RIP, then, Marcus the sheep. That’s ‘P’ as a plural in this case, obviously. As in ‘pieces’, and lots of them. Are any of the legs still going spare? Mmm. Love a bit of shank.
Marcus, as you’ll have doubtless read, was a sheep reared at Lydd Primary School in Romney Marsh who was then sent off, as is the basic idea with sheep, for slaughter and butchery. All sorts of people were very upset about this. Not the children, it must be said, because they had a vote on this, and they did not choose life. Maybe not even Marcus himself, who by all accounts was a rather stoic and passive individual, because he was a sheep. No, it was mainly parents, who presumably preferred their meat to come in packets. And, in a late final-hour intervention, the comedian Paul O’Grady, who offered to adopt Marcus and take him home.
O’Grady’s timing was a little out on this, in that he brought his considerable gravitas into play on the same day that Sir Elton John started making noises about wanting to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian orphan called Lev. Gay TV presenter wants to adopt sheep, gay pop star wants to adopt Ukrainian orphan — well, it’s basically the same story, not really enough room for both. Apparently, though, O’Grady already owns 11 (presumably quite pointless) sheep on his farm in Ashford, and offered to buy Marcus from the school to join them.
‘It’s no longer a wild animal,’ he told the Daily Mirror, which appears to have been the only paper still listening. ‘It’s a pet. I heard the sheep is in hiding. It’s the Salman Rushdie of the sheep world.’ That’s right Paul. Because this sheep has offended lots of people by writing a blasphemous novel, hasn’t he? And that’s why they all want to chop off his limbs, drain his blood, and eat him with mint sauce. Just like the Muslims wanted to, with Salman. Yes, spot on.
‘We do eat meat,’ one outraged mother told the BBC, ‘but it’s different with a pet. It’s different when it’s got a name.’ Well, yes. Because then you have to be honest with yourself. Ever been to an abattoir? My friend Al bought a house next to a pig abattoir by mistake. At night, he can hear the screaming. It’s like a porcine Tracey Chapman song. When I went to see him, we went down into the village for breakfast. ‘Not really eating bacon any more,’ he told me, grimly. ‘Can’t quite face it. Just get us a sausage sandwich.’ I got the point. You don’t need to think of pigs when you eat a sausage. He knew that his problem wasn’t what we were doing to the pigs, but what the pigs were doing to him.
You know what gets me? It’s what they must think of us in France. You’ve seen what they do to their geese, right? Chances are they have a pâté made by actually shagging them. I wouldn’t be surprised. And I bet it tastes great. God, it’s depressing. Is there another country on earth that could work itself up into such a tizz about a farm animal being turned into meat? Is there another country, anywhere, which has divorced its comprehension of meat consumption from meat production to the extent that such a thing would be possible?
We can’t even blame the kids for this. They voted to have Marcus killed and chopped up, and to use the money to buy more sheep, with which they’ll presumably do the same. And we certainly can’t blame the school. Andrea Chapman, the esteemed head, is the only adult to come out of this very British farce with any credit. She’d quite like people to shut up about her farm now. ‘The aim was to educate the children in all aspects of farming life and everything that implies,’ she has said. In other words, they now know where meat comes from, and they now also know that when it comes to animals British people are mawkish and insane. Job done.
I found myself strangely transfixed, this week, by the childhood antics of Baroness Williams, the Labour peer otherwise known as Shirley. In her autobiography, serialised in the Sunday Times, she talks of narrowly escaping an attempted gang-rape as a 13-year-old evacuee on a liner crossing the Atlantic, and spending the next few nights hiding out in a lifeboat. The experience, she decided, brought about a childhood habit of seeking out strange and lonely places. She deliberately got lost in the New Forest, she wrote, and loved to climb down the sides of bridges over the Thames and hunker down into the sheltered, secret spaces beneath. She would walk deserted streets at night, and lose herself in city fogs.
A psychologist, felt Williams, would have told her that this was all about facing danger — putting oneself in situations of potential harm, and then getting oneself out of them. If so, I wonder what a psychologist would say about me. I, too, have always loved forgotten spaces. As a child, you’d invariably find me hidden around the back of our garden rockery, in amongst the rubble. At my boarding school, I found my way into abandoned air raid shelters and onto secluded rooftops. If the latter had hatches that led into sprawling, whimsical attic spaces, all the better.
I’ve sometimes wondered if this was what started me smoking at such a young age, because if you smoked, this was where you had to hang out. Midnight exploration always went hand in hand with this; a shimmy down a drainpipe and you were out into a quiet, muffled world of your own.
I’ve no wish to belittle Dame Shirley’s evidently horrific childhood experience, but I seem to have picked up a yen for such things without having suffered any sort of trauma at all. It was trauma, indeed, that put an end to it. Aged 19, I managed to get myself pretty badly beaten up one night while strolling home through a disused railway tunnel in Edinburgh. Shortly after that I moved to London, and empty spaces in London swiftly fill up with people who want you to join them for sex or drugs. Much the same as smoking, I suppose, but both have always seemed a bit too much effort. Since then, anyway, I’ve confined myself to idly reading about disused tube stations on the internet, and occasionally locking myself in the loo.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Comments