The elephant lost in a snowdrift

I began the first working day of 2010 feeling uncharacteristically optimistic, until I had a searing flash of conscience about the stuffed elephant. How on earth could I have forgotten about that, yet again?

I should explain right away that it is not a real stuffed elephant, though given the long-running logistical difficulties in arranging its handover it might as well be. But I am assured that this one is merely a cuddly toy bearing a passing resemblance to the trunked and tusked creature that it is apparently no longer correct to call a pachyderm (did you know that they had fads like that in Nature Study, too?)

A kind friend bought it as a gift for my newborn son and, at the current rate of progress, he is going to end up presenting it to a sneering teenager rather than a gratefully gurgling infant.

And it’s all my fault, as usual. I told him that we would definitely be at home on Sunday if he felt like dropping by. Please God don’t let his remains be discovered in a snowdrift, like Ötzi the Austrian iceman, with an elephant clutched in his fist. (“Archaeologists speculated that the primitive inhabitants of Durham worshipped the animal, long extinct in their region, as a reminder of the times of plenty when its dung was prized as the magic ingredient in their legendary giant leek trenches.”)

We were supposed to be back at home by New Year’s Eve, but I contracted a stinking cold just in time for Christmas, then passed it on to Mrs Hann as an unwanted gift. Having spent a week coughing at each other in Cheshire, we were all geared up for an early start for Northumberland on Saturday morning when I happened to flick onto the ancient Ceefax system during a particularly dull TV programme on Friday, and caught a passing mention of severe weather in the North East.

We duly switched on the main BBC evening news to get the full story, but there was nothing. Not a word. This suggested one of three possibilities.

First, those setting the news agenda have finally appreciated that it gets cold as a matter of course between December and February, so it is not really “hold the front page” material. This was certainly true in my childhood, but has not really been so of late. I have only been seriously snowed in to my present house once, and that was for a couple of days in November 1988, shortly after I had moved in.

So we move on to the second and more sinister possibility for the news blackout: that the freezing conditions appear at variance with the endless bleating about “manmade global warming”, and must therefore go unreported in case us thickoes start thinking “Hang on …”

This also seems an unlikely explanation, as I feel confident that teams of scientists are already working on the case for the Big Freeze being precisely one of those “extreme weather events” we were warned about as a consequence of the underlying warming trend.

Which leaves us with the third explanation: that no-one at the BBC gives a monkey’s how bad the weather is in the North East, though if more than a couple of flakes fall in central London it is invariably the lead item on every bulletin for days.

Yes, that seems most likely on the whole. I am glad we had friends in the North to consult about the advisability of travelling (which they provided free of charge, not in return for a compulsory £142.50 annual licence fee). It is a shame to have missed the opportunity to capture some classic Northumberland snow scenes on camera, though. And it is a real pity about that elephant. I wonder whether we might have had better luck with a woolly mammoth?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Peering into our mediaeval future

Analysing the past is a lot simpler than predicting the future. That is why historians are, on the whole, more reliable authorities than clairvoyants.

While history was always my favourite subject at school, I was also an avid viewer of Tomorrow’s World and am pretty sure that we were all supposed to be travelling in flying cars by now, wearing silver foil instead of tweed or denim, and subsisting on vitamin pills.

I do not recall anyone warning me, when I began assembling a vinyl record collection in the late 1960s, that I might as well hang on as the technology would soon be overtaken by cassette tapes, then CDs and now internet downloads. In fact, I do not remember anyone forecasting the life-changing phenomenon that is the World Wide Web.

Or, for that matter, the rise of celebrity culture, Islamist terrorism and manmade global warming (though I do vividly recall the dire warnings that a new Ice Age was just around the corner).

Despite this depressing track record of failure to see into the future, the media have become obsessed with trying to predict it. We cannot even wait until 3p.m. on Christmas Day to find out what the Queen might wish to convey in her annual message; we must hear an uncannily accurate resumé of what she is “expected to say” the day before. Today almost the only “news” that is straight reportage rather than short range forecasting involves deaths, whether of elderly celebrities in their beds or of ordinary folk in accidents, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Or, with luck, the avoidance of deaths because said terrorists have again failed to strike their target. At least the weirdly perverted religion that drives the desire to blow us out of the skies seems to be associated with an encouragingly high degree of technical incompetence. Having said that, it would clearly be wrong to pin our hopes on the fanatics’ continued failure.

While history shows that those who keep up sustained campaigns of violence often get their way in the end, they normally have some vaguely rational underlying political agenda. That is lacking in the current generation of would-be mass murderers.

What we can surely safely predict is that the progression from shoe bomber to underpants bomber will be followed up by the development of some even more fiendish and presumably ingested explosive device, and that ever-more intrusive attempts to detect these will make boarding an aircraft even more of a living hell than it is now.

At least if this results in a catastrophic collapse of the global airline industry, it will please the adherents of that other growing world religion, the true believers in manmade climate change.

Look on the editorial and letters pages of any newspaper, and you cannot fail to notice that the sceptics about the benefits of European integration and the causes of global warming are precisely the same people. This seems logical enough, since both are founded on a healthy cynicism about movements tending to diminish individual freedom.

In the case of Europe, one can study history and know that the anti-democratic federalist agenda was based on a noble ideal (the prevention of war) but has been pursued with a reliance on the Big Lie that would make even Hitler or Saddam Hussein blush. On climate change, we are into the realms of futurology and it seems reasonable to apply precautionary principles just in case the science turns out to be right for once.

But it is surely a complete coincidence that those prepared to blow themselves up in the name of religion and the environmental opponents of air travel should turn out to be batting for the same side, too. Or is it? After all, the desired caliphate and wind power are both, in their different ways, profoundly mediaeval concepts.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.