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From Kevin Marsh...
These are very strange times and as I write this I am in France where everything is covered in snow and the sky looks like a box of damp watercolours.
As it happens I am not in that part of France that is supposed to get snow at this time of year though many of the Today team are because it is the annual ski trip. I'm rather pleased not to be with them - not because I don't like them or am unfriendly in any way towards them but because I have declared 2004 the year of sleeping properly and by all accounts last year's ski trip was disrupted by some confusion in the Alpine dorm. Apparently it wasn't as clear as it could have been whose bed was whose and one night there was a bit of a disagreement and two people ended up under the same duvet and neither would give way and the whole affair was accompanied by heavy panting and the sounds of muffled struggling that everyone else in the dorm had to pretend hadn't woken them up when it had.
No. I'm not in that part of France at all but up in the north where nature is very confused. A single - in every sense of the word - male chaffinch is patrolling the little copse outside my son's bedroom window and this summer's apple and pear and greengage crop is shrivelling under ice. The lead story in the local paper is about a flock of Canada geese - or at least geese from Canada which might not be the same thing - setting up home on the mudflats of the Authie estuary. And in spite of a weekend of burning log fires and stoves I never get the temperature inside the house above 10 degrees.
Strange times on air too: no sooner has the single-handedly unpicked twenty years of patient diplomacy by saying they didn't mean sorry over the WPC Yvonne Fletcher murder after all than tells us that we were bugging the UN when we were supposed to be trying to get another resolution on Iraq.
Actually, you'd have thought we'd have learnt our lesson about this sort of thing by now and that in the new world the interview with Ms Short would have gone:
John Humphrys: Tell us, Clare Short, do you have any reflections on life you want to share with us?
Clare Short: Never mind that, we were bugging the UN when we shouldn't have been.
JH: You do not have proof of that and you are only one person so I am going to cut you off if you persist in not telling us your reflections on life.
CS: Never mind that, I've seen the transcripts of conversations with Kofi Annan and our agents are spying on our friends and they shouldn't be. What more proof do you want?
JH: You are being very bad and I am now going to have to find a way of shutting you up without being rude which we also can't be these days.
But it didn't so that's that, then.
It was quite a week for brains which is nice now that I can gather clever people around the new big table I have bought that told you about last week and we can have devilled kidneys and kedgeree and white peaches for breakfast.
I suppose the highlight was on Saturday who were invited on because they both have very beautiful partners but insisted on talking about the war on terror instead. Close behind it, though, was the discussion of
who is either the greatest poet of the twentieth century who is to the likes of Larkin and Betjeman as electricity is to nougat ... or he is the navigator up a literary cul-de-sac who's sole achievement is to "refresh the language of the tribe". And do you know only today I got another letter saying we were dumbing down.
Life in the Flanders forests is differently pitched, though. Near here there is a memorial to a group of infantrymen who were shot at dawn in 1917 because they had foolishly failed to pass on to their officers the intelligence that the Great War had become a mindless slaughter and if they had done so those officers would no doubt have done something about it. I don't imagine those young men had much of a hearing and I don't imagine there was a lot of legality at their courts martial since their officers were rather more concerned to cover their own backs and make sure the blame was shifted to those who - once despatched - could not argue.
Giant black crows strut the lanes around these and similar memorials in these parts looking for roadkill. And somewhere deep in the forest a big animal is waking up after the coldest night of the year not quite able to realise that the trap it thought it had been caught in hadn't hurt it at all. But in spite of that, it is furtively and noiselessly engaged in biting off the limbs it will need to climb out of the really rather shallow hole it has fallen into.
How very different from life in the 成人快手.
Kevin
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