Norwegian naiading or Belarussian bottom baiting if we don't pull them in quickly enough.’

How differently things might have turned out had this revolutionary technique been invented in an earlier era, when men could get away with that sort of thing. In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus is reported as having said to his disciples ‘Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men’. If he’d known about Czech nymphing, however, I reckon he’d have abandoned those hairy bastards in Galilee, smeared lion dung on his donkey’s ass and pointed its nose towards Prague.

 

On optimism

I have a friend – or rather had, because that, like almost everything else in my life, has gone to shit – whose catch phrase is ‘it’ll be alright’. If he were an executioner he’s the sort of bloke who’d say to a condemned man, while gently adjusting the noose around his neck, ‘just take a few deep breaths and everything will be fine’. Indeed, so suffused with a rosy glow are the lenses through which this man views the universe, he’d probably be saying the same thing to the hangman if the roles were reversed.

It’s generally considered bad form to piss in the pints of those irritating cunts whose glass is always half full but haven’t you ever been tempted? If not, like said individuals, you may be unfamiliar with the second law of thermodymanics, the only principle in science that does any real, deep explaining.

This law can be expressed in many ways. ‘No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work’ is how Kelvin put it. He was a dry bird, however, and fortunately there are other ways of getting the gist across. In no particular order: Murphy’s Law; anthropogenic global warming; the steady cooling of the coffee in your (half empty) cup; the cosy crackling sound a good hardback makes as it burns; the extreme effort required to write a book or even a blog; the observation that whereas falling off a barstool requires little practice, balancing a barstool on your forehead after a night on the tiles is a seriously cool trick; and the fact that demolition crews earn less than architects are all manifestations of the undeniable fact that, whereas there are many ways to skin a cat, it’s tricky to stick the fur back onto a flayed feline in a way likely to satisfy the RSPCA.

Fucking up is easy. Avoiding fucking up is hard.

Vishnu - Destroyer of Worlds

All organisms, including humans, are little machines for temporarily and locally reversing entropy – the ineluctable tendency of everything to disorder – but sadly entropy always wins in the end. While some lucky sods seem to have the knack for deferring their inevitable appointments with entropy for years at a time, certain adepts progress through life moving seamlessly from one gigantic fuck-up to the next. Among these adepts I am a virtuoso. I am Mozart to the Salieri of really bad decisions. I am Jesus Christ to the George W. Bush of unintended consequences. I am J. Robert Oppenheimer to the Alfred Nobel of blowing things up. This blog is my story. 

Fish Face - Destroyer of My World

Oppenheimer, seeing the results of his work on the Manhattan Project, famously quoted the god Vishnu: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ It strikes me that Oppenheimer would have been closer to the mark had he said that death becomes us, we humans. It suits us. ‘In my beginning is my end’, as T.S. Eliot put it in ‘East Coker’. This story begins in the middle and shall end I know not where. Let me offer a friendly piece of advice right now, however. If you are the type who thinks ‘Notting Hill’ (the movie, not the place), is a heart-warming and inspirational tale of the redeeming power of love, may I suggest that you look away now?

It won’t be alright.