Month: December 2020

One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard

I came across this book sideways. I had started to read the original welsh version when I realised I had made a mistake. I had been foolishly over-ambitious and overreached myself. In the first third of the book, I had managed as the text is lucid and simple; the world viewed though a young boy’s eyes. However, as it progressed it becomes more complex, more lyrical, and concerned much deeper currents and themes. I knew fairly quickly that, while I was understanding the words, I was not appreciating the book, so I switched and started this translation by Philip Mitchell.

As far as I can assess, this translation is excellent. The text flows freely and is as full of the emotion and complex imagery as the original. This short novel has it all; life death, murder, sexual perversion, madness, childhood, geography, culture, politics and religion. These are all seen through the eyes of the child narrator and thus give us an alternative way of thinking about them. The culture of North Wales, its disappearing community and chapels, is shown in a manner that can be felt as well as known.

It is a story of long periods of sadness and disadvantage punctuated by brief periods of humour and joy, which is a bit like life really. But unlike other books of a similar genre (‘my childhood of adversity memoires‘) this is more melodic; it is never bitter and is always kind. It is perhaps this aspect that raises the novel above the others and make it a book that can be thoroughly recommended.

The Libertarian Paradox

There is a paradox at the heart of libertarianism. We have evolved as a species to be cooperative and only able to exist in social groups. We are a social animal and one which has had unmatched success in colonizing our globe, mastering our environment, and consuming our planet’s resources. Much of this success is testament to the innate skills and abilities we have evolved to allow us to live and work communally and cooperatively.

However, we still have a need to know how to curb our passions and desires and how to see the world from our fellow citizen’s perspective. As our success now brings the problems associated with overconsumption, and excess, we need these even more today than before, Particularly the majority of us that now live in cities and large towns with high levels of population density. The need for these skills has been revealed strongly by the coronavirus pandemic as we all need to review our own personal desires for contact, travel, and social interaction with the need to keep ourselves and our friends and family safe.

It is this need to control ourselves which is at the heart of the libertarian paradox. It has been long recognised that this control must either arise internally or externally. As Edmund Burke (1766-94) knew, when he wrote, “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” In essence, the more virtuous we are the less rules we require. If libertarians were highly moral, and driven by strong internal ethical codes, they could indeed live in a society with a negligible state.

Unfortunately, most libertarians are not so driven. They appear more driven by their passions and desires than by following the needle of their inner moral compass. I am much more likely to see libertarians preoccupied with rules regarding drug use or sexual behaviour (and the sating of appetites) than arguing how to promote mutual self-respect between people. Similarly, their preoccupation with free speach is more often concern about any possibility of limiting the ability to insult or hurt others by one’s words, rather than worries about any restrictions to religious thought or considerations on methods of worship. Ironically, those promoting liberty often seem to be those who give rise to the very concerns that cause liberty to be restricted. Libertines do not make a good advertisement for libertarianism.

This is a perennial problem in politics. Common sense tells us that those who have a deep desire for power are those that really should never have it. Libertarians should be aware of this and also consider Burke’s other warning that “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”

Surprise work duties

In addition to the work dictated by the seasons (planting, sowing, reaping, birthing, etc) agricultural life is also prone to periods of unexpected work that just arises when you least expect, or want, it. When you are about to head out to town for a meal and, driving out of the gate, notice that your sheep are in the next woodland, rather than in your field, and you know you have a fence problem. Or when you are heading to a class and discover you can’t travel as a tree has come down across your road; either you’re going to have to clear it or postpone all activities for a week as the council won’t see it as their priority. These are the day-to-day events that pepper your life, to add spice, and reduce monotony. Sometimes, like now, the government steps in to add further variety to the mix.

The intervention this week came in the wake of the possible developing outbreak of avian flu. In turkeys in North Yorkshire, and elsewhere in the UK, there have been cases of the highly infectious H5N8 avian influenza. This is a worry as this bird flu has the potential to become an avian pandemic and, in the past, has led to the deaths of millions of birds with a subsequent dreadful effect on commercial poultry operations. It very rarely affects people and the few cases, there have been, have been in people working very closely with birds. However, when people do catch it, it is extremely dangerous with a mortality of about 60%. Looking at the risks the government has decided that all birds in the UK should be kept under cover. Not just commercial operators: every bird, even if you keep a solitary chicken in your garden, should be kept indoors. To give time to arrange this they set a deadline of the 14th of December and preparation for this has been my unexpected work this week.

