Diary of a Hunter-Gatherer
Picture the scene.
Last weekend, I camped with my family at a barn-raising party on the western foot of the Quantock hills, in Somerset. On Saturday I crept out of the tent at 5am, when the faintest skein of red cloud netted the sky. Below me, mist filled the valley floor. I slipped through the sagging fence at the top of the field and found myself in a steep, broad coomb, covered in bracken. I climbed for a while, as quietly as I could, until a frightful wail shattered my thoughts. I crouched and listened. I could see nothing on the dark hillside. It came again, from about 50 metres to my right, half-shriek, half-bleat, a wild, wrenching, desolate cry, a cry that the Earth might make in mourning for itself.
Yes, dear reader, we’re visiting the pages of the Guardian. Specifically, the latest transmission from the strange, anguished mind of Mr George Monbiot:
Walking without a map, I reached the valley floor too soon and found myself on the main road. In some places there were no verges and I had to press myself into the hedge as cars passed. But on such early walks, almost regardless of where you are, there are rewards.
Wait for it.
Just as I was about to turn off the road, on to the track that would take me back to the barn, I found a squirrel hit by a car that must have just passed me, dead but still twitching. It was a male, one of this year’s brood but fully grown. Blood seeped from a wound to the head. I picked it up by its hind feet, and though I had played no part in its death, I was immediately gripped by a sensation so discrete, so distinct from all else we feel, that I believe it requires its own label: hunter’s pride.
Gasp ye at the dark, animal side of a Guardian columnist:
It’s the raw, feral thrill I have experienced only on the occasions when I have picked up a fresh dead animal I intend to eat. It feels to me like the opening of a hidden door, a rent in the mind through which you can glimpse a ghost psyche: vestigial emotional faculties that once helped us to survive.
Ah, the savage romance. Of roadkill.
I showed the squirrel to the small tribe of children that had formed in the campsite, girls and boys between the ages of three and nine, and asked them if they’d like to watch me prepare it.
Creepy man waves dead, twitching squirrel at bewildered children.
I borrowed an axe and sharpened it on a stone, told the children what I was about to do, in case any of them had qualms, then chopped off the head, tail and feet.
Creepy man now has axe in hand. Run, children, run.
It was exquisite: tender and delicately flavoured.
As this is apparently still breakfast we’re talking about, I’ll settle for coffee and some toast. However, George seems to have opened a psychological floodgate. A confession ensues:
I’ve eaten plenty of roadkill. I’ll take anything fresh except cats and dogs (my main concern is for the feelings of the owners, rather than the palatability of the meat, though it would require an effort to overcome the cultural barriers). But I was never before foolish enough to mention this eccentric habit on social media.
Happily, Guardian readers can now peek inside George’s head, his “ghost psyche,” and behold the passions therein. While pondering the various health concerns raised by peeling flattened squirrels from the roadside and, after waving said objects at any passing small children, reaching for the camping stove.
To seek enlightenment, about ourselves and the world around us: this is what makes a life worth living.
That, and the contents of the Guardian.
It was exquisite: tender and delicately flavoured.
The squirrel or the children?
“Come look at my squirrel, children. It’s still twitching.”
Interestingly, just a couple of days ago, Philip Hoare was raving about the evils of Sunday roasts in the very same paper:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/25/sunday-roast-menu-head-to-head
Scraping animal carcasses off roads and eating them for breakfast is good, Sunday roasts are “an oppressive outmoded practice” that should be done away with. Only in the Guardian.
though I had played no part in its death, I was immediately gripped by… hunter’s pride.
Wow.
Sunday roasts are “an oppressive outmoded practice” that should be done away with.
Goodness. “Sinewy hubris” and “meat hegemony.” Life without the Guardian would be so terribly dull.
So who’s up for a two-week camping trip with George?
Crazed vegan axe-fondler eats Tufty!
What’s he going to do next? Barbecue Basil Brush?
Turn Emu and Orville into some sort of sick, childhood-destroying turducken?
Now I’m confused. Where I live, the sort of people who dine on roadkill are the sort which Monbiot and friends at The Guardian normally criticize.
Or, is this another excuse for more references to Fanny Cradock?
Sometimes you get a glimpse of something that makes you wonder if George could have become a real human being if someone had got to him early enough.
Roadkill. I took more birds with my first truck than with my first shotgun.
It was exquisite: tender and delicately flavoured.
Sarcoptic mange, Leptospirosis and Tularemia. Lovely.
File under “Religion” – the priest ceremonially laying out the entrails of the sacrificial animal as he speaks of the collective ancestral sin of humanity.
George is swollen with pride.
Though the swelling could be due to some kind of intestinal parasite.
George is swollen with pride.
