Hands off the 'henge

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Hands off the ‘henge

Everyone agrees this looming election is a pivotal moment, where nothing less than the heart, soul and future of the British Isles is at stake, and yet somehow we’re all bored senseless. As Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand man, Willie Whitelaw, once said about Harold Wilson, Keir Starmer is going round the country “stirring up apathy”. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak’s only halfway noteworthy comment involved his Haribo habit. No wonder more headlines have been snatched this week by Just Stop Oil protestors than by party leaders.

I generally have high tolerance for vigorous, effective protest that sails close to the wind and even breaks the law – especially given the knee-jerk restrictions of last year’s Public Order Act, which banned a raft of traditional protest measures, like “locking-on”, the Suffragettes’ favourite manoeuvre. It’s hard to imagine the women’s suffrage movement achieving so much, so swiftly, without activists’ more outrageous stunts, like burning “Votes for Women” into the grass of golf clubs and setting fire to bastions of male privilege like cricket pavilions. There was also the time a protestor took an axe to a portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the National Gallery. What police then dubbed “a reign of terror” is now widely seen as defensible, or at least understandable, given the grave injustice of women being denied the vote.

In much the same vein, I support the more controversial efforts of environmental protestors to alert an apathetic world to the desecration of our planet. But this week I found my sympathy had its limits.  I couldn’t help but recoil from the spray-painting of Stonehenge with orange cornflour by two Just Stop Oil activists. What made this different for me is that to anyone with an even vaguely pantheistic, or history-respecting, view of the world Stonehenge is mysterious, numinous and deserving of the deepest respect. The stones speak of a Neolithic society beyond our ken and yet we know the humans who raised these great sarsen blocks millennia ago looked up and marvelled at the same cosmos. I totally understand the urge of modern druids and pagans to gather there for the summer solstice and have even considered joining them in my antler headdress and Tess of the d’Urbervilles white lace gown (it's what I wore to Chelsea Arts Club's Midsommar Night’s Scream ball on Saturday night). It’s sobering and proper to remember our lives are merely a gnat’s-span in the great wheel of time. That great oracle of our age, Liam Gallagher, spoke for many of us when he said on social media: “Don’t fuck with the stones man, they have mystical powers. Hope they all wake up tmoz and are all orange toads.”

Bad bet

I come from a long line of gamblers. Family legend has it that my paternal grandfather placed a mammoth bet on the Derby and lost all his money in one fell swoop. You would imagine my publican father would therefore steer clear of roulette wheels, blackjack and having a flutter on the horses. But no, Ronald Pelling was the bookies’ friend and enjoyed casinos until my mum met him in Accra in 1963 and tamed some of his more profligate habits. It’s hard to be an international man of mystery when you have a much younger wife and five children in quick succession. Even so, he liked to place daft wagers and once bet a fellow landlord that he could run from our hamlet of Toys Hill to the neighbouring village, Ide Hill, in ten minutes. This involved a cross-country mile-and-a-half route with a steep hill. He was 58 at the time, pretending to be a decade younger, which is how he persuaded the brewers to give him the pub tenancy. Needless to say, he didn’t make it – because he wasn’t Roger Bannister. For all this bravado, he was the kind of rogue who was also possessed of great integrity and common sense. He looked after his kin and wider pub family with great solicitousness, confiscated car keys from drunks and saw troublemakers off with a waved shotgun when that was still something country policemen tolerated. He also offered solid advice. I was once playing backgammon with him aged fifteen when I tried to fiddle a throw of the dice to make it more advantageous. He said, “Never cheat,” [dramatic pause] “if you’re going to get found out.” If only someone like dad had spoken to the ever-increasing number of Tories who appear to have placed bets on a general election being called in July. The Conservatives’ top data officer Nick Mason, Sunak’s key political advisor Craig Williams, the Party’s campaigns director Tony Lee and his wife, Laura Saunders, who’s standing as the Tory candidate for Bristol North West, all stand accused of using insider information for personal gain. My dad may have had many mistresses (until mum saw off that habit too) and embroidered his life story until it resembled the Bayeux tapestry, but he would never have stooped that low.

Changing the climate of discussion

As an Aussie immigrant to London in the early 1990s, I was always amused by locals whingeing about inclement weather at this time of year. From the perspective of someone who grew up in a place where you could cook a Full English on the car bonnet, it seemed hot sunny days in the motherland were in critically short supply. Admittedly, my memories are unduly tainted by the particularly cold summer of 1993, when the misery index plummeted to levels not seen again for eighteen years.

