Fear and loathing in las Americas

I am American. By blood, I am more American than I am British. I live here of course, I’m officially British too. The UK and Europe (cough) are where I identify most strongly with and where I’m raising my family. But I also have a blue passport and I pay US taxes. My forebears are Mormons from Utah and immigrants from Yorkshire. They prospered and spread far and wide across the land, living and propagating the American dream. Today I have relatives from Maryland to California, from Ohio to Arizona, from Oregon to Pennsylvania. When I travel there I am welcomed home.

Over here we poke fun at America. Hicks, rednecks and good ol' boys. Obsessed by guns and allergies. Fifteen different kinds of milk. Neurotic, fat, stupid and uncultured. There is an element truth to all stereotypes, but almost all Americans that I have met are kind, decent and honest people. They are friendly and welcoming, when they say “have a nice day” they genuinely mean it. It is a magnificent country, beautiful and diverse. Blessed.

America, what have you done?

I have never been prouder to be an American as eight years ago. It nearly reduced me to tears as Obama accepted. This morning I was close to tears again. Distraught. What has my second country done? Fear and frailty have triumphed over common sense and decency. Traditional politics has failed. Just like Brexit here, the disenfranchised have stormed to victory on the back of a message of intolerance and a considerable amount of hot air. Just like Brexit, it no longer matters what is true and what is not – voters don’t care. People hear what they want to hear, and if you have conviction and pander to that, no matter how absurd or divorced from reality it might be, they’ll listen and they’ll believe. Donald Trump exploited that.

In a way both decisions, awful though they are, are triumphs for democracy. Whether I like it or not (I don’t, in case you were still on the fence about that), the USA will soon have a leader with a scary world view and all the grace of a toasted cheese sandwich*. But that’s what the majority of Americans wanted, they wanted change, they didn’t want traditional Washington D.C. and its elite. Americans are nice people, I can’t stress that enough. But large segments of their society are clearly hurting, and unfortunately that same demographic are also very conservative, narrow-minded and ill-informed – a dangerous combination. The Presidential election was a chance to vote for change and they took it. At least they sort of voted on their issues, something that didn’t happen for Brexit. Brexit was ultimately only a vote against the establishment and not really about EU membership. UK voters failed to distinguish between an election and a referendum. Referendums are one-offs, final, whereas elections come around again and you get a second chance. The Brexit decision that all the over 65s voted for doesn’t allow the young people whose entire lives it will ultimately affect that second chance. At least in America there’s an opportunity to vote for change in four years time, and that’s the only positive I can currently see.

It is scant comfort. The soon-to-be leader of the free world is a monumental cretin, a rich and volatile bully with a dangerous lack of experience and an incoherent/non-existent strategy. Just like Farage here, he has made it OK to be racist and bigoted again. Whilst many who voted for him are decent people with decent views who simply didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, he has also given voice to a small segment of under-represented society that have frankly appalling views. We should all be mindful that views like this were once over-represented, and look what happened then. The swing to the right has been as dramatic as it is terrifying. Hatred. Remember what Yoda said about that? Low-level racism and outright xenophobia have become acceptable again, and just like Brexit the polls got it wrong on the US election too.

I don’t know why we are all so surprised. The Leave voters and Trump voters actually find their choice mildly embarrassing, and rightly so. The surprise would have been if they had had the conviction to stand up and publicly state that they didn’t actually like their Polish neighbours very much and that yes, they were going to be voting to leave the EU. Instead they stayed silent or lied when asked, and after voting went back indoors feeling faintly smug that they had socked it to the establishment. It is obviously a lot more complicated than this. I am just a bird blogger and I don’t understand large parts of the dynamics that have led us to this point, both here and across the Atlantic, but I think it can be boiled down to a few key themes. Disenfranchisement, anxiety and resentment. The world is too big. I do not understand what is happening. It was better before.

It is the failure of successive governments – globally - to address this that has led us to where we are now. It spans every facet of government. Education, health, trade agreements, the environment, everything. Everything is interconnected in a massively complex web, and knowing where you stand in a world that moves faster than you or anyone else can stay current with has been a huge and incomprehensible shock. Voters – and the demographics are very telling – want a return to simpler times, to straight-talking leaders, and to an improvement in their lot in life. Trump and Farage, who let us not forget appeared on stage together, are the winds of change. The fact that neither of them has a scoobydoo is irrelevant.

