How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [79]
My latest project is bonsai trees. While everyone else at the Chelsea flower show last week mooched about wondering why there were so few shooting invitations this year, I became transfixed by the display of miniature topiary. The pine trees with their gnarled trunks and wind-blown lean looked exactly like the fully grown examples you might find on a cliff in southern Spain. But they were just a couple of feet tall. The detailing was exquisite. And I found myself swooning in the conjoining of nature’s infinite bounds for beauty and man’s ability to make everything better still.
Bonsai-ists are the same as Yorkshire’s dry-stone wallers, who bring the countryside to life, and the thirteenth-century cathedral builders, whose vision provides a focal point in our temperate flatlands. I spoke for a while with a fellow bonsai enthusiast, who explained about how it’s essential to concentrate on the roots rather than the plant you actually see, and how to change the fertilizer and ensure a steady flow of phosphoric acid, and how to prune the leaves and to make sure there is precisely the right amount of sunshine. And I’m afraid my eyes started to glaze over as I realized it would be much easier to fire up the PlayStation and spend an hour or two shooting my children in the face.
For this reason, I’m never going to build the fantastic train set that exists only in my mind. I’m never going to hang the pictures I haven’t bought yet. And I’m never going to clear Cambodia of landmines. And neither are you, because you’re sitting around reading the papers, same as you did last week and the week before.
I know we can’t all be Ranulph Fiennes.
We can’t do everything. But don’t you wish that sometimes you could find the time from the drudge of the humdrum … to do something?
Sunday 24 May 2009
Letting beavers loose in Scotland is a dam-fool idea
As we know, the economy is stagnant, we are up to our shoulders in debt and things are likely to get worse. So imagine my surprise to find the government has decided to spend £275,000 on eleven Norwegian beavers that will be freed to roam wild in Scotland. As this works out at £25,000 each, I’m wondering if the money could have been better spent. Because I’ve done some checking and it turns out that for the same kind of cash they could have bought an extremely rare white lion cub, half a dozen house-trained chimpanzees and a brace of albino pythons. A striped Bengal cat, which looks very much like a small monochrome tiger and is created by mating an Asian leopard cat with a domestic tom, can be bought, according to a Forbes magazine survey, for as little as £500. Extremely good value for money considering that I should imagine many of the couplings end with the domestic tom inside the female’s stomach.
Of course, the people responsible for choosing the beaver instead would argue that Scotland is not an appropriate place for mutant tigers or pythons – I think they’re wrong on this – and that they went for the big-toothed rat because it used to live there before man invented toast and wanted something to put on it.
Needless to say, the scheme has met with considerable opposition from the likes of Jeremy Paxman and Sir Ian Botham, who say that beavers will eat all the fish they were hoping to put back, and from locals who think they will catch cryptosporidiosis – an incurable ailment that causes such uncontrollable diarrhoea that sufferers have been known to excrete their own lungs.
I made that up, in the same way that alarmists have made up the threat