Perhaps he’s angling for a “Hugo” in the “post-apocalypse dystopia, humans fight with other scavengers for carrion” category. He does have the requisite SJW curriculum vitae for it, I suppose.
Some readers are refreshingly blunt.
a ghost psyche: vestigial emotional faculties that once helped us to survive.
Well, yes. These “vestigial emotional faculties” once helped us to survive, but that doesn’t mean they are now some spectral element of our psyche. Plenty of people still hunt, and make something of it. They even train dogs specifically for this purpose, and may on occasion use a knife to strike a final blow to the heart and lungs of a wild beast. How feral and raw! And how completely removed it all is from scavenging road-kill.
Perhaps Moonbat was actually experiencing the vestiges of a gatherers emotional faculties, and the vicarious whiff of an honest days work blew him away and inspired him to write this misjudged article. Seems more fitting in his case.
“though I had played no part in its death, I was immediately gripped by… hunter’s pride.” Well now, that is telling. A true socialist parasite, George is. Does not do the deed and yet claims all the reward and even a false sense of accomplishment and pride all for someone elses effort.
Neither hunter nor gatherer, but a scavenger he be.
The weak willed cousin of the falcon (who survives of his own prowess).
The lazy relation of the gatherer (who works hard to obtain daily sustenance).
The Monbioticus Roadsidicus parades his pride, that was delivered by someone else’s bumper.
U wot?
He fucking ate it?!
He really should have left the head on. My grandfather, who grew up in the hills of Arkansas, would have been appalled at the waste of the squirrel’s brains.
Larry Woody (!), outdoors writer for the Lebanon (Tennessee) Democrat, explains how it’s done:
“When you dress your squirrel, simply skin the head and leave it attached to the body. When you cook the squirrel — fired, or stewed in dumplings — include the head.
Once it’s cooked, use a knife handle to crack open the skull, like cracking a walnut, and scoop out the brains. Squirrels don’t have a large brain — I’d compare it to the average politician’s — but what little there is, is delicious.”
In case you’re wondering: “If you’ve never tried squirrel brains, it’s comparable to hog brains.”
http://www.lebanondemocrat.com/article/sports/462781
Then I skinned the squirrel and stretched and salted the skin on a piece of plank, whereupon another dispute arose about who would take it home.
I bet the parents were chuffed.
But David, you didn’t mention George’s portal –the one he looked through to “see, though briefly and darkly, the ancient soul of humankind”.
But David, you didn’t mention George’s portal
Heh. A terrible oversight on my part. Suffice it to say, “The land beyond the portal is an enchanting, electrifying place, in which senses and sensations are tightened and stretched, tuned as at no other time to the inner and the outer life.”
Is it ‘shroom season already?
Wow, that is some of the most over-written prose I’ve ever seen. And he publishes this sort of thing regularly? Wow.
Ordinary people eat Sunday roast, so you can see why the Guardian would despise it. Instead they continue on their endless quest to be ‘different from the common herd’ by scraping dead squirrels off the road and eating them.
If a large part of the population are roadkill, George and co would be in their local Harvester at Sunday lunchtime.
THe beta male instinct was just too much for poor George…
And he publishes this sort of thing regularly?
George regularly denounces “the blackened waste of consumer frenzy,” by which I think he means shopping, and he described advertising as “a pox on the planet… one of the forces driving us towards destruction.” Oh, and he once equated air travel with child molestation. While flying around the world to promote his own books.
His struggles with reality can be savoured here and here. And his encounter with the criminal underclass may amuse too.
Uh oh.
Fun fact: Squirrels have ghost psyches as well, only much lighter and smaller. 10 can fit in the belly of a mature swan. In the end there can be only one.
***The bespectacled, green, urban moonbat can be seen from time to time through the bramble. Confused creatures, they need our help.
George never does tell us what he was wearing when he claimed his kill. My bet is bright red cat-print flannel pyjamas with bunny slippers.
George never does tell us what he was wearing when he claimed his kill.
Gloves would be a good idea.
shhh. Be vewy vewy quite. I’m hunting wabbits.
What a maroon!
dang keyboard. That should be QUIET not quite. And yes, I was comparing George to Elmer Fudd.
. . . I crept out of the tent at 5am . . .
. . . when everyone else bloody well had the sense to stay asleep . . .
I might suggest to George that for his next engagement of the natural elements of his inherited collective unconscious, he take the children on a scavenger hunt under a 70 meter radius of the nearest Industrial Wind Turbine. There they will find a variety of Wind Turbine kill squab, perhaps many of them already beheaded by the Turbine blades. A little plucking and a small fire will provide, I’m sure, a delectable feast to ease his troubled sociopathic mind.
