Fantastic Mr Fox
Oliver Rackham, the magisterial historian of the English countryside, has several bees in his bonnet. One of them concerns the word ‘forest’. If you believe Rackham there’s no necessary connection between ‘trees’ and ‘forests’. Forests are areas set aside for the hunting of wild game — deer, boar and suchlike — while wooded areas of country are, doh! woods. Forests are characterised by their ancient laws and royal-appointed officers, while woods feature toadstools, crapping bears, fairy rings and farouche child abusers.
I love Rackham’s writing on the countryside. To read his accounts of woodland management, the structure of field systems and even soil drainage is to have the godlike sensation that when it’s all tarmaced over and there’s a Tesco Metro where every copse used to be, one could simply reconstruct the whole palimpsest of our biota, using Rackham as a set of instructions. My friend Con has slightly disabused me concerning the omniscience of Rackham. He too is a disciple and once made a pilgrimage to the great seer of the bucolic at Corpus Christi, his Cambridge college. It transpired that Rackham obviously took his agenda from what he could see from the window of his rooms; and that his masterwork, The History of the Countryside, should really be called The History of the Bit of Countryside I Can See from my Window.
If I animadvert on Rackham it’s because of what happened to Mr & Mrs Ralph this week. They awoke during the night to the sound of a loud crash echoing through the vastness of Steadman Towers. On arising they found a trail of bite marks and paw prints leading through the elegant chambers and along the marble colonnades. A large, silk-covered ottoman had been reduced to a tatterdemalion; a turd had been deposited in the toilet. Eventually they cornered the interloper in the kitchen. How a fox cub had had the wit to become housetrained after only that very night entering a house for the first time is a source of wonder to us all.
Now, Rackham’s take on foxes is sanguine to say the least, given that he views the two cataclysmic events in the English countryside to have happened during the Iron Age, and then in the late nineteenth century. The first was the clearing of the primary woodland, and the second was the turning over of whatever little spinneys remained to the intensive rearing of game birds. Set beside these awesome reductions in biodiversity, the artificial preservation of the fox in order that it may be hunted stands as an amusing little appendix. And preserved it has been. Rackham’s hunch is that it would have been extinct in the early-modern period were it not such good fun cornering it on horseback, then watching it being torn to shreds by doggies.
The irony that the fox was preserved for so long that it managed to adapt to the growing urbanisation of England cannot be stressed enough. Over the last few years, during which this environmental appendix became so inflamed that it poisoned the body politic, it was hilarious to hear the fox-hunting lobby bleat on about how they had to hunt foxes in order to a) keep their numbers down, b) keep countryside folks’ numbers up. In essence this was the same as a talking hamster telling you that it was essential he kept running round and round in order to preserve his wheel.
Looked at from the point of view of the parasitic fox, the redcoats were a good survival strategy. However, now that you can’t walk down a London street without seeing an insouciant fox strolling towards you it’s clear that it must be foxes themselves that were behind the whole mad convulsion. While hunting was essential for their survival they happily ripped chickens to pieces and ran amok in the farmyard. But a few years ago a top-flight delegation approached the late Roald Dahl and got him to write Fantastic Mr Fox as the first in a string of clever propaganda tricks aimed at ensuring their long-term niche in the human-dominated ecosystem.
Most of the time I feel fairly well disposed to foxes. We often get up in the morning to see two or three of them sunning themselves on the tops of the garden sheds in back of our house. Granted their shit smells dreadful, they rip bin bags open and their sexual behaviour — even by south London standards — is both violent and rambunctious. Still, I saw no need to have them culled for this until the fox got into Ralph’s house. After all, to follow Rackham on this, while there may be no necessary connection between forests and trees, the prospect of one’s kitchen becoming a game preserve is not a comfortable one. Mark my words, it’ll begin with the odd fox breaking in, but before you know it you’ll be transported to Australia for laying a hand on one of the Queen’s dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets.
Feng Shui in Singapore
We stood next to a London cab on the forecourt of the Elizabeth Apartments in the fast-falling dusk of South-East Asia. It was the latest model, a bulbous TX2. Roland Soh, the cabbie, was regarding his vehicle with a certain weary affection. ‘This,’ he told me, ‘is one of the most expensive cabs in the world.’ He ran me through the bill for it: $30k for the car certificate, 120 per cent import tax. It all adds up to a cool $120k Singaporean. ‘I’m going to sell it next year,’ he conceded, ‘and get a people carrier.’
We fell in with Mr Soh at Changi Airport, and his London cab, complete with British Lung Foundation sticker on its glass hatch, helped to make landfall that much more uncanny. Singapore struck me immediately as Basingstoke force-fed with pituitary gland. The island is low-lying, greenish and tricked out with corporate bypass architecture: skyscrapers like hypertrophied conservatories hollowed out by truly hideous atriums.
At the Elizabeth Apartments, where we put up, we looked up from the lobby into a void cluttered with thirty-odd concrete balconies; the sky was a mirror, the vending machine offered soft drinks flavoured with chrysanthemums. The apartment itself was all tiled surfaces and heavyset armoires, the TV served up a state-sanctioned diet of Murdochian pap: mobile phone commercials masquerading as news bulletins.
Still, we weren’t really in Singapore at all, only stopping over for twenty-four hours. Enough time to crank the kids’ body clocks halfway round, so that when they reached the fatal shore they weren’t bouncing off the walls with jet lag. Singapore understands its own status as a 300-square-mile holding bay for people. The majority Chinese population throng the streets with their notorious orderliness, while in the lee of the skyscrapers Malays in pyjamas sweep up very little.
Mr Soh explained to me the intricacies of the car certificate. Apparently the government controls exactly how many cars there are at any given time on the island. In order for a new car to be born an old one must die. It strikes me that this is a policy inflected by Confucianism: the orbital road of life whispering on through the eras, symbol and reality interfused. I said as much and Mr Soh smiled in a satisfied way. ‘There’s more to Singapore,’ he told me, ‘than meets the eye.’
What does meet the eye is the Merlion: half-lion, half-fish. A chimerical symbol for a chimerical state. The Merlion is everywhere. There are Merlion cruets and mobile phone covers, newel posts and carpet figures. Down at Merlion Park, where the Singapore River meets the sea, a giant Merlion squirted a jet of water into the gloopy atmosphere, while out in the grey bay the ocean-going equivalents of Singapore’s skyscrapers oozed along the horizon.
Hungry for the anchor of the past in this rudderless vessel of modernity we headed for Chinatown. Along Smith Street there were reassuring carved house fronts, the city hunching down to a human scale. Atop the Sri Mariamman temple a mosh pit of Hindu deities rose into the drizzle in a tangle of garish concrete limbs. Further down the street, gongs resounded outside the Buddhist temple, where great stooks of fake currency were being consumed by fire. It was easy to understand how the rogue bond trader Nick Leeson — who was based in Singapore — got the idea that money was worthless paper, mere vouchers to be shovelled into the incandescent belly of capitalism.