As I discovered this morning, I’m afraid that’s me! Having spent part of last week enjoying the glories of the Welsh Coastal Path, and having gone into ecstasies about the Derbyshire countryside yesterday, suddenly today I catch myself giving expression to quite different views about the natural world.
The roofers have arrived, and are well into their job. Having stripped off the old Yorkshire stone covering and the defective waterproof membrane underneath, they have discovered that our roof cavity has become the home of a nest of wild bees and one of wasps. Yes: I do know about the importance of insects in pollination, and of course rely on that for the fruiting of my apple trees. But do I want them in my roof? Bees …. well, perhaps I can live with that: but wasps actually eat the wood. I begin to have doubts.
Early this morning I went for a little tour of inspection of the garden, to see what might have happened during our absence in Wales. I was horrified to find that something has been using one of the clumps of flowers as a sun-bed. The insolence of it! That’s not what I put flowers there for!
The last straw that has tipped me over from wordsworthian burbling into something bordering on “nature fascism” was an experience later in the morning. The roofers needed to park their skip in the driveway, so I went out to move our car into the street. Overnight it had been parked in a different place from its normal spot outside the door, because that is now occupied by scaffolding. It turns out that the tree under which I had left it functions as a toilet for the local birds, and the car was comprehensively splattered with bird dirt. What kind of birds do we have in Clayton that can cause that level of devastation? Vultures? Every year I take part in the survey organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in which people spend an hour identifying and counting the birds in their gardens. I have absolutely delighted in the presence of birds here. (I believe that we have at least three nests.) But now? Why can’t birds be toilet-trained? I want some order out there. Clearly Nature cannot be left to itself.
Beneath the flippant surface of this outburst I believe that there is a serious question to be asked. I’ve never thought to enquire before, as a landscape painter, whether there is an implicit view of “Nature” in my painting. I’ll have to think about that one.
By the way: the BBC Radio 4 “Book of the Week” is Julian Barnes’ Keeping an Eye Open, which is a series of essays by him on art. We’ve listened to the first two, and they are really interesting and stimulating. If you can get the BBC website on your computer it could be worth checking these out. I believe that they keep them available for about a week.