In a court case a few months later, a proposal put together by the Don’t Bury Dartington campaign for a more moderate, more wildlife-friendly and significantly cheaper alternative for Brimhay was put forward. Heroically, Dartington won the case, the result of eighteen months of hard work by Liz and Trudy, the founder of the campaign. ‘If they’d gone ahead with their plan for the flats, nobody who lives here would see each other any more,’ Liz told me. ‘As a community, we socialise because of the layout of our houses and gardens. At the moment, when I’m in my garden I see owls, jays, two different types of woodpecker. I’ve got flowers and butterflies everywhere. All that would have been gone.’ Liz and Trudy raised the £17,000 needed to fight the court case through neighbourhood curry evenings and a groundswell of community support, Liz making the long journey to London despite health problems. The case turned, apparently, on a chewed nut, which was submitted as evidence of the presence of dormice in the area. The outcome represents a simultaneous victory for people, dormice and rare bats, and perhaps the question is, why should the needs of people, dormice and rare bats ever not be mutually compatible?
Weird is a word with two very polarised meanings. Good Weird can be the best thing ever. If someone whose opinion I revere tells me a film or book or record is weird, and I can tell from the tone of their voice that they mean Good Weird, it means I need to consume it as soon as humanly possible. Bad Weird is very different: it’s a warning. It could mean a lot of stuff, none of it particularly salubrious. I can kid myself that loving bats and insects is generally thought of as Good Weird, but that’s because I spend a lot of time hanging out in a cocoon of people who love bats and insects. I know that a lot of people would view it as Bad Weird. I know that not giving a nocturnal flying fuck about horseshoe bats and wanting to park your four-by-four and executive home on top of their rapidly diminished habitats is the norm. I know that not wanting a moth in your house because you’ve just vacuumed and Colin and Sue are coming over later is the norm, as is getting Brian to come in and swat it. This view – seeing a love of nature as Bad Weird – seems to be at the root of so many of the ecologically damaging decisions made, big and small, by humans. ‘Oh, look at the oddballs fighting not to kill all these innocent creatures and to keep the entire world from turning into an unfeeling concrete monolith. What’s all that about? Ignore them. They’re just oddballs. They probably don’t even own any new coats.’ Too often, nature is perceived as an outsider’s hobby. In reality, though, it’s not some quirky extra to the main business. It is the main business.
It’s easy to look at history and find out when a king or despot was born or died but hard to pinpoint precisely when a prevailing attitude shifted. Most history is written by old people who, despite being wise, often have very poor memories, which means it is rife with factual inaccuracies. Nonetheless, it can be said with some certainty that at some hard-to-specify point in the past man lived closely connected with nature, not viewing himself as especially, if at all, superior to it. Then one day he started to view himself as more important and nature as being something to subjugate and treat without respect. Of course this was nonsense and soon created more problems for him as well as for nature. Despite regularly using face scrub, I am nowhere near as pretty as a small magpie moth. I am not better than a bat because I am able to watch Netflix and a bat is not. If anything, this probably makes me worse than a bat. In fact, out of solidarity with bats I recently cancelled my Netflix subscription. I am also almost 100 per cent sure I ate at least a couple of midges when I had a drink in the dark with the bedroom window open the other night. Now I just have to learn to echo-locate and fly through the overhanging branches of an overgrown drover’s road and I will be very nearly there, in full eternal unison with bats.
Naturally, we all have our favourites and our black spots when it comes to nature. I, for instance, try not to spend time around hamsters, as they push me towards a melancholy state of mind. But as soon as you start getting too specific and prescriptive about what it’s OK to like or not like in nature, you become the equivalent of somebody who holds the view that all people who wear hats are dickheads just because they wear hats. I try my best to endorse it all, and I want to be better at accepting that nature is better than me, but I know I have work still to do on this score. Bees are easy to love. It’s taken me years to fully forgive wasps their trespasses and accept that they are much cooler than me in terms of both physique and artisanal craftsmanship. But I am sure I will swear violently at another wasp before my life is over. After one particularly heavy day of insect bites, not long after my final bat walk of the year, I was bitten harder still by another horsefly on my cheek. I raised my hand to squash the horsefly, but I managed to resist. I considered the horsefly for a moment. It had not bitten me because it had taken offence at an out-of-context screenshot from a piece of my
