The danger that is everywhere
What links the following: endangered birds, a plump young man, an excited crocodile, and a story you won’t believe? I expect you’ve guessed already, but let’s start with the birds.
Someone in Lyttelton throws crusts onto the road every night. The birds arrive at dawn. So do I, driving my dog to the waterfront. I round the bend and there’s a scrapping mob in front of me, seagulls, sparrows, starlings, proletarian birds, unfussy birds, birds just getting by, like most of us in this life.
I am bearing down on them at the speed of a charging predator. They notice me only at the last moment. When they are all but under my bumper, they erupt in winged panic. I tense against the impact and pass right over them, then look in the mirror for the carnage. I’ve never yet hit a bird.
How they escape I don’t know. It is always appallingly close. If you or I came that close to death during breakfast we’d need a liedown. If we came that close every breakfast, we’d need a counsellor and diazepam. But the birds are blithe. They accept risk. They know nothing of rights. No one promised them safety. They live by their wits in the moment. It keeps them sleek and beautiful. Fat birds die.
Which brings me to the plump young man. At the height of summer he was back-filling a trench in my lawn in which pipe had been laid. It was 30 degrees in the shade and there wasn’t any. In his long-sleeved hi-viz jacket the young man was sweating like a kettle and his face had assumed a hue that a paint catalogue might describe as cherry ripe, or, if it were in poetic mood, cardiac arrest.
Dreading the inconvenience of a corpse on the lawn, I took him a cold drink. For a second I thought he would kiss me.
Why didn’t he, I asked as he inhaled the drink, here on my property 50 metres from the road where the only danger was of tripping over a snoozing dog, remove his hi-viz jacket?
Not allowed, he said. Safety. Or just roll up the sleeves? Not allowed, he said. Safety. I see, I said, and left him to die. I saw the crocodile the other afternoon in town. It consisted of excited primary children. They went in pairs, hand in hand, a teacher at the nose and tail, and along the flanks a host of clucking mothers. A traditional endearing sight.
It was a cool and cloudy day. Yet each child wore a hat against the sun. And children, teachers and mothers, all of them, wore a plastic overvest of such tangerine brightness it watered the eye. This crocodile was visible from space.
By now of course, you have noted the link. And if you haven’t, well, I fear you won’t. But I’ll still tell the story that you won’t believe, because I am wondering whether it marks a sociological tipping point.
I attended a state school in the south of England. In the fifth form we had to spend Friday afternoons pretending to be soldiers. Most boys went into the army section which specialised in marching, cleaning rifles and boredom. But there was one attraction. Every year the army boys would be let loose on the world in pairs. Their mission was to travel as far as possible and back in 24 hours. Public transport was forbidden. In other words they had to hitchhike.
But the birds are blithe. They accept risk. They know nothing of rights. They live by their wits in the moment. It keeps them sleek and beautiful. Fat birds die.
They also had to bring back authenticated written evidence from the furthest place they reached. Naturally some kids stayed home and forged it. But most plunged happily into the waters of chance and would bring back a post office stamp from as far away as Yorkshire, a round trip of 500 miles. It was an adventure to look forward to.
But then, when I was still in the fourth form – and this is the bit that you are not going to believe – some mothers complained. They said the exercise was dangerous. Attentive readers will recall that in a recent column I called for parents to be kept out of schools. This is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind.
The school authorities capitulated. The mission was canned, never to be revived. And I am wondering now whether I have identified the moment in history when we first grew scared of our own shadow. The year was 1971. Was it then that the rich West started to shrink from the world it had evolved in, to see danger everywhere, to shudder at chance and to cling, quivering and whimpering, to the illusory god of safety?
I think it may be so.