Our poultry are all free range. The chickens, ducks and turkeys go where they wish through the day and are only rounded up into sheds at night to protect them from the fox. They roam over a wide and varied area which suits their natures and, I hope, affords them a reasonable quality of life. (Although next year they will not be roaming through the vegetable garden as they were responsible for the decimation of our brassicas and beans!). There will be a fair amount of work preparing their housing for this.

The chickens and turkeys will cope reasonably well being indoors. As long as there is a big enough area for them to scratch around and move they will be happy, at least in the short term. I worry more for my ducks; they need to swim and feel water underneath them and this is much harder to organize. At the moment I have a plan involving a small duck pond I have just dug adjacent to the door of the duck house. I intend to cover this with bird netting held on bamboo poles.

We are fortunate to have a fairly large crop of bamboo and in one patch the cane reach about 8 feet tall which should suit our needs. I harvest the canes then call of the goats for their help. They strip every leaf of the canes ready for me to cut them to length (they like bamboo as it is one of the few green leaves still left at this time of year). I think the goats are possibly the hardest workers on the small holding, not just producing meat and dairy, they also do land management (bramble clearance), timber preparation, and entertainment (goats kids are much more fun to be around than lambs).

We have ordered all the other necessities (tarpaulins, netting, staples, etc) and should be ready to start construction this week unless any other unexpected work arrives. I just hope that this situation will be both temporary and short. It is unavoidable, though it is a touch ironic that we are going to have to keep all these free range fowl under cover and inside in order to protect the intensive factory farmed poultry. Que sera, sera.

Misapplied warnings.

I should have known better. Winter has started, the nights are dark and cold, and I was looking for something to cheer me up. As the days full of coronavirus and Brexit news are so doom laden I felt it would be safe to try and watch a recent comedy film the pass the evening. I am not going to lie. I didn’t do it just once, I tried it twice, but honestly, I don’t think that I inhaled.

I lost interest in comedy films a decade or so back. The genre seemed to have become limited to “rom-coms”. I saw plenty of them, as wife enjoys them, but I needed to have a crossword or magazine at hand as they rarely caught my attention. I had some vague memory of an age of comedy films. I am not talking about black and white cinema, the age of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. I am not talking about pre-war colour cinema with Bob Hope of Danny Kaye, although I enjoyed these, I was remembering the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s with stars such as Chevy Chase, Steve Matin and Robin Williams. Even Later work with Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey and Martin Lawrence had ended the last millennium, and started this one, with some enjoyable work. I thought it was time to discover what improvements this last decade has brought to film comedy.

I unfortunately watched “Why Him?” and “Office Christmas Party” both from 2016. I was prompted to watch the latter as it had a very able cast, I have no excuse for watching the former. I guess both of these are what is called ‘gross out comedy’; the laughs are meant to come from being shocking, crude and gross. But there is a problem with this production ethic; a race to the bottom always reaches the bottom. After someone has made anal sex jokes the next person has to go one better and it eventually leaves you with a situation where Jennifer Aniston is swearing “f*ck you” at a 7-year-old girl in a sad attempt to raise a titter.

Even these films need something to counter the constant onslaught of swearing, personal debasement of characters, references to bodily fluids and orifices, drug misuse and violence. They too know that this must be a dampener so try to leaven it with a positive message. This, however, is so alien to the manufacturers that it comes over as mawkish, sentimental tat – rich people can be nice by giving all their money away, ugly people might be kind, even old people might be able to change their minds. This sugar sweet mixture is poured over this bubbling concoction of pus in the hope of masking its bad taste and making it palatable – it doesn’t work.

I presume the manufacturers hope that this pornographication of films will help break down patriarchal attitudes and promote freedom of sexual expression. I must have missed how that worked as these films seemed simply further objectification and hyper sexualization of women and girls. I doubt that having a female character shouting “suck my dick” is going to improve the lot of women in our culture, let alone elsewhere.

As an antidote, and because bleaching one’s eyeballs doesn’t wipe your memory, I watched “Foul Play” the subsequent night. I thought Goldie Hawn in the lead role, Chevvy Chase and several others in support, in a comedy thriller might lighten my spirits. As I settled down to watch the film it was preceded by a warning along the lines of “This film contains discriminatory language and dialogue common at the time the film was made“. I was a helpful warning as there were a couple of dated jokes taht would be considered bad taste or impolite now. But I survived them and they helped me remember just how far we had progressed until recently. I felt my other two films might have been better served by a warning. Something such as “These films will coarsen your sensibilities, insult your intelligence, and transgress any ethical codes you may hold. Viewer discretion is advised as serious damage to your conscience and spirit may result from viewing.” might not be excessive.