Authors Electric

  Times have changed. The Story of the Little Mole who Knew it was None of his Business would never have seen the light of day in the 1950s, even though it was a jolly good guide to identifying animal poo. Natural history investigation wasn’t discouraged in the 20 th century, but it was more a case of scoring points over your mates. I-Spy books were actually pretty good, but oh how the order of high and low-scoring birds has changed. Magpies were unusual, and egrets and ring-necked parakeets unknown. Yellowhammers weren’t uncommon at all. The other books I treasured were the Observer books, affordable on a couple of weeks’ pocket money at 5 shillings a go, which tackled everything from Aircraft to Moths, Freshwater Fishes, Birds Eggs and Wild Animals – British, obviously. In those days moles were the villains, who desecrated golf courses and bowling greens, and we even had books in which country types wore moleskin weskits (waistcoats). Foxhunting wasn’t frowned on in pony books...

The last time I’d been in town, only a few days after the EU referendum, there’d been a fractured, distressed, angry vibe in the air. A confusion in the fabric of the country that I’d never sensed there before. Now, only eight days later, it was a sunny day as I waited between buses in town and that disturbance in the air’s molecules seemed to have gone. The next bus took me nine miles out into the pollen-crazed countryside. From there, the day’s tasks required me to walk another eight miles, across rough land with three-feet-high grass, up and down several very steep hills, following tractor tracks with my boots. Some of the walking had to be done on the main road and the worst section was the bypass by the village. Vehicles came past at 70 miles-per-hour, only inches away. Huge rural vehicles that might as well be lorries, and now and then a real lorry hurtling past. I tried to stay on the road, no pavement around obviously, but then a smell of meat filled the air halfwa...