More Bang for your tourist?

I see the government has seen sense. Well, that’s probably a bit much to hope for but it has at least backed down in the face of public pressure. About what? I hear you ask. Indeed, there’s a pretty long list. In this case, we’re talking buzzards.

Photograph: James Leonard/Alamy

As today’s guardian article has it:

The Department for the Environment (Defra) had planned to spend £375,000 on testing control measures for buzzards, after complaints that a surge in numbers of the protected bird of prey was leading to too many pheasant chicks being killed.

Not only is this rather a waste of money, the information is already there. A study has already been carried out by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust which showed that … “Of the 486 radio-tagged birds [Pheasants], we think three were killed by raptors.”  (http://bit.ly/KdvSdz). This is less than 1%.

Unlike many of those who objected to this proposal, I have no particular problem with the shooting community. Indeed, I am rather partial to pheasant. Given, however, that the government is already under attack for being “a bunch of posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk” (thankyou Nadine Dorries – a phrase i never thought I would utter.) to spend public money on researching means to protect what is seen, not entirely without justification, as a posh boys sport, is sheer foolishness.

The presentational disaster was compounded by the fact that Richard Benyon, whose department proposed the idea, lives in a 20,000 acre estate in Berkshire. And then further damage was done by the Countryside Alliance whose campaign director, Tim Bonner,  criticised the U-turn. “That the government has chosen to ignore rural people in favour of a large and vocal special-interest group shows ministers are now willing to give in to whoever shouts the loudest.”

He is of course deliciously oblivious to the irony that the Countryside Alliance itself  is one of those  “large and vocal special-interest groups“. He is obviously upset that his group’s shouting was not loud enough on this occasion.

He made the point, not unreasonably, that shooting brings a lot of money into the UK economy. True but he misses two other points of, at the very least, equal import:

1. Raptors take hardly any pheasants anyway. (see above)

2. Given the fact that there are over 1 million members of the RSPB and nearly 3 million people visit an RSPB reserve annually, it is clear that bird watching is also a not insignificant contributor to the economy.

2. Reducing the population of a species for economic gain is precisely what got us into the mess, regarding raptors, that we are only just starting to come out of.

I would like to say that these two men are clearly idiots but the jury is still out. what is clear is that neither of them should be in any position to determine the fate of Britain’s wildlife

My marriage is safe (no matter how many gay couples tie the knot!)

The recent furore about gay marriage, that has thankfully died away a little now (at least on this side of the Atlantic), has me

Gay marriage – Simpsons style

completely baffled.

I can understand, though disagree, that people who disapprove of homosexuality per se feel it is inappropriate for them to have any rights, save that to stop being homosexual. I can perhaps understand those who think that marriage, as traditionally formulated, should be preserved . . .

Wait a minute. As traditionally formulated? What point in history are we taking this formulation from? In this particular argument, we are considering the approach of the Christian church to marriage so let’s stick to that.

Marriage, as was (and perhaps still is) the case in many societies we would regard as being less enlightened than our own, is largely a civil affair. It was usually arranged by the parents for reasons of money or power. The early church did recognise the state of matrimony as being a holy one but the first Christian marriage ceremonies were not until the 12^th century. So do we go back to the ‘traditions’ of the first millennium AD and have the church play no part in marriage?

Most people when they talk of ‘traditional’ marriage though are probably thinking more in line with the Victorian ideal. Oh yes, where the woman became the property of her husband, subjugated and downtrodden. Not always, by any means, but her treatment was in the hands of her ‘owner’. I suspect some of the traditionalists do feel that way but that’s another story.

In fact, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act allowed divorce for ordinary people though proof of adultery as well as other cruelty was called for. In fact it wasn’t until the 1969 Divorce Reform Act that couples could agree to divorce just because the relationship wasn’t working.

Despite that, the Church of England, that woolly liberal institution frowns on the marriage of a divorcee (assuming the ex partner is still alive) and any proposal for this in church has to be approved by the bishop.

