Mother Nature is a bitch this week.
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Ignore the Scandi-killer on the TV, there's a real murderer just outside your window (March 25)
When you come to the end of a box set that you've really loved, it's like coming to the end of a long-term relationship. You need to spend some time whittling wood and listening to Phil Collins before you can move on.
I felt like that when I finished
Black Mirror. "Nothing will ever be as good ever again," I wailed into my snotty hanky. But last week, having swiped left on the remote for about a month, I came across a show called
Modus. It's set in the snowy wastelands of Sweden and, as is usual with Scandi-dramas, it features various weirdly attractive people staring into the monochromatic scenery while solving a set of improbable murders.
Modus is not as good as
Black Mirror.
It's not even close. But it certainly satisfies the masochistic trend that compels us all towards a drama that makes us feel afraid, cold and miserable. We seem to like the violence and the slowness and the reminder that, deep down, happiness is something to do with the devil.
However, if all you want is a bit of misery, might I suggest that until the writer of
Black Mirror stops collecting awards for the four series and gets on with the fifth, you turn off your television and go for a walk ... