Mostly Fluff

Ben Wildsmith

Concerned that my habit of sitting with the curtains closed watching 24-hour news and repeatedly replying ‘simpleton’ to social media posts isn’t very healthy, I went for an outing today.

I set out for the owl sanctuary in Ebbw Vale with the news rattling around my head like gravel in a tin can, insistent.

After parking up, I started wandering through Festival Park, past the fishermen at the lake and round the bend where blazing sunshine, soundtracked by crickets, beat down on the village of Cwm below.

I am always puzzled by why our southern valleys are so seldom garlanded for their beauty. You could spend your whole life roaming between Blaenavon and Porthcawl without running out of heart-stopping beauty.

Puffing up the hill to the sanctuary, I snapped some photos to send to my dad in Australia. He’s only got the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney Opera House to distract him from world affairs, the poor dab.

Rhigos

I love to invite friends from England and further afield to visit. It’s great watching their expressions when they see the Alpinesque view from the Rhigos for the first time or wander through the dappled light of the forestry at Llanwonno.

‘I can see why you love it,’ they say, and I beam in agreement. It’s a natural class of thing to be proud of where you live and a pleasurable boast to show it off.

In the airless clamour of today’s politics, pride and shame seem to have fused into a faux-patriotic basilisk. The right has always looked back to a golden age, they are ‘conservative’ for a reason.

Commensurately, the left look forward to a utopian future, which is why they are ‘progressive’. There are merits in both positions as we seek to preserve what defines us, whilst growing into our potential. The pitfall, though, is that obsession with times past, or to come, takes us away from the moments we live in and cheats us of our time in the world.

Politicians have found that the internet allows them to invoke nightmares in people whose experience of life is becoming more vicarious with every technological development. We can absorb yards of information about Epping, or Ballymena, or Falkirk, or Llanelli without ever visiting or speaking to people who live there.

Battlefields

As these places are described as battlefields in a war for civilisation, they become as abstract as Donetsk, or Rafa in a wider narrative of decline. Stripped of nuance, context, and culture, their names flash up on screens as signifiers of rage, only to be replaced as soon as unrest breaks out elsewhere.

The politicians and influencers driving division in our societies are riding two horses at once. They ‘love’ a United Kingdom of flags, and beer, and bacon but hold its population, languages, institutions, environment, and even laws in contempt.

Latterly, they love the monarchy but hate the king. They love the idea of a United Kingdom but none of the elements that might constitute one.

At the sanctuary, the birds were enjoying their day as much as I was. Four tawny owls took turns flying from one perch to another, in a game that seemed to have rules and an order of participation. How progressive of them.

A peevish harris hawk called Danni stared beakily at anyone who had the temerity to pass her, screaming determinedly like a barmaid at closing time.

The volunteers weeded, painted benches, and noted feeding patterns for the birds. There were buckets if you wanted to donate, no pressure, all smiles. A little, waggy dog called Benji greeted everyone who arrived without suspicion.

My favourite was the Great Grey Owl. He stood, enormous, on his perch, tall, round and powerful as you like. The information board on his cage said he only weighed two pounds. He was, it explained, ‘mostly fluff’.