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Yesterday I went on a pilgrimage to Ripon with my husband, in quest of bees. We (I say ‘we’ – he is the bee-keeper, the one who has acquired the considerable amount of scientific knowledge needed and has the requisite patience; I am the bee-keeper’s assistant, so can get by on more limited quantities of both and shirk my duties if I feel like it.) started keeping bees a number of years ago, with reasonable success. However, the terrible winter and very wet spring here took their toll and, like many beekeepers, we suffered losses.

Because, according to the press, some 80% of the nation’s bee colonies perished this winter, ‘supply and demand’ now dictates that the cost of a ‘nucleus’ colony is very high (up to £250) and it’s definitely a sellers’ market. Hobby beekeeping isn’t cheap anyway, with hives, frames and beekeeping paraphernalia. The equipment is, to me, like something designed by Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg and I’m not surprised it’s pricey, given the frankly bizarre design of smokers, heated honey-capping knives, centrifugal honey extraction drums and solar wax melters; the few existing suppliers who have cornered the market definitely call the shots. Anyone thinking of starting up should throw those rose-tinted, back-to-nature, self-sufficiency specs away and go for crystal clear lenses. Then there are the bees themselves: they aren’t like kittens; they don’t come out to melt you with their charms when you are trying to decide whether to offer them a home and they don’t take kindly to being shipped by car and bumped around, before being hoiked out of one temporary home and bundled into another. Though some strains of bee, such as the Italian ‘ligustica’, are more gentle, bees tend to be ‘mongrels’ with very variable temperaments; sometimes a queen bee has genes with an attitude problem. So, though you might dream of summer days and drowsing in the garden sunshine, imagining yourself transported to the Mediterranean by the murmuring of the apiarian equivalent of the Italian soldiers in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the reality can be more like taking on the aliens in Independence Day or WWII kamikaze pilots, hell-bent on taking you out even at the cost of their own lives. Think high-pitched incoming whine and be prepared to take cover. Unhappy bees do not subscribe to the concept that assault and battery is a crime. They just do it.

However, for those of us who do love bees and have become used to their temperamental ways and needs, caution is the watchword, and we pulled the plug on the travelling box and retreated quickly to a very safe distance. They’ve settled in already. Apparently, they get their bearings by flying backwards the first time that they leave the hive, to note where they are as they look back on it. They are remarkable creatures: they’re incomplete individually, but together comprise what is known as a superorganism. Each worker has her own task to perform and this changes over time as she ages, becoming finally a nectar- and pollen-gathering ‘forager’. The male ‘drones’ have their moment of glory, flying with the virgin queen to enable her to mate with several of them, before dying a gloriously sexy death (genitalia ripped right out of them!), or never doing anything until they are kicked out by the workers in the autumn so that they don’t deplete precious food reserves over the winter. I’m not a feminist by any means, but I can think of a few men whose families would benefit from similar summary treatment!

Because of the way in which they organise their lives and collaborate, bees have cropped up in art and literature from earliest times. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics feature bees; the early Greek writers celebrated them in song and verse. In more recent times, Alexandra Kollontai used the bee colony as a metaphor for life and love in Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution, in her masterpiece Love of Worker Bees.

Bees are a joyful trouble. If they’re successful, they swarm, and the bee-keeper, in hot pursuit, has to shin up trees or plunge into thickets, hanging on precariously with one hand as he tries to trap them in a traditional straw ‘skep’ or a cardboard box. (You notice I say ‘he’ – this is emphatically not this beekeeper’s assistant’s job – though I know that there are many very skilled female beekeepers.) They suffer from a parasite called varroa mite, on which war has to be waged all the time if the colony is to flourish. Bees eat unconscionable quantities of sugar syrup during the autumn and often yield only a few small jars of honey per hive in return, but the benefits of their wider gifts to agriculture and the environment are incalculably great.

And I have to admit, in spite of all those expenses and troubles, now that the garden is once again a-buzz with murmuring bees, it feels as if the summer has begun in earnest at last.