My wife actually ate squirrel as a child, said animal having been hunted and killed by her stepfather. (Times were hard, but not hard enough to eat roadkill.) She does not remember it as a spiritually uplifting experience.
A couple of years ago, the Other Half and I were driving on the outskirts of town, past a large cattery that’s set a few yards back from the road. In the middle of the road lay a cat that had evidently been struck by a car moments earlier. It was a grotesque sight – twitching, convulsing and bizarrely misshapen.
At no point did it occur to me to estimate its freshness or how well it might go with peas.
At no point did it occur to me to estimate its freshness or how well it might go with peas.
Well, no. Snow peas and a soy sauce, however…
As usual, George isn’t strong on logic.
George thought: Squirrel is dead. George played no part in it’s death. Eating it is ‘good’ as it avoids ‘waste’. Gaia smile on George.
Reality: Squirrel is dead. George has no idea how it died. Did the driver deliberately target it? If so George is eating the victim of psycho. Presumably by George’s logic it would be fine to eat Cecil the lion as he was ‘already dead’. He’d be happy to clean up after nutters who drive around ‘accidentally’ killing anything. Also, by eating squirrel, George is depriving the flies, bugs, birds, microbes who would otherwise have eaten it sustenance. Statistically some will have died because he stole food from their mouths. Gaia shits on George.
Narcissco George confronts the dark twisties of his public psyche while inevitably converting death into art. I mean, what else could the poor dear do?
Funny, as a rurally-raised, not-urbanist, conservative male of a certain age I mostly experience sadness returning small dead animals to the earth from whence they sprang.
And this blog is the only readership who will ever know it.
She does not remember it as a spiritually uplifting experience.
and . . .
At no point did it occur to me to estimate its freshness or how well it might go with peas.
But . . . but . . . but . . . what about the people who don’t have a life!?!?!?!!!!
I didn’t know Britain had hillbillies. The more you know, I guess….
Wait, he was a’skeered of a fawn’s cry? He’s no hillbilly–he’s just a freak.
Along with George happily mangling concepts and trying to get people to be impressed with the idea of getting up at five in the _)#*&$)(*#&$*() AM, I’ve also been reading that there are new additions to dictionaries.
Recently here and there online I’ve been running into a scattering of individuals announcing being “biracial”, which has been giving the impression of making a signaling statement rather than actually providing useful information—Such an announcement might be of interest to a casting director, but none of the statements I encountered stated what varieties of ancestry, and merely stated “Biracial”
So yes, and noting the announcements of additions to dictionaries, what has come to mind is the very probably immense gulf between what the user of the term wants people to think vs what the term actually means.
Therefore;
What the user probably rather hopes that “biracial” means:
Human plus human.
What “biracial” really means:
Klingon plus Elf
Vulcan plus Dwarf
Centaur plus Goat–‘k, a small centaur and a large goat . . .
Etc . . .
So who’s up for a two-week camping trip with George?
I nominate our host.
Wait, whut? Hal…people think they’re half-Vulcan (a pretend SF “race”) and half-(I’m assuming Tolkien) Dwarf? WHY???
I nominate our host.
As my sweet grey-haired grandma used to say, the tricky part is always disposing of the body.
Wait, whut? Hal…people think they’re half-Vulcan (a pretend SF “race”) and half-(I’m assuming Tolkien) Dwarf? WHY???
Welll . . . As is demonstrated with great regularity, very strange people do get very extremely bored, but then one does easily think of the American right wing presidential candidates and equally so, the UK Labour party leadership election. At least for a great improvement from either, there are the furries.
On an other hand, at least Google does state that when searching for Klingon Elf hybrid, there is much discussion of Klingons, and of Elves, particularly their respective languages, and Esperanto, Et al, but not both.
Squirrel brains. Forced to try back in 63.
I was only three years old. Dad gave me a beer. Uncle Dave handed me an unfiltered smoke.
They had the thousand yard stare. Some damned right of passage.
Most back in the day ran off to join the circus and hang with hobos and snake handlers.
They were the lucky ones. Others ended up running what is left into the ground.
You are what you eat. And mostly get to say something later, if one has had their shots.
… and he once equated air travel with child molestation.
I wonder what he would call waving a dead squirrel at a bunch of kids. Oh.
Pace Greg, whose grandfather knew a choice morsel when he saw one (he would have been appalled at the waste of the squirrel’s brains ), the reason Mr. Moonbat does not consume the brains of the squirrel is that he doesn’t want to wind up with more cerebral matter in his stomach than in his cranium.
As my sweet grey-haired grandma used to say, the tricky part is always disposing of the body.
Oh, nonsense. You just have no imagination.
R.Sherman,
Perhaps he’s angling for a “Hugo”…
I’d say the Bulwer-Lytton Contest committee can cease accepting nominations; this year’s winner is here.