They lied through their teeth.

Trump literally made it up as he went along. He could have said anything, frequently did, and it did not matter at all in the end. He was the outsider, the alternative, shouting long and loud what people wanted to hear. That the rhetoric was mostly and shamefully untrue ultimately meant nothing, we live in a post-factual age. There will not be a wall built along the Mexican border, that exists only in la-la land. 11 million immigrants will not be sent back to their home countries, it's simply not feasible. Muslims will not be able to be banned or monitored, it’s unconstitutional – the same constitution that preserves the right of citizens to own machine guns, and which regularly results in mass shootings of innocent people. But that’s what people wanted to hear so that’s what he said. They didn’t want to hear about liberalism and the reality of globalisation. I can’t remember who it was that said during the EU debate that the world was sick of experts, or even what side of the political divide that they were on, but they were dead right. Common sense, science, empirical fact and the truth have all gone out the window. Trump and his ilk saw that and they capitalised on it. The traditional politicians didn’t see that and they, to use an American phrase, have been run out of town. They played it wrong and they lost.

And ultimately we have all lost. All of those smug brexiteers behind their lace curtains in middle England are probably just as confused and scared as they were before, as the level of uncertainty in the world is now off the scale. There are no easy answers to the issues that are worrying people, and electing Trump doesn’t change that for Americans either. The only thing that has changed is that we will now have a dangerous buffoon in the White House next year, an unstable, uncontrollable and uncompromising man who is not fit to hold office. This is America’s new leader, the one on whose personal sanity we all in part rely, and he is a car crash waiting to happen. Sensible things like climate change deals could be ripped up, human rights will be trampled over, diplomacy will recede and militarism will increase. He will have a global impact, possibly in very very negative ways, but that irony is lost on the isolationists who voted for him. But that’s OK, because it’s America first from now on, and who cares about the rest of the planet? Or indeed the planet itself. All the jobs are coming back, all the foreigners are getting kicked out, and it will be like it used to be back in the 1950s when life was good.

Except it won’t as that isn’t the way the world works any more. American manufacturing will not come back, as when the same voters who have just sent Trump to the highest seat in the land realise that they have to pay more for their trucks, fridges, TVs and almost everything else they currently enjoy at prices cheaper than they have ever been, they will be up in arms. Hang on, we didn't vote for this! The vast majority of all the things that this odious man has said and promised are complete fiction, just like most of the empty promises made by the Leave campaigners. Remember that bus promising EU contributions shifting directly to the NHS? It’s that, but a lot bigger. Trump won’t make America great again, he’ll push America off a cliff. Just like the true implications of Brexit are only now beginning to be hinted at, job losses and financial black holes, inflation and rising prices, America can only begin to imagine the tragedy that could now unfold. God Bless America, the greatest nation on earth! Wait, whaddya mean we’re at war with eight countries? This is Britain, we’re independent, free at last from the shackles of Europe! Wait, why is my summer holiday more expensive now, and why can’t I find a cleaner? What do you mean Walkers Crisps cost more?

And that’s without considering the human cost. This impacts relationships and families. This impacts where people can go and what they can do, it restricts individual progress and mutual cooperation. It wrecks dreams. I am sounding preachy I think, but consider the opportunities now unavailable to my children following the decision to leave Europe. Think of the doors that are now closed. The answer to globalisation is not to retreat and become more insular, it is to understand it, embrace it, and make it work for you. Brexit and President Trump are steps in completely the wrong direction, and the UK and the US are rapidly heading back to the 1970s. They have set themselves back 40 years.

Elvis left the building a long time ago, reality has now followed.