Some creatures capture the human imagination more readily than others. Hares have always been magical, perhaps because of their singular behaviour during the spring, perhaps because of the magnificent way in which they will sit up on their hind legs in a field, catch a whiff or a glimpse of danger and bound away, leaping and weaving, ducking and taking advantage of cover and terrain, to throw any would-be pursuers off the scent; most mystical of all, the near-silent pair dance through a woodland glade, for once so mutually bonding that a standing human watcher is passed unnoticed. By comparison, the rabbit is streets behind in the enigma stakes. He shuffles and bobs about, waving his scut ineffectually and, as soon as he takes fright, scampers off with no pretence at dignity or even of making a measured retreat.

Domestic animals exercise similarly varying effects upon the fancy. I’ve never been close to horses, but I can see why people say that they’re noble. There’s a certain stolid majesty about cows as they stand grazing and gazing; pigs endear with their uncannily human-like squabbles. However, farmyard animals generally don’t bring with them the same depth of historical literary allusion, maybe because writers of earlier generations were more accustomed to draw their metaphors from the wild, maybe because we know that the cows and pigs and horses of, say, late mediaeval England bore only a generic resemblance to the ones that we see today. For at least the last two hundred years animal husbandry has involved the intensively selective breeding of farm animals in order to accentuate their most marketable and productive features: today’s cows and sheep are very different from those that feature in eighteenth century paintings; pigs are bred to yield less fatty meat as dietary preferences change. There’s also often a kind of placidity about the creatures found on the modern farm, as if they understand and have accepted that their purpose in life is to bend to the will of their human masters in return for plenty of good food.

Bulls are an exception, of course. I’ve known some very tricky bulls, especially those unpredictable Channel Islands fellows, only too ready to vent on unwary passers-by their frustration and bad tempers. When a bull catches your eye and rolls his own, stamps his hoof and tosses his head – or makes any of these movements – you know at once that discretion is the better part of valour and that, if there is no stile nearby, your best bet is to dive over the nearest hedge or barbed wire fence, a few nasty scratches being preferable to serious injury or death. Bulls in stalls can be even more irate and the escape routes more limited; during my youth, I knew of several Lincolnshire farmers who were gored by bulls in the byre, one of them fatally. The bull does not take kindly to having his masculinity compromised. Yet still they are domesticated, at least in the sense that they look nothing like their forbears.

One creature, however, that evokes for me all the mystery and romance, the pomp and pride as well as the murderousness, of the Middle Ages, is the cock. I’m well aware that chickens have also been subject to generations of selective breeding techniques designed to improve either the laying-power of the hens or the quality of meat for the pot; yet a proud cock, strutting among his hens, still seems to carry the primeval stamp of his ancient forefathers. He shakes his comb and wattles menacingly at impertinent human observers; he preens and poses in the midst of his harem, spurs sharp and threatening. He is a fighter; barbarously, his fighting instinct has been exploited by men until quite recent times. It is the cock who, through the ages, has serenaded the dawn and it is for this, above all else, that he has secured his pole position in the literary canon. From Aesop’s fighting cocks to the rooster after whose third crow Simon Peter betrayed Christ (unusually, all four Gospels agree about this), to Chaucer’s Chauntecleer to stories from other cultures, such as the generations-old Indian story of the cock and the hen, cocks have always crowed and have always been part of myth and fable, woven by talented narrators into great tall stories.

I met a particularly handsome Chanticleer yesterday, when visiting one of my oldest friends, who lives in Lancashire. I’ve taken his picture. Chaucer would have loved him.

This spring continues to be extraordinary. Yesterday evening, I was out walking the dog and had almost reached home again when I heard my first cuckoo of the year. In farming communities, it’s traditional to note down when this happens, so, to be precise, the time was 19.10 on May 30th 2013. I heard it again in the early hours of this morning, just as the dawn was breaking. (In the one day left of May, ‘he sings all day’!) Every year cuckoos come to call around the village, but this must be my latest first hearing in all the twenty years of my residence. I wonder if cuckoos are also behindhand because of the late spring and whether their June ‘changed tune’ (with an extra ‘cuk’) will be delayed until July?

