34 1GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
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From the porkies I told in school,
university and job interviews (“yeah,
sure, I’m a big team player”,
“languages? Oh, seven or eight
fluently, with a smattering of
conversational Sanskrit”, “Alan
Coren? No relation!”) to the pieces I
write three times a week, none of
which has ever contained a single
true sentence that I can recall, the
procession of libellous guff with
which I fill three hours of live radio
every week and the nonsense on
stilts that marches from my smirking
mouth whenever they point a
television camera at me.
And I will go on lying to my
children, thank you very much, Mr
Xi, because it is the only way I know
how to control them. No doubt you
are able to empathise? I will tell
them that I never did drugs, and they
don’t have to go to university if they
don’t want to, and nothing dies to
make a hamburger, and we don’t
have any more Coco Pops in the
house and the government turns the
internet off at 8pm... because I
know damn well that the reason you
want us to stop lying to our kids is so
that when your armies disembark at
Dover in 2030 and say “we come in
peace”, our children will believe you.
Which is why, when my kids get
home from school, I am going to sit
them down at the kitchen table to
write their letters to Father
Christmas over a glass of milk that
will put hair on their chests and an
apple that will keep the doctor away,
while I swig a large whisky for
medicinal reasons and do important
things on my phone that don’t count
as screen-time because it’s actually
for work.Chinese researchers say telling fibs to children turns them into cynics, but how else are we supposed to get through life?
Stop telling porkies, there’s no harm in lying
communist wizard with a magic
money tree who said he was opposed
to racism in all its forms, so that was
six of one, half a dozen of the other,
lie-wise.
And over in America, Donald
Trump literally only got elected in
2016 because of the lies he told.
“Build the Wall!” his supporters
cried. “Tell More Lies!” they went on.
“Lots More Lies! We Love Lies!”
That’s why he beat Hillary Clinton,
who made the mistake of pretending
she hadn’t been lying when she said
that she single-handedly liberated
Bosnia under heavy enemy fire in- She invented the word
“misspoke” to cover that one.
Possibly because she came from an
incredibly honest family where lying
was simply unthinkable, presided
over by the twice-elected President
Bill Clinton, who did not have sexual
relations with that woman, Miss
Lewinsky. Yeah, right, Bill. And
grandma isn’t dead, she’s just
sleeping in Heaven with Jesus, and
we’ll all see her again one day.
So, bugger off, Chinese researchers
from Xinyang Normal University
(what the hell sort of a name is that
for a university anyway?) with your
“white lies are bad for kids”
nonsense. Lying is who we are and
what we are and all we have ever
been, from God’s covenant with
Abraham where He promised that
He would look after the Jews for ever
(nice work, God) to the ubiquitous
delusional nostrum that the
inevitable march of technological
progress will save us from global
climate disaster and universal death.
Indeed, from a personal point of
view, lying got me where I am today.
to our children, so that they grow up
naive and credulous and, in ten or
fifteen years’ time, unwittingly elect
some bad leaders who have been
lying to them, thereby destabilising
our political systems and bringing the
validity of democracy into question?
Because, don’t worry, we’ve got
that covered. Despite my generation
of Brits having been told in our
youth that hard work is its own
reward, sitting on cold floors gives
you piles and eating Ready Brek will
make you glow orange all the way to
school, we still grew up dumb
enough to vote for the guys in the
Brexit debate who said they’d give
£350 million a week to the NHS.
And then voted for them again three
years later. Mind you, that time it
was a clean fight against an elderlyLying’s fine: you really won’t turn into
Pinocchio, as the Chinese well knowA
ccording to a recent study,
telling white lies to
children, including such
apparently harmless fibs
as “Santa won’t come
unless you brush your teeth”,
“watching too much television gives
you square eyes” and “nobody thinks
smoking is cool”, can have long-term
negative effects on their development,
including teenage anxiety, failures of
parental attachment and a lifelong
inclination to cynicism.
This is especially interesting to me
because the research was conducted
by Xinyang Normal University in
China. Yes, China. A society of
1.4 billion people who have been
brought up to believe that Mao
Zedong was an awesome guy, the
Cultural Revolution was mostly just
grandad moving some paintings
around, nobody died at Tiananmen
Square, the Uighurs are having a
lovely time in the holiday camps of
Xinjiang (hi-de-hi, everyone!) and
powdered rhino horn will give you a
big willy.
You know what I mean? By
comparison, telling a four-year-old
that Superman always eats his
broccoli seems kind of tame.
(Although that particular lie may be
less necessary in China than Britain,
what with “Chinese broccoli” being
much tastier than the stuff we sell
here, especially when stir-fried with
garlic and ginger.) “Receiving lies is
likely to cause difficulties in
understanding ambiguous
information, and therefore provokes
a negative attitude toward
uncertainty,” writes the study’s lead
author, Liu Meiting, in the journal
Children and Youth Services Review.
“Specifically, if children previously
received lies from parents, they may
later be uncertain about whether
they should believe more claims
delivered by parents or other people.”