*croque monsieur

Jungletoast

This is going to be a very boring post, I strongly advise that you click away now to something else. Anything else. Even the Liberal Democrats homepage. It’s about plants. Bye now! Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned on here that I had had a disaster in my conservatory. Boring and middle class, yay! Like many that particular blog post sank without trace, but I had briefly mentioned that I had been almost reduced to tears (and my youngest daughter actually was!) when on returning from holiday we discovered that the conservatory had had no ventilation during an extremely warm spell, and had probably heated up to something like 50C for around five days. When we got home in the evening it was still 43C in there, a dry arid heat. The kind of conditions in which dogs die in cars, and it had dreadful consequences for the plants. Our conservatory is a haven. It has – well had, let’s get the tense tragically right here – a bougainvillea vine growing into the ceiling up a trellis, foliage plants giving bold splashes of green, hanging baskets with hoya, ruellia and tradescantia, cacti and agave dotted around, and my pride and joy, cycads from Australia, South Africa, Mexico, and India. We eat (ate…) surrounded by heady amounts of oxygen and prickles, leaves arching over our heads. If it’s warm enough we open vents, windows and doors, and are soothed by the gentle rustling of leaves. We do get stabbed from time to time, but generally we (well, I) feel that the benefits outweigh the occasional sharp pain.

I’ve been growing plants for a long time, one of several interests I have. Like all my hobbies, commitment ebbs and flows, it's a time thing, and so during times of ebb the plants do tend to suffer from neglect, but this is nothing compared to what just happened to them. This spring I had finally dragged myself out of the gardening doldrums and got everything sorted out. Things were going, and growing, gloriously. Plants that had not grown new leaves for a number of years were flushing, the bougainvillea was flowering. The place was looking more lush than ever before, the results of the increasing love and attention the plants were getting. Good husbandry in other words. I still had issues with mealy bugs, a common sap-sucking houseplant pest that even Kew Gardens has legions of, but overall I felt I was winning the battle.

Then we came back to total devastation, a wall of heat. All the soft leaved plants - the vines, the trailing plants, the foliage plants - had been decimated. Barely a living leaf, brown and shrivelled, white and skeletal. The cacti and agaves, desert plants that you would think would have easily tolerated the conditions, had had the moisture sucked out of them and become shadows of their former selves. But worst of all was the damage inflicted on the cycads. Glorious leaves that had once been silver, blue or green were a deep reddish brown. New flushes of leaves had been cruelly stopped in their tracks and withered away – to put this in context the plants frequently grow only one set of leaves per year, and sometime not that many! On the species that grow continually but one leaf at a time from a central whorl I had literally lost a decade of growth. What had looked like a lush green firework now looked like a dead stump. To say I was stunned was an understatement. I sat on the sofa numb, disbelieving of what had happened. Away for just a few days I’d undone months and in some cases years of care and attention.

The family gathered round, unpacking forgotten. There was no saving some plants as once desiccated leaves do not recover. The green garden waste bags came into the conservatory and I sadly pulled down metres of dead vines from the struts and supports, and was almost inconsolable as I chopped off the dead cycad leaves. Everything got a mild watering to try and reintroduce some moisture into the soil, but not too much as dried roots will rot in waterlogged conditions. When we were finished clearing up it looked post-apocalyptic, Armageddon. Our once green space was practically bare. There were some exceptions, a cycad from Mexico had sustained almost no damage whatsoever where neighbouring plants had been cut to the ground. Of two from South Africa, both the same species one had lost 100% of its leaves whereas the other had just the mildest of brown tips. Nonetheless these were the smallest of miracles in what was otherwise outright carnage. Depressing as hell. There are no photos, I couldn't take it.

I have a greenhouse too, and the plants in there were not affected, including some that by good fortune I had moved down there to repot but not brought back, and so I was able to add some instant greenery in places but the vines and foliage plants had no subs ready to go. To get back to something not resembling a nuclear holocaust I’ve made a few select ebay purchases. A new rubber plant has been collected from Surrey, far larger than its unfortunate predecessor, and looks fantastic in one corner, like it has been there for years. It has reached the stage where it’s more like a small bush, rather than the single stems you find in garden centres, and is growing from multiple different points. I swear that it has grown by 10% in all directions since I brought it home, clearly it likes the new conditions. Agaves were easily replaced from an enthusiast in Essex and again look like they have been there forever, and where there was once a huge hoya I have now strung up a passiflora that is already four feet tall and spreading its tendrils all over the place. In time it could look amazing, especially if it flowers. Overall it is looking a lot better than a few weeks ago. The cycads are not so easily replaced though, and amongst the new green additions look like a succession of Del Monte cast-offs, pineapple husks in weathered pots. Nonetheless I was hopeful that their unique biology would have allowed them to survive.