Cuckoos are fascinating. The name itself, so precise in its onomatopoeic evocation of the call, is exotic. They are beautiful arboreal birds, shy of humans: I’ve seen them on only a few occasions, years apart. They’re pale grey in colour, with a gorgeous dark barred pale underbelly, and have a hawk-like flight and perching posture. What captured my imagination as a primary school child and still beguiles me is their anti-social behaviour. They are the vandals and parasites of the bird world, each one performing its own microcosmic act of ethnic cleansing. The females plant a single egg in the nest of a (usually) much smaller bird, such as a dunnock or a pipit; then, when the chick hatches, it dominates proceedings, diverting with a huge and gaping maw the host parents’ attention from their own offspring before turfing the latter, eggs and/or nestlings, out of the nest, thereby guaranteeing itself a monopoly on the food supply. What is strange is that the foster parents don’t seem to notice, instead running themselves ragged to feed a chick that soon grows to be much bigger than they are.

‘A cuckoo in the nest’ was an expression that I heard a lot when I was a child. It was used to describe someone – often male – whose self-indulgent behaviour and habits were spoiling things for the rest of the family or community: a heavy drinker or a work shirker, for example. It had various gradations of meaning: it was a bit like ‘fly in the ointment’, only more so; it also had overtones of the now over-used ‘the elephant in the room’ – although the latter saying implies that no-one is prepared to mention whatever it is that the elephant represents, which is not typical of forthright Lincolnshire folk. ‘Cuckoo’ is slang (particularly in America) for ‘crazy’, hence the title of the book and film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’; but in Lincolnshire dialect, someone saying ‘You’re a cuckoo’ (as opposed to ‘You’re cuckoo’), was paying you the compliment of calling you witty, or was amused by something that you’d just said. (A variant of this was ‘You’re a caution’.)

So, are cuckoos lovable or not? I think that they remain a puzzle: an enigmatic variant of Nature that has got by without obeying the rules. Like people who live by their wits, they expend a great deal of energy on not paying their way: energy that could equally well be expended on working within society instead of preying on it. Instead, once they’ve deposited their eggs – each female lays up to twelve – they swan off (so to speak!) to tropical Africa, where they spend nine months sunning themselves, the ornithological equivalent of the idle rich. I realise that I’m straying into dangerously anthropomorphic territory here, but it strikes me that the cuckoo is the Raffles of the bird world.

Cuckoos are fast declining in number and I am the more excited, therefore, when I hear their call; they are so traditionally part of an English spring that I hope we don’t lose them.

Motive is a fascinating part of murder, because it is bound up with the psychology of the killer. I find myself thinking of the motives that have driven people to dispose of others: resentment, hatred, envy, greed, retaliation, revenge, fear, anger… very human emotions that we all experience at one time or another, thankfully without fatalities. But what is it that pushes someone beyond the self-control that limits the majority? If we are to believe some crime fiction and the apparent evidence of real cases, there is sometimes the desire for fame, or notoriety, but this is perhaps very rare, if true at all.

Of course, investigators of murder cases think very closely indeed about motive, as that may well point to the perpetrator, or at least narrow down the possibilities: Who might have had a grudge? Who was close to the victim, by kin- or friendship? Who might have gained from the death?

These days, unfortunately, there are more frequently political motives for murder, when reason is overpowered by belief, and we might well gasp in astonishment that anyone could be fanatical enough to take a life in so public a way as last week in Woolwich. Most murderers seek anonymity.

It’s common to hear people say, “I’d kill for a… beer, a smoke, a cup of tea, a Mars Bar”, but the statement’s intentional hyperbole confirms its lack of seriousness. However, I have heard one person say, quite matter-of-factly and without any obvious intent to shock, that he could kill, full stop. Needless to say, I found his comment quite unnerving and, after considering the kind of person he seemed to be, not beyond the bounds of possibility. I have also turned the focus upon myself and asked myself if I could kill and, if yes, under what circumstances and with what motive? Crime of passion? Maternal defence of child? Revenge for abuse? Being for some reason or another at wits’ end? And if I were to commit murder, would I do it in a calculated way so as to minimise the risk of detection? Here I am, essentially a very pacific person, heading the way madness lies; however, as a crime writer, I do spend time on self-analysis, the better to understand the minds of my fictional characters.

