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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL 7.1.05

The toll of death, ruin and misery in the Far East is truly shocking and horrifying, but it was and is a natural disaster. Death is a natural fact and we all live our lives on a knife edge. The only truly horrifying thing is when human lives are cynically used and squandered by wicked people as pawns in a game of political power. We shall never know how many hundreds of thousands of human lives were lost as the result of a natural shifting of tectonic plates, but, tragic though that loss of life may be, it will be but a blink when compared to the countless millions of human lives that have been squandered for gains of power and politics (be it for communism, Christianity or any other blood stained ‘ism’). I feel much more horrified by the useless squandering of human lives in a totally unnecessary war in Iraq and the cynical way in which politicians will use it as an excuse for increasing their power and the curbing of individual liberties.

The other thing that sickens me is the way that the Media has gloated over pages of pictures of rotting corpses. A disaster such as the Tsunami is bound to produce a lot of corpses. In the nature of things these corpses are bound to wash up on beaches and bio-degrade. It will not be a pleasant process, but it is a natural process and we should accept it as such. It is ‘meet, right and our bounden duty’ to provide aid to help rebuild the shattered lives and businesses of the survivors, but we should not be encouraged to drool over pictures of rotting corpses. The excuses - that these pictures will help to trigger our charitable instincts are totally specious – those instincts have already been triggered. What the Media is doing is trying to titillate our grosser instincts and increase their profits with the pornography of death. For this the Media and all right thinking human beings should be deeply, deeply, ashamed.

I am glad to say that at our New Year’s Day meet yesterday, a plastic bucket of money was collected for the relief of the survivors. I understand that the same thing happened at every Hunt Meet in Britain.

I broke the law not long ago. I was staying with a beef farming friend in the West Country and ate some delicious home grown beef. This was a very serious crime for which I should have been carted off to the slammer. Confused by this? Then you have had few dealings with Defra. Every year my friend kills a beast for home consumption and very sensible, too, you might think. Defra thinks differently. Indeed, if it thinks at all, it thinks on a different plane to us mere mortals. Yes, you may kill a beast for home consumption and, yes, you and your wife may get stuck into the beef, BUT, only if your wife is also your partner. If she is not then it’s pizza from the deep freeze for her – she is not allowed to eat the beef. Nor can your guests eat it. It’s micro waved pizza for them too. I asked my friend how you would come on if you were living with a partner who was not also your wife? He scratched his head and said that he was ‘buggered if he knawed and would I like another illegal slice?’ – ‘Yes please’ I said.

Another example of Defra logic – back in the Foot and Mouth debacle, a farmer had ewes and lambs lying in a field that had become a mud bath. He had a clean dry field on the other side of the lane. So he rang Defra and asked if he could move them the few yards to the clean field. The Defrette he spoke to did not know, but said that she would find out and ring him back. At this point it is proper to point out that the two fields and the lane are in deepest and darkest rural Devon. With unusual efficiency the Defrette did ring him back and said that it would be quite in order for him to move the ewes and lambs across the road, on the strict understanding that there must be a zebra crossing at the place where he proposed to put the sheep across the lane. The farmer thanked her and said that that was a proper job and now could she suggest where, in the whole of bliddy Devon, he could get hold of a zebra?

It is said that one of the reasons that Blair was prepared to co-operate over the matter of legal injunctions relating to the Hunting Act was that he hoped thereby to prevent pro-hunting protests in the coming election campaign – Ho! Ho! Not a prayer, Son.

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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL 14 .1.05

The regular reader of this column (Hello, Mum) will have some idea as to my opinion of Political Correctness, but we have to face the facts of life as they are today and the fact is that PC is fast becoming the Official, State Sponsored, religion of this country. The fact that it is replacing the Church of England and Christianity should come as no surprise to those who have observed the ‘change and decay’ of those time honoured pillars of the State and Realm, both of which are crumbling into decay and collapse. For those of you who listened to, or read, the Queen’s speech at the recent opening of Parliament will have noticed the obvious stench of decay that rose from the awful rubbish foisted on Her Majesty by Her ‘Loyal’ Government. Her Majesty is nobody’s fool, but is far too well trained and constitutionally disciplined to have allowed the slightest trace of Her personal feelings to show, as she read out this screed of garbage. What this says about the present government and its attitude to the Monarchy is something that we may discuss in due course.

