Mr Bonner pays us £159 for the two pigs. Not much profit. They cost us thirty quid to buy, plus £20 for Snells, and heaven knows how much on food. But, assuming that we get Bluebell's six piglets up to size and that she has twelve to fourteen in her next litter and we sell them at seventy-five kilos dead weight, rather than forty-five, then we're looking at our own 'mortgage-lifters'. I gave Mr B a tray of twenty white goose eggs; the local deli sells them for 99P, so I sell them to Mr B for 40P each, as I'm keen he should make some profit from us to make up for the pork fiasco. He's selling ten-pound bags of beef bones for £1 a bag to raise money for the Christmas lights so I take one home for the dogs. Fat-Boy hugely over-eats and smells like a raw chop for two days. Mr B sells twelve goose eggs in a couple of hours.
On Easter Sunday, Charlie and I go to church in Wells Cathedral. In our age of regulation and automation it is extraordinary that the dates of Easter, in the northern hemisphere at least, are still determined by the cycles of the moon. Easter falls on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, which means that it occurs any time from 23 March to 24 April. It seems to me that whatever you believe in, it can be no coincidence that the great Christian festival of Christ's rebirth happens at the same time that the earth undergoes its own annual renewal. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. All life is about renewal, about picking yourself up if you've failed, about trying again.
We find two seats about six rows from the front. To the left of the altar, a six-foot-high cross has been painstakingly covered with spring flowers: daffodils, tulips, primroses, camellias, hyacinths, primulas and scillas, its fragile beauty bursting with colour. For over a thousand years Wells Cathedral has been a great centre of Christianity, but its importance has always been overshadowed by Glastonbury. No mythical king ever strode through its doorways and it lacks the legends that have sustained and taken Glastonbury into the realm of the spiritual, divorced from its Christian beginnings. Yet Wells is without doubt one of the finest cathedrals in England. It is small and set at the far end of a green which is surrounded by pretty houses. On a clear blue day, its eastern facade stands against the sky, the gargoyles and sculpted scenes as elaborate as anything you would find in an Italian city where tour buses would deposit their cargo all summer long. But Wells, sitting on the edge of its small market town, with only a few hundred yards separating the great front door and the open fields and the start of the footpath to Glastonbury, just seven miles away across the Levels, is spared the crowds. Charlie and I once spent a night here in winter and after dinner we walked around the cathedral green in the moonlight, the only people there to appreciate its powerful beauty.
I think I am like many people, perplexed by belief but disturbed that so many dismiss faith with secular cynicism: the towering edifice of Wells has been for centuries the recipient of the prayers, hopes, sadnesses and joy of countless people, and it is hard to feel wholly cynical in the presence of such permanence. Now faith is being abused by fanatics of all persuasions who argue that their faith is guiding them towards war, punishment and repression. Sitting in the magnificent knave, the curved arches reaching above me, I find myself remembering a man I met in the early 1990's called Steve. Steve was in his sixties, with two gold teeth which twinkled in his wrinkly, smiling face. It was shortly after MandeIa's release from prison and Steve had defected to the ANC from the South African police force. He had been in charge of a little-known unit and his job was to eliminate ANC dissidents and troublemakers who the authorities wanted out of the way. His team of three, himself and two black special constables, would kidnap and murder on demand, driving their victims into the hinterlands to the north of Johannesburg and burning their bodies to destroy the evidence. He told me that they had special songs which they sang as they watched the bodies burn, drinking themselves into a stupor as the flames went to work. I felt transfixed with horror that this man should be sitting at my dining-room table. Steve touched my hand: 'I did this because I believed this was right. That God had told me so. No one ever went to war believing they were on the side of evil.' I know my father went to war and killed German soldiers, confident of his belief, but when belief is used to justify cruelty, it is no wonder that we become so cynical of religions' deepest goals.
It is easy to dismiss the church and say that it no longer matters, but I believe that it does. In Wells this morning, on the long pew beside us, is a family with young children, the youngsters turning the pages of picture books. Behind us and in front of us are old people, middle-aged people, teenagers in jeans. The message is simple. It is for peace, for love of one's neighbour, for a moment of calm within the relentless stream of modern life. There is nothing here for anyone to quarrel with. Like it or not, the Christian story is the one that I and so many have grown up with. Christmas and Easter might nowadays represent nothing much more than a few days off work and a chance to shop even more extravagantly than usual, but the Christian year is embedded in all our lives. It is estimated that this year we spent £10.5 billion over the fourday Easter break, a record burst of consumerism, but I know that I certainly have a hankering for something over and above spending and acquiring, and that I am increasingly drawn towards the mysterious and the unknown, towards something that will forge a reconnection with a narrative that links my life into the great human quest for social justice, fairness and equality. If we reduce the world to just the bare bones of stuff, of rationality and of materialism, we deny that part of ourselves that is capable of rising a little higher, of yearning to be at one with something that money can't buy, and if we forget that, or say that it doesn't matter, then any chance of forging a better world is gone. We do not need to believe in God to care about the human condition or to believe that there is something in this world which transcends materialism or to believe that our lives are a journey in which we can strive to make moral progress. I do not know if we evolved a need for religion, or if there is a religious gene, as some scientists attest, but faith is stubborn and our need for it so primeval that no amount of shopping malls will ever replace it.