Regular readers of this blog will see a link here with my recent rhubarb post, which of course was tongue-in-cheek stuff, and might now be determining never to cross my path. Fear not, whatever murderous intentions I have will be sated with words.

It’s just occurred to me that it’s been a long time since the last Crimewatch programme, so I’ve looked it up on the BBC website and discovered that the next episode will be on Thursday.  Something to look forward to later in the week!  For visitors from overseas, this appeal programme features real unsolved crimes and asks for help from the public to pinpoint the perpetrators.

I’ve been a Crimewatch fan almost since it began.  In the early days, I was attending quite a demanding evening class and would rush home afterwards to see it.  I always missed the first twenty minutes or so, which made the remainder of the programme all the more enjoyable.  I don’t like the glitzier image of recent years as much as the more straightforward regime presided over by Nick Ross, but I still hate to miss it.  This week’s episode is on the rise of mobile phone thefts, apparently, which doesn’t sound riveting… but we shall see!

I haven’t often been bored by Crimewatch, but I do favour some of the regular sections over others.  I like the rogues’ gallery, because it’s fun to speculate and put the face to the crime – though I realise that such games are purely subjective, for one thing, and, for another, fail to take into account the fact that police mugshots, like passport photographs, are bound to look sinister, because the subject is forbidden to smile.  I’m always absorbed by the reconstructions, which tend to feature murder or rape.  Sometimes I wish I could call out to the victims, tell them not to take that shortcut or forget to lock their door.  Clips that I like least tend to feature CCTV footage of mindless violence – although I know that it is right to highlight this – or what can perhaps be best described as a dark sister of the Antiques Roadshow: the parade of artefacts discovered by police to be in the possession of criminals who can’t or won’t say how they came by them.  I know at first hand that theft is a foul crime: my house has been burgled twice and I’ve also (as you may have read here) had my purse stolen.  But somehow this collection of inanimate objects doesn’t engage the attention in the same way.  Clips that show those bereft of treasured items and asking for their return are a different matter; I can empathise with the victims completely.

Best of all, though, are the retrospectives.  Sometimes a whole programme is devoted to these.  If this programme is additional to the season’s schedule, that’s a bonus.  What’s so fascinating about the retrospectives is the way in which they provide step-by-step documentation of how the villains in a previously featured case have been caught.  (Understandably, crimes which Crimewatch itself has helped to solve are most frequently chosen.)  I’m not a police procedural writer, as my readers know, although this is a very palatable way of finding out how the police operate, but it’s the insight into the criminal mind offered by the retrospectives that really grabs me.  Sometimes the perpetrator has shown such Machiavellian cunning that I’m full of admiration for the police in outwitting him or her; sometimes s/he seems to have behaved in such a stupid or reckless way that it’s surprising that they weren’t apprehended immediately.

If you have access to British TV (I know that this doesn’t apply to everyone who will read this) and you haven’t seen Crimewatch before, I invite you to join me on Thursday evening, 30^th May, BBC1 at 9 p.m.  If you are already a fan, I look forward to keeping you company!  Perhaps we can compare notes afterwards.

I’m not really a Stephen King fan – horror isn’t my bag – although I admire his dedication as a writer. He himself has said that his writing gave him the will to live when he was seriously injured in a car accident in 1999. I have read a couple of his books – Carrie and one other whose title escapes me – and I can appreciate his work enough to see why it is compelling. He’s a true professional.

However, he managed to annoy me very seriously in the year 2000 (He was quite unaware of this, of course!) when he published Riding the Bullet, a short story, as an e-book and sold it from his own website. He sold more than 5,000 copies in twenty-four hours, which allowed him to claim that the role of the publisher was becoming defunct as digital publishing took hold. He took into account neither the fact that he had been supported patiently by his publisher through his early years as a writer nor that he had sold so many copies of Riding the Bullet because he was Stephen King; it was not a feat that any author could replicate.

