Society
Since moving to the country, I've learnt that blackbirds are black and that robins have red breasts
Published 28 February 2000
When I was younger, I would often arrive at the cinema after the film had begun. It didn't matter much, because when the film finished we would wait and watch the beginning of the film again until we reached a bit we recognised. You can't always do this nowadays. Cinemas have "separate programmes" and kick you out when it finishes (also preventing you doing that strange forbidden thing of sitting through the entire film again). Other people must have done this as well, because it has generated a proverbial expression: "This is where we came in."
I am feeling that now. My family has just completed a year in the countryside, and so we are seeing the things we saw when we first arrived. Looking out of the window, I can see snowdrops - bloody loads of them - and I suppose we saw them at the end of last February, too. Perhaps we didn't notice them. We were from the city, after all. But enough of that. I have a visceral aversion to any piece of journalism that is called something like "Countryside Notes", generally headed by an imitation woodcut featuring sheaves of corn and a cartwheel.
I would be incapable of it in any case. Early on, I bought a CD of birdsongs so that I could appal visitors by casually saying: "Isn't that the first goldfinch of the year?" But it didn't work out. For example, all kinds of finch sound essentially the same. So you have the voice on the CD saying:
"This is the blue finch."
"Cheep cheep cheep cheep."
"Whereas here is the entirely different chaffinch."
"Cheep cheep cheep cheep."
Readers may be familiar with my depressing theory of reading, which is that a year after you have read a book, all you remember about it are the things that people know about it who have not read it at all: Anna Karenina falling under a train; Augie March saying "I am an American, Chicago-born"; Captain Ahab being dragged under by the whale. (The only other thing I can remember about that novel is the doubtless untrue story - told by James Thurber - of Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker, coming out of his office and asking: "Is Moby Dick the guy or the whale?")
In the same way, all the things I have learnt about things such as birdlife are the pathetically few things I knew already. I can recognise a blackbird because it is black, and a robin because it has a red breast. And I heard a saying somewhere about how to tell rooks and crows apart: if you see a flock of crows, they're actually rooks; and if you see a lone rook, it's a crow. This is confirmed by Shakespeare, at least. There is a creepy line in Macbeth: "Light thickens, and the crow/ Makes wing to the rooky wood."
For an unsuperstitious person, I'm very superstitious about change. I'm always convinced that moving to a new place, or into a new room, will have some devastating effect - which reminds me of one of my favourite Peanuts cartoons. Charlie Brown is getting ready for a baseball game wearing his lucky shirt, his lucky shorts, his lucky socks. His sister asks what would happen if he didn't wear them.
"Well, we'd probably lose."
"Have you ever won?" she asks. And he freezes and just sits there on his bedroom floor.
For example, I think I'm probably suffering from what General Pinochet has, though whether it's because of moving to the country, or Alzheimer's, or CJD or alcoholism, I'm not yet sure. I'm not sure what the tests are for brain decay, but I have found a possible example in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement.
It's a sentence from David Lodge's review of The End of the Affair. Read it once and then answer a question about it:
"The difficulty (when addressing a modern mass audience) is that it is perhaps of all Greene's novels the most defiantly Catholic in its underlying metaphysic, prompting a critic in the New Statesman to suggest that it might be the last not to require a qualified moral theologian to review it."
Question: Is Lodge saying that the book does, or does not, require a qualified moral theologian? I read the sentence a dozen times and I am still not sure. Does this mean that psychiatrists would find me unfit to stand trial? If so, maybe I should go out and commit a crime. Suggestions from readers would be welcome.
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