Up yours Delors[35]

Wham bam! Sam Cam to be mam (she’ll need a new pram)

The hour after dawn under an open sky is a beautiful time of birdsong, dewdrops and the lingering smell of scavenging foxes. As I walk over to the cows, with my exhaled breath white, to check for new arrivals, I leave a trail of wet footprints alongside those of badger, muntjac deer and fox. The foxes always turn up when there is the prospect of cow afterbirth to enjoy . . . They [sheep and cows on being let out in spring] ran, jumping and frisking, as they always do on release from their winter yard – heavily pregnant matrons with bellies bouncing and udders swinging are not one of nature’s prettiest sights.

Mary Pierce is what you might call a slow starter. For the first set of her quarter-final against the twice champion Venus Williams, she moved around the court like an underwater diving bell. Not that fast, actually. Michelangelo’s David had more chance of returning Williams’s first serve and the result was a very reflective 6–0 to the American in 21 locomotive minutes . . . Jolted awake, perhaps by shame, Pierce stopped performing as though stuck in a pool of aspic and fought all the way to an entrancing 22-point tie-break . . . It was an inexplicably statuesque performance from Pierce, with the emphasis on statue . . . It would be unfair to call 30-year-old Pierce a basket case. She is too elegant for that. She is more like a Prada handbag case . . .

I am trying to be a priest, but I haven’t time. When I was first appointed vicar[36] . . . the diocesan annual returns[37] were on one side of A4 . . . Nowadays, the annual returns are a foot thick and a bundle of perfidious obscurity, hedged about with health and safety and absurd questions about light bulbs, and serious inquiries as to what the PCC[38] is doing to reduce our carbon footprint – all because the Church has taken up the pagan fantasy of global warming. I think the returns are devised in some Kafkaesque archidiaconal madhouse and calculated to be impossible to complete even over the whole year. . . . This is, of course, only political correctness tacked onto the failed collectivist socialist agenda that our rulers in the General Synod have foisted on us for a generation. . . . It’s a pantomime: a dumbed-down, clapped-out imitation of the entertainment industry combined with the newspeak of bureaucratic control. Once there was the Church of England. Now there is only the new Babel . . .

It was wren ballet, wren theatre, wren war . . . Wanderlust, intense mutual competition, aggressive territoriality, blindness to the existence of anything but themselves, all this combined with a male interest in engineering and female obsession with interior decor: it is an intriguingly human set of qualities. The strangest sight I have seen all the year was during the summer, in an enormous seabird colony in the Hebrides. All round me, the puffins, razorbills and guillemots were hacking and growling at each other, standing in offended silence or simply coming and going, their babies cheeping deep within the boulders of the colony, the rocks coated in guanoed slime, the shags hissing and honking at me like demented witches, a stinking, ammonia-thick and frankly hellish place.

Break six eggs into a bowl and give them a good bollocking. Set aside. Now lay three lamb epithets on a board and pummel them for five minutes. By the end of this process, the lamb should be cowed, but not completely flattened. Take it outside and teach it a good lesson. Bring it back into the kitchen and sprinkle with asterisks, then pointedly ignore . . . Give the mixture a good glare and allow to vituperate . . . Excoriate a leek and denounce a medium-sized bulb of fennel, very roughly chopped, and stir-fry for two minutes.