Riiiiight, so if you go around telling
your country’s 300 million children
that eating carrots will enable them
to see in the dark, and then it
doesn’t, they might grow up to be
suspicious when you tell them they
live in a civilised modern society
where the human rights of every
citizen are respected equally, Falun
Gong is a dangerous terrorist
organisation, bat soup is well tasty
and, don’t worry, it’s just a summercold? Yes, I can see why you’d want
to stamp that out.
But then what happens when you
package up this new “lying is bad”
discovery and attempt to seed it in
the western democracies by placing
it in the Organ of Eternal Truth that
is the Daily Mail (which is where I
read it myself and which, on further
investigation, I see is the only British
newspaper that was interested in it)?
Are you hoping that we will read it
and gasp, and immediately stop lyingI tell my children that
the government turns
off the internet at 8pm
Giles
CorenMatthew Oates Nature Notebook
Druidic trees
stand watch
over relics of
the Iron Age
A
sense of late
autumn
lingers
throughout
the year in
some places. May
almost banishes it;
but even then, in the
deepest shade, the
last of autumn’s
deadened leaves
rustle the ground,
decomposing, slowly.
Autumn pervades too
in the bracken beds,
where the stems of
yesteryear hold proudly
on to their autumnal
russets, while being
swamped by summer’s
greening. There is ever
autumn, with winter
beckoning, in the hulks of dead
trees and fallen boughs that
are being broken down, by
forgiven or forgotten.” I still mourn a
wild pear felled from the edge of a
West Sussex copse 45 years ago, in an
era of field expansion. There is a hole
where it once leant, bookishly.Miraculous plover
N
ature has the habit of
vanishing from our lives
unnoticed, but also of suddenly
resurging unexpectedly. I took flocks
of the golden plover for granted in
winter, so scarcely noticed when they
ceased coming.
Then, recently, one still morning
when I was riding along a straight
stretch of lonely lane, a flock (or wing
to use the collective noun) of some
150 golden plovers appeared to my
distant left. “Pigeons,” I thought, then
repented the error of my ways, and
rejoiced. For a couple of heavenly
minutes they flew diagonally above
and ahead, leading me onward,
calling out in fluted notes to each
other, and to me. It seemed I was up
there with them, as one with them.
Then they headed off sunward where
I could not follow, leaving yet
another of the profound memories
that nature gifts us.Matthew Oates’s latest book is His
Imperial Majesty, a Natural History of
the Purple EmperorA fear for next spring is over how
many of our ash trees will waken?
We are losing them — our most
widespread tree — to ash dieback
disease, by the million. This we are
scarcely noticing, being caught up in
our own very real catastrophe. We
meekly accept the traffic lights and
road closures caused by the mass
felling of our commonest roadside
tree, brought about by a disease we
foolishly imported from abroad.
Other trees will, if allowed, replace
them, notably sycamore.
Yet the Cubbington wild pear,
felled last month for HS2, is being
profoundly mourned. One local
statement reads: “When the grief
passes, people around here are going
to be very, very angry. This
vandalism of nature will never beFungi on a fallen tree. Left: a goshawkfungi and invertebrates numberless.
In nature, nothing is wasted,
everything is recycled; that is one
reason why it is to be revered.
My mind was up on Croft Ambrey,
a sombre Iron Age hill fort in
northwest Herefordshire. To its south
is one of the unkindest conifer woods
ever created by man-unkind, where
ancient oaks were maimed by ring-
barking, then suffocated by dense
conifers. There, it is always winter but
never Christmas. I go the other way.
The hill fort’s ramparts are studded
with time-worn, almost druidic,
pollards of ash, beech and oak,
all lichenised. They blacken
against the skyline. The
genius loci here is not so
much of human or
ecological history, but
of single-seasonality:
it is the epicentre
of autumn.
As a lover of
spring, I feel
unwelcome on
the Ambrey. It
is a place
haunted not so
much by
humanoid ghosts but by pitiless
November. Here dwell the spirits of
that month, clad in russet,
November’s banner colour.
Nearer to home, the round
“hedgehog clumps” of beech trees
along the crest of the MarlboroughDowns have been preaching
November since their leaves were
withered by those autumnal gales we
suffered in high summer. Today,
though, they tell of December, as will
the outgrown beech hedges that
characterise many a stretch of windy
lane on high Exmoor. There too,
spring and summer are short,
autumn long and winter longer still.
This year I set out to love autumn,
really for the first time; if only
because it ushers the pathway to
spring. Hence my pilgrimages to
Croft Ambrey and the Marlborough
Downs escarpment. I am faring
surprisingly well, as one addicted to
natural beauty should. The first
fieldfare flock gave as much delight
as the first swallow, and a clump of
golden scalycap fungus on a veteran
beech glowed like a May dawn.
As I left the Ambrey, a goshawk
sped silently by; sent, it seemed, as an
emissary. I found myself uttering a
line of one of Edward Thomas’s
poems: “But these things also are
Spring’s”.Fallen giants
M
y tree of the autumn is the
humble sycamore. Their
palmate leaves have flamed
wondrously around here this season,
unaffected for once by the black tar
spot fungus that so often hinders
their colouring. It is, after all, an Acer,
so it should perform in October. @matthewoates76