October 2006

Sorry the column is late this month – it is what comes of moving house and finding that I wake up every morning with seven men  - if not exactly in my bed, then very near it.
   
I am going to be abroad much more for a while, but I have to get together a little fastness where I and my books can be stored when I am in the UK. The cats will travel with me and have PET PASSPORTS, which is daft, but at least means no quarantine.
  
My beloved Minnie-cat has been run down by the usual idiot-male driving too fast. I found her at my gate – her last act had been to jump over to get home. I do not want to remember that morning when I sleepily threw up the bathroom blind and saw the little tortoiseshell body on the gravel.
  
I ran outside, naked as I was, and scooped her up. There wasn’t a mark on her – the vet said it would have been internal bleeding.
  
She was the cat who understood English and explained to the other cats what was going on – so now I am slowly teaching the other cats English too, but it is hard.
  
Most days I said, ‘Come on Minnie, let’s go to the studio’, and she trotted after me to do some work. An animal helper is there in all the fairy tales, and I have lost mine.

There are people, plenty of them, who think an animal is a child substitute, or just a thing on four legs that is nice for the kids.
  
But a cat or a dog is not a substitute for anything – it is itself, and can be a place of both comfort and continuity. My Minnie cat is gone and although I have planted her under an apple tree, dappled like her, I cannot get used to working without her. I miss her very much and there isn’t such a thing as a Minnie substitute. I will find a special cat again, one day, and I will be lucky, but such a cat will not replace Minnie – the cat will be herself, different, maybe difficult, but decidedly her own.
  
Only crap, senseless hyper-capitalism reduces everything to interchangeable, buy-another-one, substitutes. But real things are whatever they are, and cannot be replaced in the way our simplistic value system pretends.
   
And love? Love is not confined to human beings; it is cross-species, and it belongs in nature too. We love what we love, and sometimes we are fortunate enough to be loved in return.

  
So I will leave my Minnie-cat there, and wish all of you well, who love the larger world, not confined to human beings. Never trust anyone who doesn’t like animals.  Beware of those indifferent to Nature. Help the kids you know to find a relationship with both, and come to value things outside the human sphere.

  
The great thing is I can say such things here, in a private space. If I printed that in a newspaper I’d have a bunch of puffy podgy pseudo-liberals lining me up with the animal rights bunch in balaclavas and moaning about health care in Africa, and single mums in tenement blocks, without making any connection between a deep indifference to the natural world and what it sustains and the miseries that then accrue to human beings.
  
Only Connect, as EM Forster said, is not something you can say to the urban self-righteous who see a green field and think – ‘we should build affordable housing on that’, or who swipe at animal charities for having the temerity to look after creatures for whom nothing is their own fault.
  
One of the charities I support is the Brooke Animal Charity, which helps animals in the poorest parts of the world, largely by treating their sores and damage, and teaching their owners how to look after them. This makes sense for everyone – a neglected donkey working in a brick kiln might only live for 2 miserable years. A healthy cared for donkey can work for 15 years.

Connections, connections – how we behave, how it affects others, how our actions here determine so much that happens in the poorest parts of the world, and then we rush out and do a lit Live Aid, or Band Aid, which is fine in a way, and means nothing in the longer term.
  
I don’t know why politicians are so scared of saying we shall have to live simple, less consuming lives. All the science-fixes there are can’t turn one planet into three, and whatever the space-boys think, there is no other home for us as yet.

I have installed my Rain Water Harvesting tank. Can anyone tell me why it attracts VAT at 17.5%? Why there aren’t any grants available for people who have the space to do it, but perhaps not the means?
  
No wonder I went to the Tory party conference – not because I am a Tory, but because our planet is worth more than anyone’s politics.

One good thing – if you live in the UK, why not switch your electricity supply to ECOTRICITY. Call 08000 326 100 or visit www.ecotricity.com. All their power comes from wind turbines sensibly erected (not on peat-bogs!) and with the support of the local communities where they are found. The more of us sign up to renewable energy suppliers, the more the government will have to take it seriously.

Ah well, back to books. There are too many of them – pointless, wasteful piles of books. If I going to sacrifice a tree, what’s written on it had better be worthwhile.

Don Paterson- a poet I love, has published a new collection, ORPHEUS, (Faber, UK), a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette An Orpheus. I have used one of his poems in our Poem of the Month. Order it on-line, or better still, find it at an independent bookshop. It will not disappoint anyone, and more than that, it will help, in the way that poetry does help – practical and to the point, and without waste.
  
So many wasted words…

You’ll find on the site this month my Introduction to a collection of essays etc about Tracey Emin’s work. TRACEY EMIN. WORKS 1963-2006. (Rizzoli). It’s an expensive book, but worth buying if you are interested in contemporary art – and love or hate our Tracey, you can’t ignore her, if art is what excites you.

What else? Only this – plant a tree, even if it is a conker or an acorn by the roadside.  It might grow, it might not, but nothing done with a good heart is wasted.