24 Saturday January 1 2022 | the timesComment
Melissa Harrison Nature Notebook
common with the 74 per cent of
teenagers and young adults who, I
read this week, consider internet
connectivity of greater importance
than holidays, friends or owning a
house. Commentators were enraged
by Gen Z’s apparent enslavement to
the virtual world but I say hurrah for
them: they are learning the easy way
(before gathering years of rubbish
around them) that things you can
touch or see just get in the way.
And the makers of this new BBC
TV Show, Sort Your Life Out, know it
too, which is why contestants are
challenged by the host, Stacey
Solomon, to throw away half their
possessions. In the past, gameshows
were all about accruing worthless tat
(“The cuddly toy! The cuddly toy!”)
but now we’ve realised that the real
dream is getting rid of it.
So maybe, at last, after all the
damage 150 years of consumerism
have wreaked upon the planet, the
grim fetishising of owned objects (and
primitive storage of disposable wealth
in three dimensions) is coming to an
end, killed off by a combination of
ecological awareness, the internet and
a new kind of personal zen.
“Really, none of it?” said Esther,
when I laid this all before her. “That’s
exactly what I was going to say.”
And so I look forward to a big row
in this house, many years from now
(or possibly sooner), when I stand in
the front room with my divorce
lawyer, pointing at one household
item after another and shouting at
Esther, “This is yours! And these are
yours! And this and this and this!”
And Esther, similarly legalled up,
yells back at me, “No, they’re yours,
everything is yours, all of it, do you
hear? It’s all YOURS!”“things”. Beyond the meagre books
and clothes mentioned above,
everything in my house is only here
because sorting things out by
recyclability is such a massive hassle,
and I’m too much of an eco-pussy to
send everything I own to landfill.
This immaterialism of mine made
Christmas a nightmare. Esther, as
usual, bought me two pieces of
quality dark grey knitwear, and it is
nice to have new ones, all fresh and
shapely and not yet as pot-bellied and
mooby as I am. But what do I do with
last year’s? They’re still perfectly
wearable. Charity again? It’s so tragic.
And I am enjoying Mrs March, thank
you, darling, but I’d rather have had
her on my Kindle, backlit and
flickable with a single thumb
movement. But you can’t wrap a
download, so here’s this stinky thing
made of trees that will have to be left
on the garden wall in spring, to be
taken away by a bookish stranger.
The new Japanese carbon steel
petty knife was great, I admit, being
marginally sharper than my old
Japanese carbon steel petty knife. But
what do I do with that? Can’t leave it
on the garden wall for a stranger to
take. Not in Camden. It’s just more
junk now, to follow me to the grave.
My kids must feel the same because
they didn’t want anything for
Christmas. My list for Santa used to
take weeks to write: Action Man tank,
Evel Knievel dragster, Subbuteo rugby... but they couldn’t think of a thing to
put down, bar more screen time and
books for their e-readers. So I winged
it and got my son a basketball hoop
and an amp for his drum kit, which
he unwrapped and said, “Thanks,
Dad, can I go on my iPad now?”
He’ll have had that sentiment in
look like a crack house, they’re not
interesting or valuable (or nice).
Otherwise, there’s just an oldish, not-
very-widescreen TV, this very slow
laptop, a couple of Oka coffee tables,
two printers that are “not detected
on network” and some John Lewis
lamps that want rewiring.
It’s a facet of 2020s convenience
living, I think. When my childhood
home was burgled in the early 1980s
it was catastrophic. There was silver,
jewellery, sellable furniture, porcelain... but if burglars broke into my gaff
their disappointment in the contents
would be matched only by mine,
when I got home, that they hadn’t
stolen any of it.
Which makes me realise that, in
fact, if Esther were to leave me, a real
plus side would be her getting all my
stuff. A proper clearout. I hate
T
here was a moment during
A Very British Scandal (if
you didn’t catch it, it’s
Claire Foy wearing pearls
in the 1950s again, except
this time noshing off strangers —
basically The Crown with blowjobs)
when my wife turned to me and said,
“If we got divorced, what would you
want to keep?”
At this, I looked up from the book I
was reading by the fire (the excellent
Mrs March by Virginia Feito, a
Christmas present from said wife),
reached for my glass of Madeira (it’s
not just Foy who can impersonate an
olden days posho on Boxing Day)
and said, “I don’t know, why?”
“Well, Claire is just divorcing the
Duke of Argyll,” said Esther, clicking
the remote to freezeframe on Foy in
a fur stole which I’m sure she wore
for Christmas at Balmoral in 1973,
“and she’s going round the castle
with her lawyer, pointing at all the
things that are hers, and I was
wondering, if we divorced, what I’d
take. I mean, what you’d take.”
“Well, I’m enjoying Mrs March,” I
said. “Can I keep that?”
“I’m not going to divorce you
before you’ve finished the book!”
“But quite soon afterwards?”
“No, it’s hypothetical. Come on: if I
were chucking you out, what would
you claim as yours?”
I didn’t say anything for a while,
but considered the slow interweaving
of our material life over the last 14years, and how hard it would be to
unpick and return each part to its
separate possessor — like trying to
turn a hamburger back into wheat,
salt and a cow — until Esther, bored
now with the proposition (or just her
elderly husband’s ponderous response
to it), flicked the telly back on to
where the Queen, sorry, Duchess,
was swanning round Inveraray
Castle, barking: “I want all my
clothes, all of them... thet’s mine [to
a Regency sideboard]... both thyose
are mine [two octagonal plates on a
mantelpiece]... thyose are mine (two
candlesticks)... thet’s mine [a small
brass stag on a table]... and thet tray
there [a tray!]... thet furniture’s mine,
and those... thet picture... thet
eshtray, the dorg bed.. .”
