Giraffe Boy’s Big Day Out

Newly escaped from his cramped, low-ceilinged enclosure in the zoo for strange human/animal hybrids (where he subsisted on tasteless fodder, dispensed three times daily, and was prodded and laughed at by his visitors and keepers alike), Giraffe Boy looks to the trees of the English countryside for fleshy, succulent leaves, longing to stretch his long, slender neck up into the tall canopies and feast on the tastes and textures of his idealised motherland.

Well, he doesn’t mind starting out a little lower to the ground. Here he gets his teeth into the miniature jungle of Lime leaves, suckering from the base of a tall tree at the entrance to a local graveyard:

Mmm, soft and flannelly and soothing to the mouth and throat, only just emerged from their red buds. The Southern lowlands used to be full of Lime woods until they were cleared by the first farmers or herdsmen. Now they are nearly all planted specimens of the small-leaved, large-leaved or hybrid varieties. Later on in Summer the leaves get all sticky and sweet from aphids sucking on the sap and pooing out the sugary excess. Yum!

A little further on he finds a rare Wych Elm which he recognises from the thousands of small, flat-winged seeds (also edible) he saw earlier in the year:

A deeper, richer, more mealy flavour. Thought to be the first elm to establish itself in the primeval woodland, and, like Lime, a large component of that ‘wildwood’. Beloved by livestock and susceptible to disease, so it has suffered and dwindled long in this land. Giraffe Boy grazes only where he can reach and leaves the rest of the tree to drink in light and air and produce its vital pollen and seeds.

Mmm, let’s try some more Lime. Higher up this time:

And now a venerable Silver Birch:

A bit more bitter, but refreshing, and it’s lovely to see the the slender tree sway and shiver in the wind. If he gets really hungry, Giraffe Boy can nibble through to the inner bark. The yellow catkins also have an interesting, polleny flavour. And if he gets cold he has heard that the flaky outer bark is really good for lighting fires (though his hooves make it difficult to make a friction ember). Here’s another one he found later on that day:

Ah, Beech. Some beautiful, tall specimens occasionally generous enough to lower branches down to a young Giraffe Boy’s height:

Best when young, soft and slightly hairy (older they get more tough and papery), the leaves have a delicious lemony tang, leaving the mouth feeling wonderful. Giraffe Boy likes to reach down and feast on the small, pointy brown nuts in the Autumn.

A little further on, Giraffe Boy finds a hedge of Hornbeam. He tastes the leaves, which have a rather strong, not entirely pleasant flavour. It looks similar to Beech, but the leaves have deeper grooves, more like the Wych Elm. Hmm, not sure about this one…

Later on he finds a full-grown tree with its curious knarly bark:

Ooh boy, here’s a lovely Hawthorn!

Both the flowers and the leaves taste delicious. Heady & aromatic, and sweet & nutty. ‘Bread and Cheese’ as the country children used to call them. Mind the thorns Giraffe Boy! They start out soft but toughen up to a sharp point later in the season, and you wouldn’t want to impale your tongue on one! Don’t eat too many of the flowers, either – you know how much you like to eat the sweet, red berries they turn into by Autumn-time!

Oh dear, Giraffe Boy seems to be suffering from a headache. No fear! Someone has been good enough to plant an ornamental Weeping Willow by the lake. A brief nibble releases the salicylic acid – present in all Willow species, and a precursor to aspirin – into Giraffe Boy’s body. In a little while he feels as right as rain (and appears to have discovered that he has thumbs):

Giraffe Boy doesn’t care if a tree isn’t ‘native’ to Britain. If it feeds or heals him well then he will accept it joyfully. After all, he and his long-necked, rough-tongued ancestors came to these shores in exactly the same way. Likewise, for obvious reasons, he doesn’t get all pompous about the genetic ‘purity’ of any weird or wonderful varieties, noticed and propagated by human individuals. Speaking of which, oh my goodness, would you look at this glorious Copper Beech – what a luscious feast for the senses (taste included)!

All the same, Giraffe Boy feels at most at home among the trees in English woodland.

But, oh no! What has happened here?

Our story ends in tragedy, for Giraffe Boy has eaten the deadly foliage of the Yew tree! Oh Giraffe Boy, you felt your freedom so sweetly, but you didn’t know that some plants refuse to be eaten by curious human/animal hybrids, and instead of sustaining life they bring death. Oh the high price of wisdom! What a sad fate befalls the wide-eyed and innocent!

