Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse.
I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as an egg-packing station. Quite often I wake in the night not knowing where I am. I sit bolt upright in the darkness in an existential panic trying to figure it out. If I’ve been dreaming, I think I’m in a railway tunnel or a mineshaft or I’m looking out from a cave. The prosaic, less frightening truth, when I realise it, that I am in a bedroom, lying on a bed, comes as a huge relief. But when I wake at my uncle and aunt’s place, and look round in a panic, and all I can see are eggs, and the silhouettes of eggs, thousands of them, in trays, stacked around me, it takes a while to realise that here in Norfolk reality can be every bit as bizarre as a dream.
At my uncle and aunt’s place you are fully in the country. You eat the best bacon and eggs imaginable, the dogs are kept outside, the well-thumbed books on the shelf are about pig breeding and chicken breeds, the latest edition of Cage and Aviary Bird lies on the arm of the chair, and the talk is mostly of the predations, infections, contaminations and atrocities committed by vermin such as mice, rats, mink, sparrowhawks, crows, foxes, badgers.
Since I was last up there, otters have been added to the list. The only reason that otters have been painstakingly reintroduced into East Anglia, encouraged to breed, and protected by stringent laws, apparently, is to antagonise hardworking, Conservative-voting smallholders with ornamental lakes and ponds. Bold as brass, and conscious, perhaps, of their protected, minority status, these upstart otters are going from one private lake to the next stripping them of valuable fish. Only last week the ‘cheeky devils’ cleaned out my uncle’s neighbour’s pond of ornamental carp, all old monsters.
It’s the same with the hawks and raptors. The powerful RSPB lobbies for their continued protection and with no predators such as my uncle and his rook rifle to worry about they’ve proliferated to an absurd extent. And then we read about declining songbird numbers, says my uncle, indignation raising his voice by an octave or two.
As for the explosion in the badger population, well, it’s best not to mention it and start my uncle off. But I do anyway. I tell my uncle I’ve read an official pamphlet in which all the submissions to the previous government’s inquiry into the badger/TB issue were collected and summarised. In it, I tell him, some badger protection groups were of the opinion that it was the badgers who were being infected by the cows, rather than vice versa, and the cows were being infected in the first place by farmers and their farm labourers.
My uncle has been quite poorly lately. Sometimes he thinks he’s nearing the end and jokes that he is planning no further forward than his next change of shirt. But when I tell him things like that, the world is suddenly so far beyond his understanding, and the people in it so wilfully ignorant, that he is almost glad to be going.
As for all that free-range egg business, he took me to see one of his son’s free-range chicken sheds, to show me what a lot of nonsense it is. ‘Look in there,’ he said. I opened a door, looked in, and was confronted with a flock of 5,000 brown hens standing in a shed, all craning their necks and staring at me as though I was mad. The sun was shining, the doors were open, they had five lovely green acres to play in, yet they all preferred to be indoors. ‘They feel safer inside,’ my uncle explained. ‘Outside they feel vulnerable to attack by hawks. Even if a seagull drifts over they all run for cover. Give me a battery-cage egg any day,’ he confided. ‘You know it’s clean and it tastes the same as an egg produced any other way.’
I disagreed profoundly. At home we eat eggs laid by chickens scratching around in the earth for insects and there’s no comparison. And I think battery cages are an abomination. But not wanting my uncle to lump me in with the sentimentalists, I didn’t say so. I kept quiet.
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