11. Jan, 2020

A Year in the Life of a Year reflections

'A Year in the Life of a Year' seems an apt title for various commentaries on the last at the start of the new in 2020 and, as you learn in every documentary, about nature or man, all things work in predictable cycles triggered by predictable or unpredictable things, once you know how it works.

This nature programme's images were of painterly beauty, catching transience as painstakingly as a landscape artist's oils might, to create layers of perfect photographic moments. It follows, from the first of January,  the Winter to Winter progress of wildlife living in an abandoned First World War airfield near London, its very setting lyrically suggestive of a wistful secret garden presently unpredated by the humans who built it for the purposes of fighting in the skies, and who flitted from it to live or die up there.  They are all long gone and since nobody is hunting them except themselves, fairytale animals and birds live in its thickets and on the grassy plain; deer, hares, badgers, foxes, owls and falcons, voles and moles all flourish there.  Infrared cameras are now so sophisticated that we can see the creatures by night in silvery, almost phosphorescent edged shapes gleaming against the cold white of dark, while they can only scent each other and listen for the telltale coming of a hunter.  A hare and her leveret are nervous of the unseen fox and badger who almost brush pass each other as, spooked by their own picking up of the other's smell in the air, the two would be baby snatchers run away. The barn owl, unperturbed, glides with spectral grace across the field, knowing exactly where the hidden mice will be and happily, the leveret survives for that time.  It's Winter and the filming creates a magical portrait of the English countryside, where frost fields grow their ice crystals in slow motion, or as Spring comes, catkins' soft fur pods open to pollenate female flowers in the coming sunshine.  Filming visits Cumbria, where red squirrels scamper delightfully across the lichen covered tombstones of another vanished human community in a churchyard but, as always in reality, there is a survival mechanism at work.  The ones without buried nuts to eat are watching where those who have them are digging or burying them with a view to a raid. Back at the airfield, a Barn Owl, one of two resident there, watches with what seems a look of anxious envy from its perch in an empty window frame as a Short Eared day time hunting owl pair, saucer faced and yellow eyed with oddly stumpy bodies in what is still a graceful flight, get at its intended supper first.  

This programme was a welcome antidote to a two part documentary I had been watching previously, again about a vanished human community but this one had self immolated, not in war but in Jonestown, one of those, still, to me, mysteries about how narcissistic oddballs and outsiders manage to garner a following and create a messianic cult which always implodes with the increasing psychosis of the sadistic paranoid who has got a grip of them. When cult members realise the tide has turned to totalitarian control by a derangedly egotistical misfit, that leader has already built up some kind of army of enforcers and created mistrust among everybody by informers infiltrating the the whole set up to save themselves and please, in this case 'Father', and by now, they have been living well away from reality for so long they don't know what's true and what isn't about what propoganda is fed to them.  Chillingly, for me, when you closed your eyes as Jim Jones was ranting on with that hypocritically pious, patriotically grandiose note which infiltrates many such speakers' performances, be they president or preacher, his tone and wording was like listening to Trump today.  Worrying but very America.     

I wonder why America in particular seems so prone to such cults developing, perhaps its vastness and (to use a phrase overused to the point of vacuity) 'vibrant and diverse' communities with their social and economic polarities lend the country to it.  But then, yesterday, in Manchester, for the second time I'm accosted by some young woman asking me if I've heard of 'the Mother God'.  After the first time I looked it up so I knew it was another "mad, bad and dangerous to know" cult, this time South Korean in origin and started by a woman, where yes, you have to find the time to live well before the world ends by giving them all your wordly goods and joining them.  I refused the leaflet and suggested she should clear her head of all that rubbish while she still could.  She told me I couldn't tell her what to believe.  I told her it was a pity that someone else had but there I had to leave it.

America is a place of enormous differences, though, as shown in another documentary, where Monty Don the gardener is visiting American gardens of note, revealing the positive side of what he referred to as 'the pioneering spirit'.  Monty analysed this as conquering the wild and nature but with an open, community feeling principle at the heart of it and so he was particularly uplifted, as I was viewing it, by young folk creating roof top veg. gardens in New York; a local, resident run food, flower and come one come all feasting place in the Bronx; a wild salt marsh garden haven for natural habitat in wealthy Long Island and one its tickled owner referred to as having been written of as 'A Good for Nothing Garden' because it had no purpose except to be a kind of garden in the weeds that dominated the land there.  Monty asked why Americans had a tradition of unenclosed front lawns shared in front of houses and that same open, neighbourly outlook was referenced.  He loved the white picket fence bordering a perfect lawn and flowerbeds in one astonishing garden, a mix of English country house landscape and tropical blooms, only today, for practical purposes, the fence was plastic rather than wood.   It's the 2020s now, so modernity is a-comin'.