I bid you all to learn from Giraffe Boy’s example. Stretch your necks high and escape into the wonderful wildness of trees, but take care not to dive too deeply or too quickly without reasonable confidence in your knowledge, and keep a gentle, loving regard for your own safety and well-being.

[Photo credit: HC]

The Revolution comes to Britain

Forgive me for posting another video (I’ve got quite a bit of original stuff waiting on the production line but am having some trouble engaging the machinery needed to crank it out) but last night I watched the second episode of ubiquitous Scot, Neil Oliver’s BBC series, ‘A History of Ancient Britain‘, and thought it provided a pretty decent exploration of the arrival of intensive agriculture in the British Isles some 6,000 years ago – an important subject to me for obvious reasons. Anyway, some kind soul put the whole thing up on youtube, so when you’ve got an hour to spare…

I wasn’t aware of the theory about multiple ‘first contact’ with farmers in Kent, Ireland and even the Orkneys (voles in grain sacks, you say? – well okay, unless they arrived on driftwood or hitched a ride with a friendly eagle), or that the Carnac stones in Brittany were put in place by hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic (‘We will be remembered’, eh? – reminds me more of the civilised preoccupation with stamping a mark on the landscape in the form of dead monuments rather than preserving a living legacy in thriving ecosystems, but I could be wrong…)

I spotted the old trope of hunter-gatherers ‘struggling for survival’, even alongside evidence of the backbreaking nature of the farming lifestyle – cutting down all the trees, killing all the wild animals & plants, building walls to protect livestock, yearly ploughing, the ‘daily grind’ of an hour or more of processing wheat for a family’s daily bread, the insecurity of next year’s crop being dependent on this year’s harvest…etc. He also says they stuck to the coasts and waterways and perceived the forested interior as a ‘dangerous, forbidding world’ [8:06] after making it clear that they derived a large proportion of their subsistence from hunting woodland animals and saying himself that ‘these people didn’t just live close to nature – they were part of nature’ [2:36]. I would’ve thought it was the farmers who were far more likely to see the forests in that way. As Luther Standing Bear put it:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.

Although he does his best among the Carnac stones and with the meditation at the end on how ‘sad’ it was that the farmers were trying to ‘separate’ themselves from the wild, undomesticated world (or rather, I would say, trying to impose their way of doing things and thus destroying that world), I thought Oliver’s account was rather ‘embedded’ in the experience of those oh-so courageous pioneer farmers. He could have looked at examples throughout the historical record of clashes between hunter-gatherer and farming cultures to convey the likely attitudes of prehistoric British tribes towards the people clearing the land of all the species necessary for their subsistence. I even saw an exploration of this on the BBC in the form of Marco Bechis’s film, ‘Birdwatchers’, about the struggle of the Guarani Indians in Brazil who are in the process of being displaced from their land by cattle ranchers and sugar cane farmers:

I was struck by the stark contrast in the visuals throughout the film of lush, green rainforest on the one hand next to bleak, brown farmland on the other. There must have been a similar disparity between the early wheatfields and stone-walled livestock enclosures of Neolithic Britain and Ireland and the vast, peopled Wildwood they too were setting out to conquer. At one point in the film a Guarani shaman instructs his pupil to not eat the meat from a domestic cow the tribe has just poached, because such a beast does not belong to that landscape in the way that the rainforest species – considered brothers and sisters by the Indians – do. After showing us [55:33] the difference between the ankle bone of domesticated and wild cows in prehistoric Britain, I wish Oliver had followed in the footsteps of Jared Diamond and Weston A. Price in showing us the difference between domesticated and wild humans. Is the evidence here consistent with evidence around the world indicating that hunter-gatherers lived longer, were taller, healthier, stronger, less stressed, more … human than their genetically identical farming counterparts? Who most truly belongs to the British landscape; to any landscape – Homo sapiens domestico-fragilis or Homo sapiens neo-aboriginalis?

(hat-tip to C)

Altogether, though, I want to applaud Oliver’s effort here in shedding light on this important transition, putting modernity into its ancient context and going some considerable distance towards rescuing what was surely an epic, richly meaningful drama from the precious few scraps of evidence that survive.