And I found myself saying,
“nothing”.
“What’s that, luv?” freezeframing
again.
“If you divorce me, you can have it
all. I literally don’t want a thing.”
And it’s true. I do not ownanything I care about. I have never
been into objects, have no interest in
art and have given away most of my
books already because I prefer to
read on Kindle. My clothes have no
sentimental value, they are just the
ones that happen to be camping in
my wardrobe this year on their way
from some Chinese sweatshop to
Age UK in Kentish Town. My home
does have pictures on the walls, but
only because without them it wouldMy clothes are on a
journey from Chinese
sweatshop to Age UK
Giles
CorenThe only reason to keep buying things
is to enjoy a proper clearout in futureI’m keeping absolutely nothing in any divorce
There’s far too much clutter and ‘stuff ’ in our lives and Christmas just means more junk that will follow me to the grave
on a walk with them, torn the peel
up small and tossed it away.Frost’s parting gift
J
ust before Christmas I awoke to a
hoar frost so thorough that
everything out of doors was
furred in white. My breath plumed
and my car was encased in ice, locks
and all, but as I edged my way along
the icy lanes to meet a friend for a
walk I laughed to see each dying
detail, each inconsequential filigree
of the tangled winter hedgebanks
cast in precious platinum and
sparkling in the clear, low light.
It couldn’t last. As the sun rose
higher the hoar melted away within
the space of ten minutes — it really
was no more than that. But as it
disappeared it performed one last
miracle. A stand of silver birches had
hung on to a few last, golden leaves.
Overnight, the frost had severed the
abscission layer connecting them to
the twigs, but the ice had held them
a little longer in place. Now, as it
melted, the leaves were released all
at once into the motionless winter
air, each tree divesting itself with a
sudden, shivering sigh.The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature
Diary is out in paperback now@M_Z_HarrisonEastern Daily Press, has recently
been published by Slightly Foxed.
His piece for January 1, 1955 paints a
picture of Suffolk farmland with its
“black, gesturing trees” that any East
Anglian will recognise, although far
fewer of us get our living from the
land today. “There is vegetable life
and much animal life, and embedded
among them is human life, with its
beliefs and pieties and loves and
relationships that develop between
the tending of the horses and the
cattle and the corn,” he wrote, “the
latter so pressing and important it is
almost as though the human
relationships were a by-product of
the guardianship of the earth.”Orange embroidery
H
ere in our little alluvial valley
we are on sand — so much of
it that in certain places it
washes out from the fields and clogs
the road drains, and I have seen
children with buckets and spades
make castles from it just as though
they were at the beach.
Climb just a little, though, and you
find yourself on clay, the thick,
“loving” kind that clings to boots and
which Bell knew so intimately, his
knowledge born not from leisure, as
mine is, but from toil. This heavier
land is ploughed more often, and to
follow a right of way across it at this
time of year is a serious undertakingbest attempted with a stout stick:
small wonder Suffolk Punches, left,
were bred without “feathers”, in
contrast to other breeds of draught
horse. Unlike sand, this clay holds
prints: the broad pugs of badgers, the
oval pads of foxes and the deep slots
of deer, whose narrow, glossy hoofs
sink deep into the ploughed soil but
lift out clean and well.
But prints aren’t the only thing to
mark the furrows: in several places
the turned earth is embroidered with
orange, the brightest thing for miles
on this dull day. It is orange peel
fungus, a saprophyte that loves bare,
compacted soil — especially clay. It
is as though someone has taken the
last of the Christmas tangerines outwildflowers, no lush new growth, no
swifts screaming overhead; instead,
you must seek out beauty in the
land’s ancient contours, the revealed
tracery of trees, and the brief and
vital alchemy of decay.
I set out at about three in chill
mizzle, distances lost and details
indistinct. Rooks rowed silently out
of the grey and disappeared back
into it; a lone wren perched like a
woodcut in a wet, leafless hedge.
Even the road margins were
indistinct, clotted by leaves fast
flattening to sludge.
At the edge of the village dirty
sheep lay among the turnips, jaws
working, bounded by lines of electric
fence that mirrored the telephone
wires overhead: firm pen strokes
when everything else was a wet
watercolour. When I reached the
open fields I found more hard lines:
the trenchers had
been out, shearing
the ditches to razor
uniformity, ready
for the new year’s
rains.
The Suffolk writer and
farmer Adrian Bell (setter of
this paper’s first crossword, in
1930) wrote about winter farms
even more movingly than he did
the summer fields, and A
Countryman’s Winter Notebook, a
collection of his columns in theI
t is one thing to know the days
are lengthening; quite another to
feel it. I wake in the half-dark, see
to an absent neighbour’s hens
and split some logs for my
evening fire, and by three the light
is leaching from the winter sky
again. The sparrows set up their
bedtime chatter in the privet, the
hens settle themselves to sleep and
by four the village is quiet again, a
few yellow windows set between
darkening fields.
It can be tempting, in this dim
caesura, to huddle
indoors where there
is heat and light —
but to know a
landscape fully one
must see it in
retreat. This is a
time of year
when very little
will be handed
to you, no banks ofTo know a
landscape
fully, see it
in retreat
trf
tttttttt
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tA backlit silver birch tree covered in
hoar frost following a snowstorm