8 December 2015
I'm on my way to Norfolk to do some serious bird watching and photography. Does this make me a "birder"? Is a birder the same sort of thing as a sniper, a mouser, ratter, harrier, wildfowler, courser, rabbiter? We say of a cat that she's a good mouser, or a dog is a good terrier, ratter or rabbiter. A sniper shoots snipe (and by extension any difficult target). Terriers terrify, harriers and coursers chase hares and wildfowlers shoot wildfowl. The object of the word always seems to come off worst, but the worst we birders do to birds - and this is not trivial - is to disturb them. We do shoot them, but with our cameras, not with guns. There are all sorts of reasons why we are fascinated by birds. The most visible of our wildlife, we love how they look. We love to have them near us, to tame and master them. In the same way that a passion for football is a sublimation of our tribal warrior instincts, so stalking and photographing birds is for the hunter within us. I freely admit to the latter, and I am heading for my hunting ground.
As I drive past Kettering I am not quite in the geographic centre of England, but between the two north-south arteries of the M1 and the A1M I am crossing the distribution centre of Britain. This is truckland where long lines of massive container trucks mark out the big roads and the huge flat fields grow gigantic sheds, interspersed with non-descript arable crops . These are the warehouses of the big companies who sell us all our stuff, who service our insatiable appetite for goodies, things, gadgets, white goods. The trucks bring the containers from the big container ports; the goods are unloaded at the warehouses, sorted according to dispatch priorities and then taken by more huge lorries out to all the towns and out-of-town shopping centres, but more and more to the regional distribution centres where they will be taken by an ever- growing fleet of white vans to our homes.
I have good reason to hate this country. It is where my first attempt at serious manufacturing hit the rocks. The biggest customer of the doomed debt laden business of "Turners' Chairs" was in Kettering. We made the arms for one of their lines of settees. They went bankrupt leaving us with a debt of £1200. It doesn't sound much now, but in the late seventies it was fatal.
Even if had no prejudice I would find little to enjoy in the dreary landscape, until I get to Peterborough which calls itself "Heritage City - Environment City - Event City" and uses this logo to show how central it is, at least to England and Wales.
I'm on my way to Norfolk to do some serious bird watching and photography. Does this make me a "birder"? Is a birder the same sort of thing as a sniper, a mouser, ratter, harrier, wildfowler, courser, rabbiter? We say of a cat that she's a good mouser, or a dog is a good terrier, ratter or rabbiter. A sniper shoots snipe (and by extension any difficult target). Terriers terrify, harriers and coursers chase hares and wildfowlers shoot wildfowl. The object of the word always seems to come off worst, but the worst we birders do to birds - and this is not trivial - is to disturb them. We do shoot them, but with our cameras, not with guns. There are all sorts of reasons why we are fascinated by birds. The most visible of our wildlife, we love how they look. We love to have them near us, to tame and master them. In the same way that a passion for football is a sublimation of our tribal warrior instincts, so stalking and photographing birds is for the hunter within us. I freely admit to the latter, and I am heading for my hunting ground.
As I drive past Kettering I am not quite in the geographic centre of England, but between the two north-south arteries of the M1 and the A1M I am crossing the distribution centre of Britain. This is truckland where long lines of massive container trucks mark out the big roads and the huge flat fields grow gigantic sheds, interspersed with non-descript arable crops . These are the warehouses of the big companies who sell us all our stuff, who service our insatiable appetite for goodies, things, gadgets, white goods. The trucks bring the containers from the big container ports; the goods are unloaded at the warehouses, sorted according to dispatch priorities and then taken by more huge lorries out to all the towns and out-of-town shopping centres, but more and more to the regional distribution centres where they will be taken by an ever- growing fleet of white vans to our homes.
I have good reason to hate this country. It is where my first attempt at serious manufacturing hit the rocks. The biggest customer of the doomed debt laden business of "Turners' Chairs" was in Kettering. We made the arms for one of their lines of settees. They went bankrupt leaving us with a debt of £1200. It doesn't sound much now, but in the late seventies it was fatal.
Even if had no prejudice I would find little to enjoy in the dreary landscape, until I get to Peterborough which calls itself "Heritage City - Environment City - Event City" and uses this logo to show how central it is, at least to England and Wales.
I dare say it is a beautiful and exciting city - certainly the cathedral looks good from the by-pass - but I am heading for another flat landscape, because by an accident of history, a massive engineering project in the 17th Century
No comments:
Post a Comment