We may dote on livestock literature, but we’re not so kind to the real thing
Iquite like sheep, in moderation. Cows I can take or leave. And about Robbie Williams I have no particular views. In this I seem to be rather at odds with public opinion – or at least, with the opinion of the book-buying public, whose enthusiasm for
The Secret Life of Cows, an affectionate account of the idiosyncrasies of her herd by cattle farmer Rosamund Young, has sent the book swarming up the bestseller lists and turned it into the sleeper hit of the autumn. Meanwhile, the languishing sales of Robbie Williams’s autobiography are about to be overtaken by Young’s beguiling bovines.
The rise of a new genre of livestock literature is a curious phenomenon. Farm animals have always been a staple of children’s stories, from the flower-fancying Ferdinand the Bull and Hendrika, the intrepid Cow Who Fell in the Canal, to the Derby Ram and entire droves of pigs – EB White’s Wilbur, AA Milne’s Piglet, Dick King-smith’s Babe.
But now they have captured the grown-up imagination as well, with gritty accounts of tup-wrangling such as James Bebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life and Amanda Owen’s Yorkshire Shepherdess replacing celebrity memoirs as our favourite escapist reading. (Pigs, so nobly represented in adult fiction by the Empress of Blandings, have yet to break into non-fiction. But it cannot be long before some contemporary swineherd remedies the omission.)
As the showbiz stardust turns more toxic with every scabrous revelation of behind-the-scenes misdemeanours, it is hardly surprising that our fantasies should turn in more wholesome directions. Of course, there is a disconnect between reading about the rigours of farming and the real thing. As anyone who has ever endured lambing knows, there is nothing romantic about it when live, rather than literary, sheep are involved.
That in itself is not a problem: the purpose of books, after all, is to take us in imagination to places beyond our lived experience. The real difficulty comes when we don’t learn from what we read. As The Secret Life of Cows stormed the bestseller lists last week, MPS voted against a clause that would have enshrined the status of animals as “sentient beings” in UK law. In literature, we dote on our farmyard chums; in life, apparently not so much.
A mother whale carries her dead calf in her mouth – its death perhaps the result of a food chain polluted with toxic plastic; another whale has a fin entangled in a plastic bag. Anyone counting on Blue Planet II to provide warm and fuzzy end-of-weekend watching will have been dismayed by the grim evidence of the harm done to marine life by plastic. In this week’s Budget, the Chancellor is expected to announce a consultation on the taxing of singleuse plastics – coffee cups, drink bottles, and so on.
The 5p charge on plastic bags has proved entirely painless: almost everyone in my local supermarket now has what is known in Russia as a “perhaps bag” – a fabric shopping bag that folds away to nothing. Yet, as a correspondent to The Sunday Telegraph pointed out yesterday, if you shop at a supermarket, what goes into the perhaps bag comes swathed in unrecyclable plastic packaging. Even loose produce has to go into filmy plastic bags.
My local grocer provides brown paper bags, into which I can put exactly as much stuff as I need. If he can do it, why not the virtue-signalling behemoths of Waitrose and M&S?