Political Correctness is a stark and ghastly piece of modern social engineering that affects all our lives. It is like those featureless blocks of modern buildings which now afflict all our towns and which, one hopes, are destined either to collapse or be pulled down, in a more enlightened time to come. However, it is here and as it is here, we had best make the best of it. I think that it should be celebrated and greeted with some sort of recognition and should have its own official Day – after all we have May Day, Commonwealth Day (I challenge you to tell me when that is and no peeking in your diary) and Remembrance Sunday - we should also have a PC Day with the Union Jack flown (upside down) on all public buildings and Mr Blair giving a public display of playing ‘air guitar’ in Trafalgar Square. But first I think that we should explore the origins of PC. Most people think that PC came from the USA – along with drinks that rot your teeth and double ‘Obesity Burgers’.

The ‘Cousins’ have certainly been enthusiastic disciples and evangelists of PC, but they did not actually invent to phrase. I did not know until the other day, but now I do know the name of the culprit. We could do no better than name this new national festive occasion after the inventor of the phrase – ‘political incorrectness’. Ladies and Gentlemen (can we still say that?) – a drum roll, please – let me give you – wait for it – ALFRED SHICKLGRUBER DAY!! - WOW!! I hear you say, then ‘Who?’ well, I suppose the name might not be familiar to all of you, nor is it a name that might command immediate respect or attention, so it is hardly surprising, that Alfred decided to change it to ADOLPH HITLER – does that ring any bells? He is the man who is credited with first using the phrase ‘political incorrectness’. From this he developed a political philosophy that seems to bond very well with the political philosophy of NuLab. The party might even adopt one of his more famous slogans – ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – it was displayed over the main gate at Auschwitz. This translates loosely into English as ‘Labour sets you free’. Alfred was about as economical with the truth as NuLab.

A letter from a reader who is in her 80s. She recalled being a ‘Land Girl’. She came ‘oot the Toon’ and was sent to a hill farm on the edge of the known world. She had trouble with the language. After breakfast on her first morning the steward got up and said:

“Aal reet ye lassies, loup the dyke and if ye need grass divn’t use the wickens”. She went on to say that, not altogether unsurprisingly, she had no clue as to what he meant – her being a gently nurtured girl from Jesmond. It was fortunate that the ‘Daft Laddy’ (a title that defined the newest male recruit to the farm) saw her confusion and whispered to her:

“Hinny, there’s nay netty paper on the hedges”. As she says ‘I have never forgotten that day!’ She spent 5.5.years in the Land Army on 8 shillings and 9 pence (get teacher to work it out, but I reckon it’s about 43p) per week. Mind you, single workers ‘lived in’ and, on a ‘good place’ got 5 meals a day. She met some ‘splendid, happy, contented people’. Not too many of them about today, even on rather more than 43p per week. In fact ‘happy and contented people’ are about as rare as ‘netty papers on the hedges’.

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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL 20.1.05

Oh Dear! Poor silly Prince Harry – yes, he made a stupid mistake, but let any reader tell me that he/she has never made a stupid mistake and I will write back and politely tell him/her that he/she is a liar. But as you are not (I suspect) a member of the Royal Family, your mistake did not get plastered all over the world’s press. No one can be in any doubt that the Nazi regime was one of the nastiest in the history of the world. It killed and ruined millions of lives and it is meet right and our bounden duty never to forget that evil. It is also meet and right that there should be an ‘Auschwitz Day’ to commemorate a place that has become a synonym for evil. But why do we not also have a ‘Kolima’ or ‘Magadan’ Day, in memory of those who were starved, beaten and tortured to death in Stalin’s Gulag? The evils committed by the Nazis are pale shadows compared with those committed in the name of Communism. In spite of this there is still a Communist Party (albeit a rather sickly one) that is legal and alive in this country and in other countries. I wonder if there would have been the same fuss if Prince Harry had gone to the party dressed as Che Guevara. Che was a homicidal psychopath and a Communist and yet one continues to see his pictures plastered on walls. Guevara look-alikes walk openly about London without a squeak of protest. The Nazis did not invent the Swastika – they adopted it and, in various forms, it is openly displayed in the insignia of several nations. If the Nazi Swastika were to be banned, then so should the Red Star of Communism, which represents an even greater horror perpetrated on Humanity.

There was an interesting and little reported sideline to the Tsunami disaster. One of the areas flooded by those monstrous walls of water was a Wildlife Reserve and yet there has not been a single report of any of the Wildlife being drowned. In the same area, there are remote islands where the indigenous inhabitants are described as living a ‘stone age existence’. There have been no reports of human casualties from these, either. Mind you there is one group of islands, where the natives greet and discourage visitors with showers of arrows and I cannot say that I blame them – the ‘civilisation’ that these people reject is not all it is cracked up to be. So, what does this tell us? It tells us that the animals knew instinctively when trouble was coming and moved en masse, to higher and safer ground. The same could be said of all those ‘primitive’ islanders. They are still much more in touch with the vagaries of nature. In modern parlance, they got ‘bad vibes’. Modern man has lost many of these ancient senses - our senses of smell and hearing have gone all to hell. I have known old men, especially sea and hill men, who could ‘smell’ the weather and they were usually right. I do not know, but I suspect that animals and a few men have a sensitive response to changes in barometric pressure. I remember when I was hunting hounds in Yorkshire. We had some visitors from the south so I chose a meet for them in an area that was usually lifting with foxes. We drew all day without the sniff of a fox. That night it came a blizzard.