I was therefore delighted to read in today’s Times that he has not only decided not to release the digital rights for his latest book, Joyland, but is also encouraging his fans to buy their print copies from bookshops (as opposed to online booksellers). “Support your local bookshop” seems to be his new mantra. On that point, Stephen King and I are in perfect accord. I’m sure that he’ll be relieved that I approve!

Yesterday evening, I went with my husband to our favourite local Italian restaurant. It’s quite an amazing place to find in a small city like Wakefield: housed in a large building with two floors, it has been handsomely fitted out. The tables have marble tops; there are tasteful pictures and mirrors on the walls. The waiters are impeccably polite and wear a crisp informal uniform of white shirts and black trousers. The menu has always been varied, the prices reasonable. This restaurant has succeeded in combining professionalism with a personal touch.

For the past three years or so, its appeal has been enhanced by the services of an inspired and dedicated Portuguese manager. He told us that he brought his family to Wakefield because there was no work in Portugal; that he had tried Putney, but found the cost of living in London too high; that he was proud to be running what has many times been described as the best restaurant in the city; and that, aside from returning to Portugal once a year for a family reunion, he is not interested in holidays. Under his aegis were instituted a daily ‘specials’ board, cheaper prices for pasta dishes and pizzas on weekdays and free hors d’oeuvres for diners while consulting the menu. For regular customers like us, he always added something extra: free tomato bread with the main course, or a complimentary limoncello with the coffee.

Yesterday he wasn’t there. He could have been taking a day off – it was Monday, after all, and the restaurant wasn’t busy. I don’t think so, however. We had more than an inkling that he had moved on, attracted perhaps by the higher salaries on offer in a bigger city, or snapped up by one of the big Yorkshire hotels. We didn’t ask the waiter, who was as attentive and polite as ever, but subtle changes suggested that the Portuguese manager was no longer influencing operations. There was no ‘specials’ board; there were fewer choices on the menu (the vegetable-based pizzas had disappeared and several types of pasta were no longer on offer); there were no weekday reductions. Although the waiter recognised us and gave us a friendly greeting, we received no complimentary extras.

The food was as good and as well presented as ever, the service faultless. If it had been our first time dining at this restaurant, we’d have left well-pleased, extolling its virtues. As it was, we felt slightly short-changed… and more than a little sad that we’ll probably never meet the Portuguese manager again; conversations with him meant much more than the extras. It made me think that, although it’s true that excellence creates its own rewards, each time you set the bar higher you are creating more demanding expectations from your loyal customers. For every writer (and every blogger!), that is a challenging thought.

Some months ago I wrote a piece about the books on my bookshelves.  I chose a shelf at random and described how I came by the books on it and whether or not I had read them.  As I said then, for the most part my books have been shelved in a fairly random way.  The exceptions are the two shelves devoted to books about and by George Moore and his contemporaries.

I’m not referring to George Edward Moore, the philosopher, but George Augustus Moore, the writer.  As a postgraduate student, I based my research on the latter Moore and his writing career.  When I was first interested in him, only Esther Waters, his most famous book, was in print. (Later the Anglo-Irish publisher Colin Smythe reprinted three or four more of his novels.)  As a consequence, I spent many happy hours in secondhand bookshops and leafing through antiquarian catalogues in pursuit of his works.

Moore was an extraordinary character.  Born into the largely Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, he came from a family of Catholics.  (This lends some credence to their claim that they were descended from Sir Thomas More, a tale Moore himself loved to retail, though there is no positive proof that it’s true.)  The Moores were, in fact, members of the more modest, untitled squirearchy.  Setting little store by education and the Arts, they spent their time managing or mismanaging their estates and racing horses.  The only one of Moore’s ancestors who had shown the remotest interest in literature had lived as a recluse in the second half of the eighteenth century, spending his days writing a history book that was never published – not a propitious precedent when Moore himself began to exhibit literary leanings.

