On Saturday The mystery of our merciless barbarity

APRIL showers used to behave themselves, rarely escaping the month in which they were born. Now they’ve taken over, and they’re a pain. Constant days of intermittent rain are a problem for anyone who regularly spends time outdoors.

I write these words gazing at the bright Exmoor valley which sparkles outside. The sun is out and it still has a warmth, despite November being just a few days away. The sunshine is illuminating all those golden autumn leaves and I would go out this minute. But...

There’s a whacking great big black cloud heading this way. And it is not the sort of cloud that seems to say: “I may deposit a little precipitation in your direction, or I may not. I’ll see how the mood takes me when I’m above your place.”

It is an angry, purplish, sergeantmajor of a cloud that growls: “If you dare walk even a few yards up the track I’ll make sure you get soaked to the skin.”

It will rain heavily. But only for a limited period. Then there’ll be another blast of sunshine. Then more wet stuff. And so on. Because, as I’ve complained many times, spring showers are the West Country’s new default weather system.

My sympathies go to anyone who works outdoors. How are you meant to deal with such contrasting conditions? Even if you’re going out for leisure purposes, it’s a nightmare. The dog needs walking – so you don your waterproof gear, only to start sweating in half-an-hour of sunshine.

All you can do to avoid feeling agitated is to remember that this is a very mild, soft-edged, English kind of problem. Elsewhere in the world people are dying in droughts. They would give anything for our patchy rain. Other places are hit by such violent downpours, entire communities are washed away. We really mustn’t complain.

I was reminded of how amazingly fortunate we have been to avoid large-scale natural disasters recently while standing in a ruined building. The empty wreck was on the shores of the Indian Ocean. No one had bothered with the house since it was overwhelmed by the tsunami of 2004. A Sri Lankan who was with us said the wall of water was three storeys high. As we drove along a lane which wound its way from the coast, we discovered that in places the terrifying inundation had swept a couple of miles inland. No one on that wide flat expanse of coastal plain under the coconut palms near Peraliya (where 1,700 people perished in a single drowned train) was safe from its watery grip. Thousands died.

So, moaning about an overdose of spring showers does seem pathetic. But then, we humans are just clever animals who’ve learned to communicate. If we hadn’t invented all our wonderful gizmos we wouldn’t have a clue what terrible things were happening in other places. The person who first lived in my house when it was built 250 years ago wouldn’t have known what was happening the other side of the hills, let alone thousands

Moaning about an overdose of spring showers does seem pathetic

of miles away. But we have invented all those gizmos, so we do know what’s happening around the globe. Live pictures of the most awful things have been beamed into my living room just about every time I’ve turned on the TV recently.

And here’s me moaning about spring showers! What’s falling on my head when I do take the dog out will be nothing more than a few droplets of water. There are places on this planet where the stuff falling from the skies is made of metal and explosives.

It’s a dichotomy no other species has to deal with. Each of us can say: here’s me, here’s my experience of what’s happening right now. In my case, those constant showers are looming large. But we can also say: here’s me – and I am aware of terrible things that are happening to my fellow humans in other places right now, and they are making me angry, sad, perplexed and confused.

There’s a brilliant early segment in the original Space Odyssey movie which occurs shortly after a mysterious monolith arrives on Earth. A group of apes approaches the black pillar and, soon after, one of them picks up a large bone and seems to realise he can use it as a club or weapon. In the next scene he’s beating another ape to death. His mates join in, grabbing bone-weapons as they quickly and effectively destroy the neighbouring tribe. The monolith has somehow triggered this terrible and historic moment when the apes who became humans learned to use a superior form of violence in order to have their own way.

Of course it didn’t happen as West Somerset’s Arthur C Clarke suggested it might in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it is an amazing bit of Hollywood shorthand that somehow manages to depict the mystery of our merciless barbarity.

How did we really develop our potential for carnage? And why do we keep doing it?

Outside movies, the appetite humans have for making life difficult and dangerous seems to have had no beginning and it threatens to have no end.

Which is why it is so tempting to bury our heads in the sand and worry about the weather.