The point is that the nature of marriage has always changed to match the feeling of the people – those who actually get married. Usually at some distance, it must be said. So there is no fixed standard that we are departing from.

The rather more bizarre statement put about by several opponents is that gay marriage will undermine the whole nature of marriage. That marriage was ordained by God as between a man and a woman for the purpose of bringing up children.

Where do I begin? That sort of ‘logic’ would have childless couples being not legally married. What about couples who marry after their child-bearing years? Should these loving relationships be banned? Of course not.

As for the devaluing of the institution? How?

I am writing this on the third anniversary of proposing to my current wife. (To placate any hardliners reading – if you made

The Angel Choir, Lincoln Cathedral (Where I was married)

it this far – we were neither of us divorcees). I don’t see my marriage as being affected by anyone else’s at all, for good or ill. If a gay couple get married in Tiverton, that will have no more effect on my marriage than will the awful tackiness of a ‘big fat gypsy wedding’* or the hitching of a couple of chinless, inbred aristocrats or royals.

My marriage is down to me. It’s no one else’s business. If two people care enough about each other to want to make the public statement that marriage is then I really don’t care who they are, gay, lesbian, hetero, black, white, green, young, old, intelligent or stupid.

I was pleased to see that Barak Obama finally came out (so to speak) in favour of gay marriage and stood up to the bigots. I was still more pleased to see that looking at an American opinion poll, the younger the age group, the fewer people were against the idea. It seems that the seeds of tolerance are finally sprouting amongst the homophobes. Hooray for that.

* I would like to stress that I have never seen any episode of this series – ever!

Whose brain is it anyway?

Yesterday the BBC carried a story about various body parts that had been retained for investigation that were still being kept many years after they were of any meaningful use.

Chimp Brain in a jar.jpg (Wikipedia)

This is obviously not a good thing and the knock on the door from police telling the relatives of the bereaved must have opened scores of partially healed over wounds and left people feeling raw and angry afresh. It was nothing more than an administrative cock up and apologies have been fulsome and so that should be an end to the affair. And indeed it probably will be.

I was struck, however, by an interview with Julie Middleton on PM. Her son died of cot death and it turns out that 13 years later his brain had been retained. So far so ghastly.

What struck me most, however, were Mrs Middleton’s comments. She said that the coroner had said that the brain was their property. Her response was to say that having carried, given birth and nurtured the baby, it certainly wasn’t. I quite see the reason for her feelings but if the coroner says it is his property, I think he is probably correct – irrespective of whether that is a reasonable position or not.

She then mentioned about having to have another burial ceremony for the brain (I was listening in traffic at a tricky roundabout at this point and she might have meant the whole body including the brain). My initial response was ‘Why?’ If you are a Christian, (or, I would assume, of pretty much any other religion that believes in an afterlife) then surely the soul has long since departed and what has happened to the body is entirely irrelevant. Indeed, in most people’s cases it has long since been reduced to ash. Surely the presence of a bit of tissue that got missed out is neither here nor there. For an atheist, there is no soul to bother about anyway and once the body is dead, the individual is gone and thus the body, or any bits of it become irrelevant again.

And yet it does seem to bother an awful lot of people. My grandmother has recently died. Two days ago. I find myself not even remotely bothered what happens to her body. As it happens, she had been suffering from dementia for many years and, in a sense, the person who has just died is not my grandmother. The real grandma is within me. And surely that is the case for all of us. It is too late at night for me to bother to source this but I recall reading about the belief of a certain Native American (or possibly Aboriginal) tribe. Death for them was a gradual process. The beginning of it was the death of the body. But the individual lived on in the hearts and minds of his or her loved ones and was only truly dead when the last person to have known them, themselves passed away.

Life is transient. Even the religious must admit that Earthly life is transient. And it seems a little inadvisable to grow too attached to a fleshly dwelling place, no matter how much we loved its occupant.