NATURE

My name is Harry Medium. I enjoy music and films and Doctor Who. And food – I loooove to eat. I’d like to think that I’m an enlightened chap, I’d like to think I’m a good person but as I get older I find myself getting grumpier and generally more like Heathcliffe from off of that Wuthering Heights by that Emily Bronte. I think he had several good points to make.

People annoy me. Relentlessly. If I met you, you’d annoy me. I guarantee it.

Something that annoys me more than people is cruelty to animals, usually by people not by other animals. I would avoid an argument wherever possible in everyday life, I’m not keen on confrontation. But when I have had a go at someone it’s always been because of animals. Once upon a time I barged through a crowd of students (I'm generalising here - they may not have been students but they were definitely "youths") who were throwing stones at swans and apologised for “interrupting your fun”. I think they got the message but I was wearing Buddy Holly-esque specs at the time, and it may have taken some of the impact of my scolding away. I also seem to remember that I’d got a bit of a beery tummy, and I’d had to undo the button on my jeans. I probably looked weird. Maybe my point was lost. I hope not.

I consider that humans, in general, should be more enlightened – it’s simple, isn’t it? I have the choice, as someone of medium intelligence, whether to hurt or kill something. I choose not to. The only thing that would change this is if the situation I was in was kill or be killed. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll get mauled by a tiger on Monks Road. So I choose not to hurt things, easy. Come to think of it, if that situation did arise I’m pretty sure that I would be tiger lunch before I could do anything about it. Maybe I could hope to fill him up with an arm or a leg and then drag myself away to the relative safety of the Co-Op. Although the prices in there! That might finish me off.

But bear with me; I am actually leading to a point. I have started to find that I’m fighting nature. I heard a weird buzzing coming from one of my windows the other day. I went to have a look and a spider had made his little webby home inside the window and an unlucky fly had wandered into it. The spider was pleased – he’d got a decent meal out of it – but I had to stand nearby listening in distress until the buzzing stopped and I knew the fly had been put out of its misery. I still think about that fly.

The amount of damage I have probably done by trying to save animals from potential dangers; the legs that have fallen off Daddy Longlegs as I try to waft them out of the window, the snail that has fallen to it’s doom as I try and move it to a nice safe plant, the moths wings ruined as I try to save them from the heat of the uplighter bulb. I even try to help wasps – and I hate wasps. What is the point of them? Does anyone even know?

The thing is I now feel guilty about not being able to help. That’s stupid I know, nature is very natural, some might say that nature is the most natural thing in the world. So why do I feel like that?

I have always treated my cats like another member of the family, and I know that we people of the west have done that for some time, on the whole. In this period of the post-nuclear family we do (or I do, at the very least) put human qualities onto our animals. I do it all the time and it’s not just because I am a fan of Watership Down and The Plague Dogs (two films GUARANTEED to have me blubbing harder than a whale on a bonfire).

Our hamster recently died (miss you, Melvyn) and it was an important lesson to my five year old as we went somewhere nice and buried him. Under a tree, next to a river. We had to find somewhere that he’d like to live. Then we went and got an ice cream.

I think that - for me at least – animals are the true innocents of this planet that we call The Earth. They only act out of instinct, whether that instinct be to eat something or run away from something that wants to eat them. They don’t have political agendas. They don’t want to impress you on Facebook or convince you to change your gas supplier. And depending on who you believe they have been given the short end of the stick by us humans, what with us destroying their habitats and pulling them out of the sea to eat and stuff. The ironic thing is there’s always more sea coming at us, but apparently less stuff in it.

Maybe it boils down to the fact that animals are more enlightened than we are. They definitely wouldn’t be interested in reading this. More fool them. Actually, no – that proves it: due to their lack of moaning they are definitely more enlightened than me. Flip.

Er.....hang on....

This thing still exists????

It's five and a half years later. I have greyer hair and beard.

Nothing else has changed.


In the interests of nostalgia, I am leaving the lists of songs...I mean posts below for your delight and delictation (don't read them).