He came bounding out of the bush, a blurred shadow in the ambiguous light of dawn, landing right in the middle of my vegetable patch where his paws dug into the soft earth. We were only metres apart but, oblivious to me, he stared back at the tree line as if something was chasing him. His long bushy tail waved languidly. Then, turning, he saw me. With that peculiar cheekiness typical of foxes, he gave me a long, scrutiny before loping away in his own good time. Probably, back in his earth, is a detailed plan of attack on my chooks and geese. But I couldn’t help admiring him. And that reminded me of something …
Almost exactly 60 years ago George Orwell published a wonderful essay called, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. It was characteristic of him that he should have chosen, of all creatures, the stereotypically repulsive toad to characterise the coming of spring. It was partly homage to a fellow underdog: ‘… the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from the poets.’ But the point of the essay is to insist ‘that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing’.
This observation, however, raises for Orwell the question, ‘is it politically reprehensible … to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song …’ Not unexpectedly, he comes down firmly on the side of nature. Observing with pleasure the rites of spring ‘even in London N1’, he thinks of ‘all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could’. Despite the threatening presence of a number of evils which remain familiar today – destructive weapons, official lies, ubiquitous policing – Orwell takes comfort in the knowledge that ‘the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it’.
Dictators and bureaucrats are still, however, well in the frame and still disapproving. You don’t have to enter the arcane realm of AWB or the self-protective labyrinth of the Department of Defence to know that bureaucrats and their flawed systems are proliferating – even, perhaps especially, at the ground level of ordinary lives, as distinct from the oxygen-lean heights of bribing or bungling senior officials.
A young man of my acquaintance, for example, had to give up his