On Dartmoor the Galloway cows that lived out on the high moor were a certain weather indicator. When you saw the long black lines of cattle filing down to the Moor gates, you knew that the snow would not be far behind.

I have no doubt that animals feel ‘danger vibrations’. I went out after a doe the other evening and was sitting looking down a wooded bank. I saw a pair of does feeding quietly below me, but the cover was too thick to get a safe shot. I could see that they were watching something and sure enough a man with a couple of dogs came walking along the footpath below them. They watched the party with interest and then went on feeding – no danger vibes there.

I have seen foxes strolling through a flap of feeding rabbits and them paying no attention. They could ‘feel’ that the fox was not hungry. If he had been, they would have been into their burrows like a shot.

I was once trained by a man who owed his life on more than one occasion to his feeling for danger. I asked him to explain it and he said that he could not:

“All I can tell you is that if something feels wrong, then it is wrong – get out quick”. He must be right, because he is still alive.

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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL 27.1.05

We had a House Meet yesterday. The people of the Border Hills are immensely hospitable. A meet of the local hounds provides them with a chance to offer welcome and generous entertainment to their scattered neighbours. Trays of food are plentiful as is the amount of alcoholic refreshment

House Meets are a fine old English tradition. I say ‘English’ because the ‘Great Britain’ that generations of my family fought for, is being eroded, not to say, corroded by this government. The traditional English rural life is anathema to the ‘toxic toonies’ who now rule and ruin this country. I cannot say that we had a great day’s hunting, but what made me think of this particularly was the house itself. It is a good solid Northumbrian hill farm house. It sits on top of a hill, facing south and yet is so sited that it has good protection from the ‘bad airts’ such as the North and the East.

When Pip, the terrier, and I are walking on the hills and we come across a steading, I like to stop and study it and its position. Some are still happily occupied, some falling into ruin and some just heaps of tumbled stones. But there is one thing they all have in common – they were well sited. The sites were chosen, back in the mists of time, by people who really understood the weather and the prevailing conditions. You can be walking the hill in a gale and driving rain, although, in my advancing years, I tend to try to avoid this and you will come across the tumbled remains of an old steading. Go and stand by the site and it is always well placed in the ‘bield’. The screaming torrents of wind and storm flow over and around it, but never through it. The old men knew their hills and they knew where to build. There is a favourite spot of mine, high out on one of the old green drove roads. It is a delightful place set in a cup in the hills at the junction of two rushing burns. I have seen a picture of the house. It was a fine stone house with a grove of ash trees on three sides. There are only a few skeletal trees left and the house is a heap of grassed over stone, but it is a fine sheltered spot. I often park there when I am going to the hounds, but I know that once I climb the old road out of the basin, I shall meet the full force of the wind that has been screaming above me all the time. How pleased the old herds must have been when coming home off the hill to drop down into that sheltered hollow. One they were below the lip, the weather would be cut off as though someone had slammed a door on it.

The other example of natural scientific knowledge is the Sheep Stell. For those of you more accustomed to air-conditioned shopping malls than to the hills, the stell is a circular, dry stone walled, enclosure, where the old men penned up their sheep when they sensed (we discussed senses last week) that bad weather was coming. Stells are usually placed at the bottom of hills and close to a burn – where there is a stell, there is nearly always a crossing place. A stell is circular for two very good reasons. The first is that there are no corners for a sheep to get trapped in and very likely trampled. The second one is basic aerodynamics. I do not suppose that the old herds who sited and built the stells were familiar with the science of aerodynamics, any more than I am, but they knew their ground and they knew how the air currents worked in each particular part of it. The stells were so sited that the air currents and the snow they were carrying circled the stell and prevented the snow settling in it to any great depth and, possibly, smothering the sheep penned within it. This was true science, but it was not garnered from any text book, but from generations of hard won instinct and bred in senses. They probably would not have been able to explain it to you, if you had asked them and you can’t because ‘they arl deid’. Some of their senses and hardiness have, thankfully come down through the genes and have been adapted to modern conditions. The other day I watched a young herd riding his quad up a slope that I would have thought twice about walking. I said to the man beside me:

“I wouldn’t have the nerve to do that.”

“It’s in the breeding, Man,” he said. Good breeding is not considered to be politically correct, but ‘Thank God for it’ say I.

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