His first love was painting, or at least he used that as his pretext for travelling abroad.  Like many Irish artists and writers, he felt stifled by his country.  When he came into his inheritance at the age of twenty-one, he departed pretty swiftly for Paris to enrol himself as a pupil at the Académie Julian.  There he became an early appreciator of the French Impressionists and actually struck up a friendship with Édouard Manet.  Moore was a kind of nineteenth-century gentleman’s equivalent of a groupie: he insinuated himself into the Impressionists’ consciousness by spending many hours at Les Deux Magots, the café that they frequented.  He was later to pursue Zola and other authors of the school of French Naturalism in the same way.

Eventually realising that he hadn’t the talent to become a painter, Moore took up writing as very much a second-best profession.  He wrote several passable, if bleak, novels in naturalistic mode, the best of which is, in my opinion, not Esther Waters, but A Drama in Muslin, a captivating satire on the Dublin marriage market.  In common with other exiled Irishmen, Moore was often at his most eloquent when he wrote about Ireland.  He was also an observant early adopter: Another of his Parisian acquaintances was Édouard du Jardin, who had written a book entitled Les Lauriers Sont Coupés; it embodied a style that has been dubbed ‘the melodic line’ and was actually the forerunner of the stream-of-consciousness technique;  Moore wrote several evocative novels that employed this device, including The Lake, the haunting story of a priest who loses his faith and orchestrates his own disappearance by leaving his clothes on the banks of Lough Carra as if he had drowned, swimming across the lake and escaping to take passage for America (Moore Hall, Moore’s ancestral home, was built on the shores of this lake.).

After many years in exile, Moore was persuaded by W.B. Yeats to return to Ireland to take part in the so-called ‘Gaelic Revival’.  Moore’s own account of this sojourn telescopes the length of time that it took; in fact, he spent most of the first decade of the twentieth century back in Ireland, working with Yeats and other luminaries, including J.M. Synge and the Irish mystic poet AE.  Not that Moore ever really worked very closely with anyone: he was a past master at ‘doing his own thing’.  His true masterpiece dates from this period.  It is a two-part work entitled Ave Atque Vale (later changed to Hail and Farewell; the original title was simultaneously designed to poke fun at Moore’s own lack of Latin and the pretentiousness of his literary colleagues).  It purports to be a factual history of the Gaelic Revival, but is really a highly-polished satire of how it unfolded in spirit.  Once it was published, Ireland became too hot to hold Moore once again.  He retreated to London, where, in his later years, he devoted his energies to writing whimsically discursive stories based on Greek and Roman mythology and Christianity.  These were produced in beautiful limited editions that were sold by subscription. I am the proud possessor of two of them, Aphrodite in Aulis and The Brook Kerith.  It was typical of Moore that the latter, his account of the life of Christ, was based not on the Gospels, but on the writings of the Essene heretics.  To the end, Moore loved to stir up controversy whenever he could.

This was true also of his private life, which was possibly more blameless than he would have had people believe.  He never married, but conducted a number of clandestine affairs with well-born women, the most scandalous of which took place with Maud Alice Burke, an American heiress, prior to her marriage to Bache Cunard, heir to the shipping line.  Later, transformed into the society hostess ‘Emerald’ Cunard, she resumed the affair, until Moore was ousted from her affections by Sir Thomas Beecham.  Moore was widely reputed to be the father of her daughter, Nancy Cunard, herself a writer and friend of Hemingway and Ezra Pound.  He encouraged his friends and acquaintances, including Nancy herself, to believe in the truth of this rumour.  However, the gossip went that his sexual prowess was in some doubt.  When he was still a young man, a contemporary had jibed that ‘some men kiss and never tell; Moore tells but never kisses’.  He never lived this down.

Sadly, Moore Hall was burnt down in 1923 in one of the recurring cycles of the Irish troubles, not because Moore was an absentee landlord, but because his younger brother, Colonel Maurice Moore, served in the British army.  I have visited the ruin twice.  It is one of those unhappily poignant roofless  Irish mansions, its walls still standing foursquare, the windows blank, the floorless interior home only to the spinney of gangling trees that poke above the parapet in their quest for light.

