Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson November 05
IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN meteorological fact that we never have easterly gales in Strathtay in the three weeks straddling the beginning of November. I know this because I look hopefully at the forecast every year and yet it never happens.
Just beyond the end of the garden sits an enormous copper beech and those are the weeks when it sheds its leaves. Every year they are dumped in vast, rustling heaps on our lawn. If they went the other way they’d have a virtually clear run to Loch Tay, but they don’t.
There’s no gate I can open so that they continue their journey off the premises so I am left to rake them up. It used not to bother me since raking them up demands a level of skill with which I am comfortable but, over the years, I am slowly building up a resentment, both towards the tree and the wind. I doubt if either is much troubled. |
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Uncle George made his annual visitation here a couple of weeks ago. His perspective on life is different from ours since he’s lived in Kenya for more than 50 years. Sometimes his preoccupation is water - he marvels at the vast amount we have here. Sometimes it’s AIDS which he sees cutting a swath through the productive population at home. This year it was too many people. When he went to East Africa in the early 1950s, the population of Kenya was roughly the same as in Scotland, round about the 5 million mark. Here it’s still much the same. There it’s now approaching 35 million. And such increases are the norm south of the Sahara.
Imagine the impact that a sevenfold rise in population would have had in this country over the past half century. Seven times the number of people living in the central belt. Seven times the number of people in Strathtay or Pitlochry. It’s an extraordinary idea. How hard would it have been to provide jobs, education and housing for all those extra folk? How hard would it have been to feed them?
And Scotland would have started out as a fully industrialised country which was certainly not the case in Kenya. Add to that a ruling class whose members are into Swiss bank accounts rather than taxi fiddles and some idea of the dreadful pickle that much of Africa is in can be understood.
There’s now concern that fresh water in sub-Saharan Africa is running out. Lake Victoria, for example, which covers about the same area as Scotland, is predicted to degenerate to swamp within a lifetime.
Nobody has a clue what to do about it. Prosperity is the only factor that seems to stop population growth and there’s no sign of that in Africa. Uncle George recommends doling out condoms along with bags of maize to the hungry but that would require some 30 billion sheathes a year and results would take decades to filter through. And the missionaries, now mainly fundamentalist American Protestants, follow the Catholics in opposing any attempts to limit the creation of as many souls as possible to worship their Lord.
Africa has always been subject to drought, famine and locusts. All those ancient enemies are still there but many times more people are now at risk. It’s another of those occasions where one can only thank the stars for having the good fortune to be born in this country
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I’m short-sighted. I had a eureka moment round about the age of nine when I peered through the specs of a four-eyed git of my acquaintance and saw that trees were covered by individual leaves rather than amorphous blobs of green. You fear you look a prat at that age if you wear glasses but the pleasure in actually having crisp vision far outweighed the downside. So I have been a speccie ever since. I tried contact lenses for a year when I lived in London but found that the accuracy of vision was not so good. It also meant that the Tube was scarcely usable since an approaching train was preceded by a blast of warm air laden with decades of dust and dirt which ended up acting as emery paper in my eyes.
I’ve never really minded wearing specs. It can be a bore if it’s raining. It’s also a bore when they steam up or you sit on them but I’ve had enough rose branches slap across my nose or splinters ping off the lenses to know that they have protected me from harm more than once. An advantage of short sight is that one can focus about half an inch in front of your face which has been useful for threading needles, reading tiny print, mending watches and suchlike.
One of the indications of passing years is increasing long-sightedness which means that everyone ends up with spectacles, if only for reading. But, in my case, the long-sightedness is cancelling out the short-sightedness. I’ve been half expecting such an event for many years but it’s actually happening. I was rather unnerved to discover a couple of weeks ago that, for the first time in my life, I am now legally able to drive bare-eyed. Sans specs I can now read a number plate at the required 67 feet and can see a pheasant sufficiently far in advance to hit it without difficulty.
Just the same, I wouldn’t dream of going out in the car without specs. It may satisfy the law to be able to see at 67 feet, but it seems grossly inadequate to me and it is alarming to think of those blurry-eyed souls coming at me in the opposite direction.
And why 67 feet or 21.5 metres? Was this figure the product of a learned conference under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1938? Was there a brisk negotiation between supporters of 60 feet and those of 75
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