Cycads are funny old plants. They’re remnants, living fossils, descended from the oldest of plants and familiar to dinosaurs, like Ferns and Araucarias (like the Monkey Puzzle). For some reason plants from these families have always called to me, I should have been an Edwardian. They have small furry or smooth trunks, caudexes, formed from the bases of old leaves, and they grow incredibly slowly. Smaller plants in particular, which most of mine are as I’ve grown them from seed, tend to have significantly more more below ground than above, huge underground root systems far larger than the caudexes themselves, and this means that they can store a tremendous amount of energy in the form of starch. I was hopeful that this energy would be released after the heat stress, just as wildfires in habitat can trigger a mass flushing of new leaves.

Tim Farron never looked so good did he?

I was not wrong. A mere three weeks after the furnace they are springing to life, even the smallest and daintiest plants. In the days immediately after coming home I gradually introduced a bit more moisture, and then the following weekend I gave them a decent amount of a high nitrogen fertiliser. Slowly but surely the tops of the caudexes are expanding. Green tufts are beginning to show. On one Indian cycad they’re a foot long already. I will remain eternally grateful for the extra warmth that September has blessed us with, as ironically enough these plants need heat in order to grow. Had we hit an early autumn it could be that many of these plants may have just gone dormant, as it is I’d say that around half of them are actively growing, and it’s likely the other half will follow suit, although the sooner the better as the leaves become stretched in low light conditions (the professional term is etiolated). It may not look dark to you or I but these plants are from the tropics.

I suspect that in another four weeks things will look vastly better, and that a year from now we will barely remember what happened with the exception of one of two plants that will unfortunately look forlorn for much longer. There is a silver lining however, and that is that a week of oven-like conditions has proved pivotal in the fight against the bugs. Mealy bugs are soft and moist, with a waxy coating, and the unrelenting and extreme heat seems to have killed the vast majority of them off. A few lived on the leaves, and so departed when I cut them off. Many more however lived unseen in the cracks, crevisses and fur. When soft new leaves start to come out they’re like a magnet for these pests and in some cases, if I’m not sufficiently on the ball, can prevent a new leaf from growing before it has even got started. They breed like the clappers and severe infestations can completely engulf leaves, making them look like they’re covered in snow. Like aphids they secrete sticky goo, and this in turn grows mould on it and it all becomes disgusting. They’re easy enough to clean off leaves, but hiding in the cracks they escape detection and also insectides (though mostly I use a hose or the shower to blast them off). This time around however and the new leaves are untouched. Where previously I could have been guaranteed to spot small white bugs crawling up stems, now there are practically none. I can only surmise that where a decade of various treatments has failed, the unintended super-heating of the conservatory has fried them all. Who knew? Certainly not me, and whilst I would obviously have preferred that none of this had ever happened, if all the plants are back to normal in a year or two but I have no bugs to contend with, it may just have been worth it. Just. 

Did you make it this far? If so I'm amazed!

My twist on the Midas touch

What's that saying? Everything he touches turns to gold? I've got something very similar going on, but it's not quite as good. Everything I touch breaks. When I say similar, I suppose I mean the opposite really. Rather than making a fortune at every opportunity, instead I'm hemorrhaging money on needing to repair almost everything I come into contact with. It started this summer when I dropped my camera for the umpteenth time and it finally died a short while later in Poland. I'd previously dropped it on Southend Pier, at Dungeness, in the Emirates, frequently in Wanstead - actually it might be easier to list where I haven't dropped it. Anyhow, that was a monster repair bill and a stack of hassle. 

Then the almost brand new washing machine died. Naturally I had not bothered to send in the warranty stuff, and after a failed repair it become more economic to just get a new one. Cue another unexpected bill. So annoying, it was literally about six months old, whereas the previous one had lasted ten years. 

The following week in Hong Kong, the diaphragm on my trusty wide angle zoom froze up. Excellent. The following month, in Florida, I forgot to zip up half of my backpack, and as I swung it onto my shoulders my second camera and a couple of lenses sailed through the air in a graceful arc, bouncing off a parked car and then onto the tarmac. The lenses seem more or less OK, indeed one of them had very recently dropped off the front of the camera at a wedding in Scotland and bounced spectacularly across the dance floor - one senses though that its luck might be running out. The camera however has given up the ghost in protest and will now only fire one shot before freezing up. It's my full frame travel body, and whilst used mostly as a back-up it gives me plenty of options that I now no longer have. I've yet to take either of them to be sorted out, I can't face it.