What do my thoughts about George Moore have to do with crime fiction?  He certainly doesn’t write about crime, except obliquely: he is less incisive than Dickens, but as a young man he was concerned with and wrote about the social ills of his day.  His works are perhaps not of the first rank, though Hail and Farewell comes pretty close.  He is not my favourite writer – that is certainly Jane Austen – nor even one whose works I re-read many times.  But I feel that George is part of me; decades ago, he succeeded in getting under my skin.  In some way, therefore, I am certain that he has also inveigled himself into the fabric of my writing.

The farmers I knew in Lincolnshire were mostly millionaires. They lived in huge houses, set proudly in the midst of their many acres, and were rarely seen on tractors; they drove luxury limousines with personalised number-plates; they made their money from growing crops on what is perhaps the richest arable land in the country.

Farming is quite different where I live now, in the foothills of the Pennines. Most of the farmers are tenants, the land they hold carved from estates that were parcelled up generations ago. Today, the farms are small by modern standards; mostly devoted to animal husbandry, they are barely large enough to sustain the families owning them, some of whom have been working them for many years. One farmer told me that his lease entitles the family to hold the land for five generations, of which he represents the fourth. I am impressed by this family’s loyalty both to its landlord and to farming as an occupation, and fearful for its future. What will happen to it when the present incumbent’s son dies?

In reality, the family may have to quit long before then. Modern farming is a scientific business. Farmers are not, in the main, scientists; therefore, as farming methods become more sophisticated, they have to rely on the trained representatives of, say, the feed manufacturing companies to give them advice. A couple of years ago the farmer I have mentioned (who is still in his twenties) was rebuilding his dairy herd after inadvertently buying two tubercular cows from a neighbour and consequently having to slaughter his whole herd (in accordance with DEFRA regulations). Building up a new herd was expensive. He had always farmed in the traditional way, keeping the cows in byres in the winter and allowing them into the fields to graze in the late spring and summer months. The feed manufacturer advised him that this was inefficient, because cows use up energy wandering about and trample much of what they feed on. The modern way is to improve milk yields by keeping them in the byres the year round and feeding them on corn. The company’s representative paid visits to advise him on the quality of the corn he should use and how much to give each cow. The cows were kept in.

Yesterday, I was therefore surprised – but delighted – to see that the whole herd was out in the fields. Anyone who has seen a cow skip and dance when it is first released into a meadow after a long winter can be in no doubt that, although fastening them up in byres may not actually be cruel, they surely value their freedom.

When the farmer is about he usually stops for a chat. He was there yesterday and told me that he’d had to abandon the corn-feeding regime over the summer months because the cost of the corn was bankrupting him. Milk yields had dropped, too. During the winter, his milk cheque had covered barely half the amount he’d had to pay for feed. As he commented in his laconic way, “Something’s not right here.”

If he is right, this sounds to me like a case of legitimised fraud. It reminds me of how communities in Africa have been devastated after being persuaded by large companies to grow cash crops, destroying traditional self-sufficiency and yoking people to an artificial dependency. This Pennine farmer’s case is not as irrevocable, of course: he has still the option of going back to more conventional farming methods, which he’s chosen to do. Nevertheless, he is still repaying the loan to replace his herd, which is not yet back to its former size, and now has to bear the additional millstone of debt for the corn. The investment in the extra feed has been counter-productive; his business has taken a big step backwards. No-one will be brought to account for this, except, perhaps, the farmer himself, if he is unable to pay the debt quickly enough. The feed manufacturer will have all the weight of the law – and of ‘science’ – on its side.

Crime and legality are sometimes difficult to distinguish.