The service opens with the hymn 'Jesus Lives', followed by a sung psalm and then the first reading from the Old Testament, from the book of Genesis, which tells the biblical version of creation. Creationists tell us that this, indeed, is how the world was formed and they are rubbished in turn by devotees of Darwinism, who say that we all evolved in a random fashion, with the fittest being the long-term survivors. Clearly the world was not made in seven days, as the creationists believe, but I have never understood why a belief in some kind of god, a god of one's own understanding, is incompatible with evolution. Creationists like to challenge evolutionists about missing links, attesting that as we do not fully know how worms evolved to be human beings, this therefore implies the presence of a creator. I'm with the scientists here: in time and with diligence, we will discover all those missing links and our progress from single-celled life to fully evolved human being will be understood in all its minutiae. But what evolution doesn't answer is what started it all off in the first place, what kicked off the big bang which led to life on earth. Evolution doesn't, and I think cannot, explain that, and neither can it explain our need for beauty, for love, for human emotions. The fact that God can't be explained in any way that makes satisfactory scientific sense doesn't mean he doesn't exist.
But religion has a lot to answer for, not least in an environmental respect. The reading from Genesis tells us that God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' In Christian theology, humans were given carte blanche to rule the planet; indeed, it was stated that it was God's will that we should bring nature under control. But as our population has increased and our technological skills have advanced we have become a rogue species, dominating all others, convinced by our own righteousness. Until recently, humanity had evolved happily within liv
ing communities, all profoundly interdependent on one another. The natural world was our kin; maybe this is why we find it so restorative today. We need to rediscover this interdependence, and this involves learning to live lightly. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous stressed the importance of this. Anyone struggling to recover from addiction knows that one of the secrets of recovery is learning to take life seriously, but not so seriously that we lose our sense of humour, wonder and fun. Living lightly means living with respect for others around you, it means losing the crippling self-absorption that is the trademark of an addict's life and it means becoming aware. As a species, we need to rediscover how to live lightly once again.
On Easter Monday, the piglets discover that they are small enough to squeeze under the gate, Peter Rabbit-style, which leads out of their pen and on to the path along the side of the walled garden, where we're growing rhubarb and cut flowers. They trot along, noses in the air, looking this way and that, full of curiosity and then, for no reason that I can ever detect, they stop, stiffen, their ears prick up and they squeak loudly, turn round and dash back to the safety of their mother as fast as they can, their little pink legs moving in sequence as they race along the grass. They seem to behave exactly like Piglet, who was always in a state of alarm and agitation at real and imagined fears. When Winnie the Pooh decided that he was going to track a Woozle, he enlisted Piglet's help. The two animals paced round and round in circles, unaware that the tracks they kept encountering were their own. 'Suddenly Winnie the Pooh stopped, and pointed excitedly in front of him. "Look!"
'''What?'' said Piglet, with a jump. And then, to show he hadn't been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice more in an exercising sort of a way.'
Out in the big field, pheasants have eaten all the small new leaves of the cabbages and the broccoli. We had planted fifty metres of each and now the plants look like shredded lace made by a bunch of drunken elves. They've left the red cabbages, possibly considering them too bitter. There aren't many solutions to the pheasant problem: we have tried birdcontrol devices which fire off blanks every few minutes but the birds seem to know instinctively that this is just a ruse. CDs or bits of silver paper strung on lengths of string are similarly useless. Charlie's father used to have a Labrador that was so well trained that he would sit by the growing vegetables for hours on end, provided his dad left his shooting jacket on the ground beside him. As an anti-pheasant tactic, it is not much use for us: Fat-Boy can't sit still for a minute, let alone be entrusted to keep watch over the cabbages. So I write a cheque for two 250 x 8-metre lengths of gauze which will cover the new plants until they're big enough to withstand the onslaught of the pheasants. Another £334.96 to add to the bottom line, but, as David points out, we can use it over and over again.
'This is our town and we love it. Mark my words, it is going to change.' On the Tuesday after Easter, Bryan Ferris is standing in front of a crowd of almost one hundred in the Ilminster Parish Hall, making his last-ditch attempt to garner enough support to force the council to reconsider the planned one-way system. He, Mike Fry-Foley and Mr B have set up stands around the room which show in detail what the proposed routing will do to the town, in particular to the shopkeepers of Silver Street. 'If we don't have a commercial heart to the town, we have nothing,' he says. Mandi and Graham Bulgin, owners and proprietors of'Allo 'Allo taxis, look gloomily at the maps. 'From May 1st the Somerset County Council is making it compulsory for all taxis to have meters,' Graham says. 'This route change is going to add £3.50 to a fare for someone coming from the south who wants to get to the north or east side of Ilminster. There won't be any point in us having a taxi rank in the square, so we'll just be available by phone.'