Then last week I discovered that the hands on my watch had become misaligned, so at six o'clock one hand points at six whereas the other doesn't point at twelve. Nothing major, but very irritating once you notice it and so I sent it off to be assessed at the beginning of this week. I might get away with this one as it appears to be under warranty, but it's still a hassle. No problem though, my shiny new phone I mentioned in the last post tells the time....

Ah. Yesterday I went out for the East London Birders Drinks, and whilst attempting to take a drunken photo managed to drop it on the floor. To be fair I drop it quite a lot, but this time I noticed a few purple spots had appeared on the screen. Ah well, not much of a problem, on with the festivities, more wine please! I woke up this morning to a pounding headache and this.

Whilst the headache gradually subsided, the phone got progressively worse as the morning went on, and when I realised it was to all intents and purposes now useless I conceded defeat and trundled off to a place that specialises in relieving idiots of hard-earned cash, the appropriately named iSmash. There I parted with another vast and wholly unnecessary sum of money, and a few hours later received it back in pre-Hornchurch condition.

They say bad things come in threes, but this is the sixth time this year that I've managed to destroy something expensive to the point of no return. Maybe they meant multiples of three? Anyway, Christmas is cancelled.

Death and Despair. No Biscuits.

Where I work there are televisions that are always on. One is always in my line of sight if I am looking at my computer screens. If I turn around to get away from it, another appears instead. In the 360 degrees from my desk, I can see seven televisions, and every single one of them, despite no sound, is feeding me a diet of bad news. Constant bad news. Constant unpleasant bad news. Unless I’m in a meeting somewhere, my day is completely dominated by whatever atrocity or disaster is currently befalling the world. It does not do much for my well-being is the conclusion I am reaching. I don’t know about you, but as I age I seem to slowly but surely become more sensitive to sad and bad things happening. I never used to be like this, and really you would expect that the constant in-your-face aspect of today’s news services, often beaming you tragedy live and as it happens would harden you to it. Toughen you up. Yet it is the opposite, and there are some stories that I end up with a lump in my throat. They can be global news stories where you see a child’s body under a sheet, or they can be reading Michael Clarke’s address from Philip Hughes’ funeral. Perhaps it is to do with having children, perhaps it is to do with my own mortality, as so famously penned in song by Pink Floyd. Shorter of breath, one day closer to death.

I’m trying to work, but I’m surrounded by death. Seemingly news is not news unless somebody has died. Preferably lots of people. Yesterday I was pumped ten hours of the siege at that café in Sydney. As terrified people ran out of the building, so I saw them run. Then I saw the repeats of them running. Again and again. I saw the SWAT team going in and the flashes of gunfine. Again and again. And I saw the wounded being carried out. Today I’m being fed live updates from Peshawar, where religiously-motivated gunmen have just killed 130 children in some kind of revenge attack, part of an ever-increasing spiral of violence. Children, shot in their classrooms in cold blood. To say it is harrowing is to belittle it, I am speechless. I spent the summer watching Ebola unfold, with light relief provided by the periodic beheading of western hostages in Syria and Iraq. I saw the candle-lit vigils, and then the stills from the videos and the men in black with balaclavas on. I get aerial footage of M25 crash scenes, I get capsized ferries and cruise liners, I get downed airliners. Rape, murder and child abuse are all quotidian.

Occasionally, very occasionally, the BBC feel sorry for the viewer and stick on a feel good story. Or indeed comedy, for instance when UKIP take part in a by-election, or when FIFA release a report into their own activities. This is very rare, but the other day there was a piece, repeated pleasingly often, about baby seals, replete with extensive footage of baby seals looking adorable. This was heart-warming, and I watched it as often as I could, transfixed by the deep black eyes of the pups. But of course it was a story about orphaned seal pups being hand-reared back to health, so the sub-text was still DEATH. And as I type the BBC is now telling me that one of the last Northern White Rhinos has died in captivity. Ideally they’ll follow this up with a story about poaching, and show a few dead and mutilated animals bleeding in some dry acacia-dotted scrubland. Breaking News they call it. I’m sick of it.

I know what you’re thinking. Get up and turn the TV off. I would, believe me I would, but they’re suspended from the ceiling and I can’t reach the buttons.