None of us have a clue.
Soap operas reveal their developing plots- if that is the right word- slowly, and the shifts and changes are the devices by which the writers try to keep us hooked in to the process. Heroes and villains rise and fall within the whole process, like the contents of a badly made soufflé, sometimes prodding a little private sensitivity within each of us and saying: ‘Go on. Admit it. That annoyed you, didn’t it?’
Hence, as a tiny example from our very own real life Brexit soap opera, the 300,000 service men and women who served during the 38 years of Operation Banner (the British army’s deployment to Northern Ireland from 1969-1997) may just be raising an ever so slightly more quizzical eyebrow at some of the things that the Irish Taoiseach is coming out with these days than the 66 or so million who didn’t. It’s all left brain/right brain stuff, and I don’t claim to understand it.
But it is why I have recently, with apologies to Laura Kuenssberg et al, simply given up watching or listening to the news, unless I can’t avoid it. I have retreated to that deep childhood reflex that dictates that when you hear your parents arguing downstairs at night, that they are grown-ups, and will probably sort it all out by the morning. It’s a long shot, I know, but then I still have a soft spot for the tooth fairy as well. And the more the feeding frenzy of rolling 24 hour news bangs on about the global shit storm around us, the more I realise that, by and large, we are living longer, healthier, safer, better connected lives than we ever have before. It’s just that they don’t get paid for telling us stories about clean rivers.
A relatively new writer has many insecurities and fears, to be sure, but they are dwarfed by the freedom that any aspiring artist gains from the process of creating something out of nothing. So the vacuum left by my not listening to the shriek of news coverage is more than filled by the intensity with which I have been researching for a new book I am writing about a particular seabird. In dragging me from museum to library, Oxford to Cambridge, the Isle of Rum to Patagonia, cliff-top to hillside and land to sea, it has revealed to me yet again the sheer amazingness of natural world around us. And yes, I know that word doesn’t exist, but it’s what I mean, so I don’t care.
Everything, as Leonardo da Vinci and Vladimir Lenin are both supposed to have said, is connected to everything else, and once you start writing about natural history, you come to accept its truth. Every farmed salmon steak you buy at your local supermarket, for example, is helping to spread incurable disease among the wild stock, and, through robbing their food source, decimating the puffin population. But nature is full of good connections, as well, and it has been a particular joy of the last three to four weeks that I have been principally been discovering these.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at two in the morning on a remote Welsh island watching a ten week old Manx Shearwater chick drag itself up onto a dry stone wall with its feet and beak, vigorously shake its wings and then suddenly rise up into the night sky and out of my world. It is the start of a journey that will take it 8000 miles south to the oceans off Argentina and, at the start of a half century of life during which it will fly three or four million miles, it will not touch land again for four years. I’m not ashamed to say that it wasn’t just the sharp wind stinging my eyes after it had gone.
What I have rediscovered is my sense of awe. It is there for all of us if we want it to be, but the busy lives we lead, and the scientific approach that we are encouraged to apply to almost everything, tends to knock it down each time it tries to poke its little head up.
Sometimes, a rainbow is beautiful because it just is. The important thing is that it moves your soul, not that you understand its exact scientific composition.
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