The Parish Hall stands at the top of North Street: it's a large stone building with scuffed wooden floors and a stage at its southern end. It's the biggest meeting place in Ilminster. Three town councillors are present and, once everyone has studied the road plans, Bryan asks them if they want to speak. 'We'll keep our powder dry and listen,' says Mike Henley, who had been so dismissive of Bryan at the meeting the week before. Bryan and Mike then invite the townsfolk to come up to the microphone and share their views of the one-way system.
'I'm a member of the Ilminster First Response Unit,' says Steve Mayor, owner of the Dolls' House shop in East Street, 'and we pick up 999 calls and go to help. We often arrive well before the ambulance. But the local ambulance is usually parked in Chard and the one-way system will add eight minutes to the journey. That could be a matter of life and death.'
Deirdre Cargen, proprietor of Bishop's Funeral Services in Chard, says that she hopes to open an office in Ilminster and she wants to warn the town about the effect Tesco might have. 'I've watched Chard go downhill: it's a beaten place now. Even though Tesco agreed not to sell various things, they do. Take pot plants. When they won the contract to open in Chard, they agreed never to sell them. But on the day before Mother's Day the store was full of pot plants. The same happens at Christmas. They take them away before anyone has a chance to complain. Ilminister is a lovely little town. I don't want it to go the same way.'
The councillors are getting annoyed. 'This was meant to be a meeting about the road system,' shouts Mike Henley. I am sitting next to Steve Mitchell from the picture framer's and we agree that he sounds like an arrogant windbag. 'Now you're all talking about the supermarket. There's no debate about that. Tesco is coming.'
His words are greeted with loud jeers, but the next group of speakers stick to the question of the road system, raising issues to do with parking, whether Tesco, who own the car park, will charge people who just want to use it but not shop at the store, how the signposts will work, where the buses will stop, what will happen while the store is being built on the site of the existing car park. It soon becomes clear that the issues have not been thought through at all.
'The one-way system didn't just happen. There's been full consultation,' interjects Mike Henley, to more raucous boos and jeers.
'I'd like to contradict that.' The calm-voiced speaker is at the back of the hall. 'It was a split vote at the original meeting last year and it was only pushed to a vote because the councillors wanted to get off to dinner. It was never fully discussed. It wasn't democratic. I was there.' I look round to see if Mr Henley plans to answer, but he's gone, slipping away through the crowd to the side exit. The atmosphere is now highly charged and excited. There is a goal towards which everyone is working and, it seems to me, there is now a villain in the person of Councillor Henley. I get a lift home with my neighbour, Henry Best, who used to be the regional representative for the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Henry is six-foot-six tall and he folds himself into the driving seat of his small Ford Mondeo like a collapsible walking stick. 'It's not going to work, they're not going to listen.' I don't want to believe him, but Henry is a wily old bird who has, over the years, worked tirelessly to support the rural communities around the town. He's seen the closure of countless village shops, and watched what happens in towns when supermarkets move in and, one by one the shops close down, or move away. While I concede that the supermarket battle is lost, winning the fight over the one-way system still seems not only possible but an important victory to strive for. It will make a difference to the shopkeepers, but it will also be a unifier for the town, making us all aware of what we stand to lose.
The week after Easter we set up an honesty table in the front porch of Dillington House. Several hundred people go in and out every week, taking courses, attending conferences or local council training days. Dennis has built a table to fit precisely into one side of the porch without disturbing the passing traffic: six feet long and eighteen inches wide. In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's unconventional take on what makes life tick, there's a story about the economics of honesty boxes. In Washington in the 1960s, a man named Paul Feldman was employed to analyse weapons expenditure for the US Navy. He was a good boss and every Friday he brought in bagels and cream cheese for his
staff. Employees from other departments heard about the bagels and wanted some too. In time, he was bringing in fifteen dozen a week and to recoup his costs he put out a cash box and a sign with the suggested price. His collection rate was 95 percent: he attributed the underpayment to oversight, not fraud.
In 1984, his research institute was taken over. His kids had finished college and his mortgage was paid off so he quit and decided to sell bagels. The plan was simple. In the early morning he would drive round all the companies who had signed up to his scheme and deliver bagels and a cash tin: at lunch he'd pick up the money and the leftovers. Within a few years he was delivering 8,400 bagels a week to 140 companies and he was making as much money as he ever made working for the Navy. He was also, quite unwittingly, carrying out the field research for an economic experiment into white-collar crime.
He expected to continue receiving the same 95 percent payment rate. What he didn't bargain for was that his presence in the research unit deterred cheating and that in the real world, he had to settle for less. A company that paid above 90 percent he considered 'honest'. Anything between 80 and 90 percent was 'annoying but tolerable' and less than 80 percent would elicit a snappy note of complaint ending with 'I don't imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourself?' He noticed several curious trends. Cheating went down immediately after 9/11. It is more pronounced in big offices than small ones. Warm weather makes people more honest, while unseasonably cold days make people cheat prolifically. The week before Christmas is shocking, as is Valentine's day and Thanksgiving. However, around the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Columbus Day, people are more likely to pay up. The reason? The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones. Feldman also concluded that people who were happy in their work were less likely to cheat.
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