He was at a barn-raising party??
Shudder.
I grew up in the countryside and have long nursed a desire to return there, perhaps in my retirement.
Unfortunately, it looks as though all the agreeable places in England will now be infected by the likes of Monbiot and his obnoxious snooty friends. Why can’t they all just piss off to Tuscany and live with Polly?
File under “Religion”
George does seem to be gripped by an ersatz religious fervour, a kind of eco-mysticism. What with his “portals,” “ghost psyche” and the “ancient soul of humankind.” As if scavenging roadkill and pretending to be pre-modern somehow makes his existence more real and authentic. His mind is an amusing place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to be stuck there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3213631/Environmentalist-skins-butchers-cooks-dead-squirrel-live-BBC-Newsnight-seven-swings-axe.html
Scraping animal carcasses off roads and eating them for breakfast is good, Sunday roasts are “an oppressive outmoded practice” that should be done away with.
So if I want to enjoy a grilled steak this weekend I’ll have stand by the tracks and hope a cow is hit by a train.
But you can use it for the column, too!!
Exodus 22:30
And ye shall be holy men unto Me; therefore ye shall not eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs.
The dietary restrictions of the Old Testament always seemed superfluous to me, if not useless. Why would limiting what people eat help them tell right from wrong? Maybe it was supposed to help tell right from CRAZY.
George is obviously an asshole of immense proportions. But, however much it pains me, I have to point out he is one of the few writers on the Neo Left to take issue with Noam Chomsky, over the latter’s contribution to ‘the Politics of Genocide’. The highlight of this demented tome describes how the Tutsis were actually the engineers of the Rwandan genocide and how a vast conspiracy has kept this truth from us. George’s ‘attack’ on Chomsky may have fizzled out in a disappointing fashion, but along the way he did at least show the latter up as a complete and utter cunt.
Here’s a more vegan friendly alternate scenario:
George happens upon a head of lettuce that fell off the back of a delivery lorry and was subsequently run over by the next car that followed.
(said quietly)
Bloody hell. He’s headed this way. Red alert guys.
It does strike me as odd that, for years, lefties despied country folk and country ways. Any talk of rural tradition and of being connected to the soil and the ancient ways was sneered at as superstition and sentimentality on the part of the in-bred peasantry. Yet here we have George getting all atavistic and aquiver at the sight of a dead rodent. It will all end badly.
Yet here we have George getting all atavistic and aquiver at the sight of a dead rodent.
Heh. That, as they say.
I think there’s ample room to doubt this story top to bottom. Video or it didn’t happen.
“I crept out of the tent at 5am”. The children’s tent I’ll bet.
The dietary restrictions of the Old Testament always seemed superfluous to me, if not useless.
A huge part of the law of Moses was to help the Israelites be different from their pagan neighbors — separate, apart, unmixed, unadulterated — so that they wouldn’t acquire their depraved customs such as child sacrifice and ritual prostitution. If the Israelites found it hard to socialize with their neighbors at mealtime, for example, they’d be less likely to seek approval from or try to fit in with the pagans. (A losing battle, but a battle nonetheless.)
(All other regulations that emphasized separateness fell into this category [Leviticus 19:19]. Oddly enough, the psychological rigor that accompanies not mixing wool with linen helps people keep the precept of separateness in other contexts.)
As a Mormon with my own dietary restrictions (no coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol) I find that avoiding those four substances — which almost all cultures use in friendship rituals — forces me to Be Separate from the off. Having to ask for cocoa instead of coffee, herbal tea instead of regular tea, soda instead of alcohol (or turning it down outright) is uncomfortable and awkward and annoying and indeed thwarts the full impact of the friendship ritual. If we all went out to dinner, I could enjoy your company well enough but I’d still be the one not quite integrated into the group.
So all that stuff about being holy (non secular) and a peculiar people (chosen, apart) got reinforced in customs great and small.
What mojo said.
Charles C.W. Cooke calls our attention to a proposed new writer to join the Guardian fold, but alas, he is dead.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423221/hypocrisy-culture-kills-crowd-charles-c-w-cooke
A barn-raising party? Save me. Unless you live in Lancaster County, PA and are called Jacob Stoltzfus you have absolutely no excuse to be doing anything so utterly twee. Mongbat wasn’t camping. He was on safari.
On point. Trust me.
http://www.madmusic.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=20787
I quite like this.
I quite like this.
That’s awesome.
“a bridge long enough to get over yourself.”
Too bad it takes some many characters to make it work.
It is rather pretentious, but I give him credit for being willing to butcher and clean his own meat. 98% of us never see where meat comes from, and would prefer not to, I think.
Something about culinary recommendations seems awfully familiar . . . .