More recently, cold summer days have been rarer, meaning that this year’s unseasonally chilly start was eagerly seized upon by climate sceptics as proof positive that – as one social media friend put it – “global warming is bollocks”. The same friend, during last year’s much warmer summer – indeed, the hottest on record – posted an article about the “Heatwave of July 1808” in an attempt to prove the same thing using reverse logic. To be fair, that month was – at the time – a bit of a scorcher, reputedly the second hottest July since 1783. Although I recently discovered it now ranks only ninth since that date, making me wonder at his choice of evidence. In any case, a GCSE science student could tell you that plucking isolated figures off the thermometer is utterly meaningless, and that, as meteorologists put it, “weather is not climate”. What matters is the overall evidence of a warming trend, and the increasing frequency of average temperature records. Besides, one recent study used tree-ring data instead to establish that 2023 was actually the hottest in 2,000 years. And if you want to put that in perspective, 23AD was the year Pliny the Elder was born.

Summer now seems to have arrived – though I still maintain an Antipodean distrust, 30 years on, that sees me habitually pack a raincoat and fleece even in blazing heat. And our tepid start has not been matched elsewhere in the northern hemisphere. As I write, millions in the US and Canada are experiencing record temperatures as the “heat dome” there intensifies; soaring temperatures in the Balkans have caused power shortages across the region due to higher-than-usual use of air conditioners; and a heatwave has stretched across northern India, placing a similar strain on power networks. The real human tragedy so far, however, has come in Saudi Arabia, where as many as 1,000 Hajj pilgrims died in extreme heat that saw the mercury push past 50°C for sustained periods.

What I find most depressing is not the statistics but the way our concern for “the environment” has largely been reduced to arguments over carbon emissions. We hear little these days about the habitat destruction that threatens iconic species such as orangutans, rhinos and turtles. Or that we’re living through the first mass extinction event in 65.5 million years, which will see off many thousands more that we’ve never even heard of. There's also the fact that the UK’s once fresh waterways are literally awash with toxic chemicals and faeces, yet this health threat is struggling to gain traction as an election issue, despite the heroic efforts of independent campaigners like Feargal Sharkey, and groups such as River Action and Surfers Against Sewage.

That our emissions have caused a long-term rise in temperatures is both an established fact and pretty obvious to anyone who’s used bubble wrap to supercharge their greenhouse. Many other environmental issues are deeply interconnected with manmade climate change, which is one reason decarbonisation is essential for a sustainable future. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that driving electric cars or installing solar panels will make Cumbria’s River Eden worthy of its name or save Atlantic salmon from extinction. We shouldn't assume that climate scientists are all-knowing gods. The earth's system is incredibly complex, unpredictable and perhaps largely unknowable. The changes we need to make to the way we live within it need to come from collaborative global endeavours focused on restoring ecosystems and our place within them, driven both by science and our sense of spiritual connection with nature. If we want to save the planet and ourselves, we need to dial down the divisive rhetoric on what has become a mindless, and often meaningless, pursuit of “net zero”, and strive for a much more holistic recalibration of the discussion.

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Book of the Week

Moon Road
By Sarah Leipciger
(368pp, Doubleday, £16.99, hb)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

The anguish suffered by families when a loved one goes missing is delicately explored in this novel about estranged parents reuniting to make one more road trip to Vancouver Island in search of their lost daughter, who vanished while camping alone 22 years earlier. The story opens on the eve of Kathleen's annual party for Una, held to keep her daughter's disappearance in everyone's minds in the hope of new leads. But while she marks off the 7,968th day since Una disappeared, most friends have moved on with their lives. And when her ex turns up unexpectedly, after nineteen years of not speaking, Kathleen is wary. Sitting opposite him in the local cafe, she registers the white scar, "like a bird's wing", left by the heavy green-glass ashtray she hurled at his cheek last time they met. For his part, the still handsome, thrice-married, 73-year-old Yannick recalls the first time he saw Kathleen, when she was eighteen and he was a labourer in her father's backyard: “She came outside wearing a yellow bathing suit and a pair of denim cut-offs, doing a string of cartwheels, and he was pretty sure it was a violation, the stuff he thought about when he saw her... She knew it too. She manufactured that moment sure as shit.”

When Yannick discloses bones have been discovered in the forest, which the police think might be their daughter’s, Kathleen rushes home to bury Una's milk teeth in the garden, terrified they'll be used in DNA tests to end all hope. Kathleen's brusque, straight-talking manner and lack of self-awareness have echoes of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. As Yannick and Kathleen embark on a 5000-km journey back to the island, Leipciger lets their tetchy yet tender conversations unfurl the story of two people who were once crazy about each other – and perhaps still are. The portrait of their relationship is interwoven with Una's own story about what happened when she was camping in the wild, aged 22. The parallel narratives come together at the end, when the mystery of why Una vanished is finally solved.