Country Mouse
COVID-19 left some silver linings in the wake of its carnage.
It seems that many normally slothful Britons are now ‘woke’ vis-à-vis the natural world. Forced to pretend that they wanted to take one hour of exercise outside as an excuse to leave the house under lockdown, they stirred their stumps and found they actually enjoyed it.
Capitalising on this new tendency, Boris has rolled out an Obesity Charter to get us all shedding our COVID stones. We must all take more exercise, he decrees.
And, this autumn, Environment Secretary George Eustice plans to milk even more out of the new nature-wokeness.
Since 1998, eight out of ten GPS in New Zealand have practised ‘Green prescribing’ for depressives. Now a UK trial will do the same. GPS will try diverting patients away from the surgery and medication and into the Great Outdoors. They will ‘prescribe’ walking and cycling as better means to raise the spirits.
Speaking personally, on leaving my own mini-demesne, I have to go at least five furlongs before I can un-shield my eyes and allow them to feast on anything that will raise my spirits.
First, I have to pass through a sinister prairie of corn-on-the-cob plants, each one taller than a man, standing in serried ranks like triffids and all being grown not for food – but for the generation of tiny amounts of electricity.
I am reminded of the words of the American naturalist Aldo Leopold – ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’
Where can we Britons find the Great Outdoors? Certainly not down south, where years of agricultural intensification have wrecked so many shire counties. The lifeless monoculture badlands will do nothing to allay depression and may indeed exacerbate it.
In the past, a walk in a country village might have done the trick, but what is it that makes people conflate land clipped and shorn to within a centimetre of its life, so it resembles the putting green of a golf course, with virtue? The Campaign to Protect Rural England and its well-intentioned – although now outdated – Best Kept Village competition, which originated in the 1970s, is partly to blame.
Old habits die hard: at a time when almost every gardening guru is declaring that the over-manicured look is not only passé but unecological, the delusion that it is praiseworthy persists. Hats off, incidentally, to Caring for God’s Acre, a conservation group that has been successfully publicising the potential of the ‘wild’ churchyard as a reservoir of biodiversi-lover and daisies.
Depressives would do best, prescribes Dr Wood, to seek out rough-land countryside for their walks. We can’t all go to Knepp Castle, the ne plus ultra of rough lands, but nondescript, overlooked bits and pieces abound.
I point to my own spinney, which is bisected by a public footpath. Bathed, as it currently is, in the heady scent of linden, it would certainly raise spirits.
Remedial effects can reliably be found on the South Downs, the heather moorlands of Shropshire and along our coastline. Riparian walks and canal towpaths usually pay dividends.
Also look out for abandoned fields. Even a minimal relaxation of grasscutting regimes will increase insect pollinators looking for self-heal.
Last week, I was emboldened to lead a party of trespassers into a field of oilseed rape whose characteristic bad-egg smell was being pleasantly overpowered by an infestation of scented mayweed. Here was a display of bio-abundance to induce exhilaration as thousands of cabbagewhite butterflies wheeled pell-mell around our merry band.
This strange period we are living through has been described by scientists as the anthropause, meaning that we have temporarily paused the destructive power of the human juggernaut. This should not be confused with the andropause, which has to do with declining hormonal levels in older men – also known as puberty in reverse.
And even if the slowdown in human activity is only temporary, it has already had beneficial impacts. One minor example: more sightings of the usually shy stoat which, with its handsome waistcoat, has suddenly become an inquisitive extrovert.
But there has been absolutely no pause in anthro-activities beyond my garden gate where noises of strimming and mowing have quadrupled.
The Big House gardener was bemused to see his master mowing again, two days after he himself had mown to perfection. The master explained that he was doing it to ‘freshen up the stripes’.
Perhaps the impulse to cut and slash long grass is epigenetic, based on a fear of lurking vipers. The Great Outdoors UK is not devoid of health risks. A snake bite presents a negligible risk, but a deer or sheep tick might turn into the increasingly prevalent Lyme disease. The bewildering array of symptoms leaves it difficult to diagnose and the recovery period lengthy and complex enough to rival that of COVID-19 itself.
I concede that the visible progress made possible by power tools may be irresistible, too. And there’s the noise. My father, Godfrey, had a habit of using a strimmer only at weekends – we suspected to signal to his nearest neighbours, who wouldn’t have been around to hear it on weekdays since they were out at work – that he too was a busy man.