In which our author indulges himself in a short rant on the state of the planet in the early twenty-first century, including (but not restricted to) matters such as climate change, single-use plastics, mass extinctions, the depletion of nature, rampant pesticide use, plummeting insect populations, cruelty to animals, wanton littering, pollution, trophy hunting, the burning of the Amazon, the inaction of governments, the innate arrogance and selfishness of humankind, our apparently limitless capacity to treat the other inhabitants of the planet with disdain and contempt, and our equally limitless inability to see, appreciate or care about the consequences of our own short-sightedness with regard to the environment; with observations on the feelings of helplessness engendered by all the above (and much much more), as seen from the point of view of a concerned individual, and expressed in the form of a mildly allegorical tale about an English off-spinner and a broken lawnmower
Once upon a time there was (and is – he lives still) a man. We shall call him John Emburey, for that was (and is) his name.
John Emburey was a cricketer, bowling off spin for Middlesex and England. He was also an occasionally useful lower-order biffer, and (even by the standards of the 1980s) a fairly unathletic fielder whose stock-in-trade, in the immortal words of John Arlott, was to ‘fall in behind the ball and accompany it to the boundary’.
None of this is relevant – I merely add it as a bit of colour. Cricket-haters, agnostics and don’t-give-a-toss-ers can safely ignore the last paragraph.
What we want to focus on are five words once spoken by John Emburey. History doesn’t relate when he said them. That doesn’t matter. It’s possible he never said them at all, but that doesn’t matter either. These apocryphal tales, embellished over the years, their origins lost in the mists of time, are often better than the real thing. The point is that in those five words are embedded Socratic levels of wisdom, the kind of thing you expect from philosophers, sages or statesmen – not, with all due respect to purveyors of that fine and much maligned craft, from English off-spinners of the early 1980s with a bowling average of 38.4 and a strike rate of a wicket every 104.7 balls.
Coincidentally, the five words are spookily relevant to the state we find ourselves in vis-à-vis the current viability of the planet in general, and the environment and natural world in particular.
As I say, the time and place of their utterance needn’t concern us. Let’s say it was Lord’s cricket ground at some point in the 1980s. Similarly, of the circumstances of their uttering we need know only that they involve a broken lawnmower – a broken lawnmower stubbornly defying the ministrations of several members of the Lord’s ground staff.
John Emburey, passing by, was asked for his input.
He examined the mower. He fiddled. He tinkered. He did all the usual things people do when trying to mend something. Finally, he stepped back with a laconic expression on his face. He chose his words carefully.
‘The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’
He might have been right, but (just to stretch the metaphor beyond breaking point) I’d like to think we are all capable of wielding a spanner.