I was amused to read in today’s paper that standards of grammar are slipping ‘even‘ among MPs. I’m amazed that the author considers the linguistic prowess of politicians to be the yardstick for the nation’s performance in this respect. For years I have been entertained by the dreadful but often hilarious ways by which MPs mangle the language. Those most self-consciously aware of the way in which they speak are prone to make the worst gaffes. Mrs Thatcher’s Tudoresque announcement “We have become a grandmother” is etched on the national memory. Very recently, Michael Gove, that staunch advocate of traditional grammar school education who now wants to extend the length of school days to workhouse proportions, explained his rationale thus: “If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday, and we compare it to the extra tuition and support that children are receiving elsewhere, then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap.” Crystal clear, mellifluous, grammatically rigorous and beautifully structured, isn’t it?

I’m not sure that I agree with the hypothesis that this slip in standards, if indeed it exists universally, is caused by shortcomings in our formal education; there may be a more profound cultural change at work. My grandmother left school at the age of fourteen with no formal qualifications. Although she was deeply interested in learning and continued to read widely throughout her long life, the number of days that she actually spent at school was pitifully small, because she was the eldest of nine children and expected to stay at home, sometimes for months, whenever her mother had another baby or one of her siblings was ill. ‘In service’ for the whole of her working life (which began when she was fourteen and finished when she was seventy-four), she prided herself on speaking ‘properly’. I remember what she said to have been always grammatically correct and exquisitely enunciated, although it was not delivered in what came to be known as ‘Received Pronunciation’, because she always retained the slight burr and elongated vowels of her native county, Kent.

Her speech was picturesque in ways that have almost been lost. I think she must have thought in pictures and she had a fund of sayings for every occasion. Not one to suffer fools gladly, she used these sayings to convey her opinion (relatively) politely, but with disarming directness: “Who’s upset your apple-cart?” she would say, fixing me with a bright eye if I were behaving in a sulky fashion; “No fool like an old fool,” she would trot out summarily if one of her sisters related a mishap that she believed had been the consequence of a stupid decision; “Cleanliness is next to godliness”, she rapped out at her neighbour, an old man to whom she always referred as ‘Hicks’ (she regarded him as not quite her social equal), when he told her that he was unable to perform his usual weekly task of carrying out her dustbin to the street because he had a painful boil on his neck. “Red hat, no drawers,” she proclaimed in a penetrating whisper when a lady sporting this outré headgear passed us in the street.

One of the most fascinating things about language is that it is a living thing. Like all living things, it changes and evolves. We seem to be experiencing a rapid period of change in our use of language at present. I don’t think that this means that it is in terminal decline. What will emerge will be a new set of ‘rules’. (How the rules change over time can be demonstrated by consulting early editions of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.) The reasons for the present shifts in usage seem to me to be complex: Some can indeed be blamed on ‘poor’ education, but, as my grandmother’s example demonstrates, adopting a lifelong reading habit is the most effective way of understanding language and using it well; some owe themselves to a rapid influx of imported words and sayings, predominantly (such is the power of media) from the USA; some happen because the speaker (e.g. Mr Gove), although well-educated, does not take care to present a series of related thoughts in a logical sequence. As any writer knows, when you have something complex to convey, crafting a series of short, simple sentences may be the best approach to take. Of course, we need to pay attention to these things, but above all we need to guard against allowing the lifeblood to be drained from our speech by becoming too ‘PC’. I’m not talking about being rude or slanderous, but, like my grandmother, we must continue to harness the power of the language itself to convey our true opinions, not hide behind some anaemic gobbledygook that has been dreamed up by the thought police, or politicians!

As a totally irrelevant aside, it was my grandmother who first taught me about irony. Visiting my mother one day, she announced that my Great-Uncle Arthur was in hospital with a chest infection and that my Great-Aunt Lily had ‘fallen up the steps’ on her way to see him and cracked three of her ribs. Both she and my mother were then overcome by a burst of spontaneous laughter. I was shocked at the time, but realised later that it was the irony of the situation that amused them, not poor Lily’s misfortune. Jane Austen, not herself the product of a formal education but the mistress of irony, would have smiled.

Mr. Gove, perhaps you may pontificate when you have acquired the verbal skills to do so!