Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy was given to me by a colleague, Mr C. S. of Borehamwood, for my entertainment when I was off work with depression over a decade ago. I cannot say why I picked it up now, but I am glad I did. It’s set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty):
‘Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?’ A shaky live picture came on to the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear… ‘Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone … This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown. The neo-surrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to winning until the police moved in …’
Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.
Isabella Tree: Wilding Something happened just after I finished reading this book that made me incandescent with fury rather cross. It was news reports from South Wales where homes and businesses had been wrecked by floods from Storm Bert, mere years after having recovered from floods set off by Storm Desmond [honestly, who thinks up these names? — Ed]. All the talk was of strengthening flood defences, which costs £££, when it seems clear that to me (nobody mentioned this on the news) that this is precisely what one should not do.
Ever since Victorian times, engineers have followed the mantra that surface water should be removed as quickly as possible. To this end they have drained marshes, wetlands and water-meadows, and canalised rivers into narrow, straight courses. So now, when rivers flood, the water doesn’t do what it once did — hang around in pools, soak into the ground, and meander. Instead, rivers, now confined by hard engineering, rise rapidly and overtop their banks.
The solutions are, tragically, close at hand, more effective, and much cheaper. Flood defences should be torn down, not built higher. Rivers should be allowed to relax. If necessary, people should be relocated to higher ground. At the very least, they should be discouraged from paving their front yards to make hard standing, so rainwater can soak into the ground. Trees should be planted on slopes to stabilise soil. Fields should be allowed to revert to wetland. Beavers should be reintroduced to dam streams, slowing river flow.
And if you, as a local planning officer, really are going to be so idiotic as to allow developers to build on floodplains (the clue’s in the name — well, duh) dictate that they don’t build yet more depressing estates of identikit boxes, but apply some design and engineering thought, and put them on stilts, with an undercroft, so the water can flow underneath. For goodness sake, Grand Designs has been on our screens for a quarter of a century, but for all that it’s had any influence, developers and planning departments obviously do things with their eyes shut. That nobody seems able to understand this is what makes me so angry. Oh, and farmers should allow unproductive or marginal farmland to go a bit wild at the edges. As Isabella Tree shows in this amazing and inspirational book, doing these things improves biodiversity as well as water quality, softens water flow and prevents flooding.
Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts.
The Burrells were up against it.
Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings.
Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning.
She also dispels two other big lies. One is the myth that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison.
Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig fo Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s frankly criminal Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste.
Rewilding your land seemed like a romantic dream. In current circumstances, discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.
