Early March. It’s that miraculous time of year once again when the bushes and trees are in blossom. It doesn’t last long, alas, but while it does the countryside is a riot of colours: white, yellow, pink and deep red. The cherry trees take the floral biscuit; such a rich pink that you could harvest the flowers, whizz ‘em up in a blender and drink the results. (I’ve never tried it.)
I’ve taken to stepping onto the terrace outside the kitchen just to gaze in awe at the pair of plum trees that separate us from the communal track that leads down to our occasional Parisian neighbours. We’ve only ever had one decent harvest of plums – remarkably sweet yellow-green Reine-Claudes – but the white blossom is so dense that it looks in the early light of day as if it has snowed overnight. And the smell! A heavenly perfume pervades the surrounding air. (It took a nudge from the Good Wife before noticing it, I’m ashamed to admit. As befits an aromatherapist, her nose is as attuned to odours as my ears are attuned to sounds.)
For the lucky ones like us, particularly at this time of annual transition, life is a many splendoured thing. Unfortunately, there are constant reminders of what goes on outside the blossom-coloured bubble in which we live. On Sunday, for example, on our walk with Daphne and her best chum Holly, we passed a whole battalion of hunters congregating in their day-glo jackets just outside Patrick’s sheep shed. The cars and those big macho pick-up trucks with grilles at the back to confine the baying hounds within were parked higglety-pigglety all over the verges of the road. These good ol’ boys congregate with guns and dogs most Sunday mornings for the pleasure of killing as many innocent animals as they can flush out of the protective woods – and, what’s more, in the self-righteous belief that they are doing us all a favour because we would be overrun otherwise by deer and boars.
The scene put us both in mind of the Lord of the Flies dramatisation we are currently following on the Beeb. Golding’s idea for the novel was a stroke of genius: placing a band of boys on a tropical island without the moderating influence of women and seeing what develops. It’s been many, many years since I read it, so I can’t remember what happens, but already the battle lines are drawn: in the red corner, the odious Jack and his obsequious band of hunter-followers; in the blue corner, the reasonable and probably doomed Ralph and Piggy and the ‘Little’ns’, the ever silent majority. For the moment, the hunters are out for the blood of wild pigs, but I fear it won’t be long before the trainee psychopaths commit their first murder.
It’s a cliché or truism that most men are like overgrown children. If he gets off the island, someone like Jack will turn into the kind of cowardly charismatic bully that wields authority, either in industry or finance or even politics. Place him in a position of real power and you can see how easy it would be to incite a band of obsequious followers into doing his dirty work. It’s not too fanciful to extrapolate how this Sunday morning sport is really just a substitute for war. Big boys need their war, war and more war. What a depressing ledger of conflict it makes throughout the centuries, and all due to a surfeit of testosterone. With Grand Theft Auto and other such video nasties now to train the younger generations for indiscriminate havoc, there’ll certainly be many more such devastating conflicts to follow.
We walked on towards the farm. I resisted the temptation to slash some tyres (although, to be honest, I’d quite neglected to bring a Stanley knife for the purpose and, to be still more honest, I’m a yellow-livered coward who avoids unpleasantness). We did, however, discuss an audacious plan to solve this age-old problem of male aggression. Much as I disapprove of modern farming methods, there’s a lesson to be observed in the meadows. Look no further than the image of a herd of cows with solitary bull…
What if… every community on earth were female only, each limited to one male for the purpose of procreation? The male could be kept in some kind of cosseted seclusion, to be farmed out to any female particularly keen on having a child who has passed an emotional intelligence test. The male could go and stay with the female for a few days, or however long it would take to do the business and, in between vigorous bouts of craq-craq-biscotte, to carry out some useful woodwork or mend a dripping tap. I might be up for the role if my practical skills weren’t so negligible (although I’m frankly getting a bit too long in the tooth for anything demanding vigour).
Which does, I suppose, raise a number of key questions about this audacious plan. This peripatetic progenitive male would have to be carefully selected to meet the demands of the role. A big sturdy bull in a field with a healthy set of equipment is one thing, but this stud would have to be sufficiently handsome to attract the emotionally intelligent females; he’d have to be a Monsieur Bricolage type, a dab-hand at DIY; and he’d have to be intelligent enough to ensure that the progeny would benefit the community. And then there’s the problem of what to do with all the males who didn’t tick the necessary boxes. Ah… I begin to see where this audacious plan might lead. Somewhere uncomfortably near Hitler’s Final Solution. No, I fear we’re stuck with them.
After our walk, I turned on my dad’s old laptop and tuned in to the BBC homepage for a quick look at the headline mayhem en route to the sport. My attention was diverted by an article to the effect that there is a groundswell of desire, presumably on the part of more militant women, to rename certain parts of the female anatomy that were named after males. I never knew, for example, that fallopian tubes referred to an Italian anatomist by the name of Gabriele Falloppio. The Adventures of Falloppio… It has a certain Disney-like ring to it.
While I can empathise with the annoyance and even resentment that this must provoke in certain women, I can’t help but think that this collective energy would be better channeled into something more worthwhile and ultimately beneficial – like for example the foundation of a truly tooth-ful rather than tooth-less United Nations body that could stop wars before they start, or end wars swiftly where they already have.
Alas, I have neither illusions nor delusions. When I hear my ever-optimistic wife speak hopefully of a Golden Age, I know that she is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Its creator Aristophanes knew a thing or two about utopia and disillusionment when he was busy satirising society in the centuries Before Christ, back when the Greeks were fighting the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. I studied that particular war for Ancient History at school and I still couldn’t tell you what it was all about.
As for what’s happening now in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine (unless you’re a moronic megalomaniac in charge of a military machine) that the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle. The consequences are likely to be wide-ranging and long-running. Unlike the beauty of the blossom around here, it’ll be very ugly and far from transient.
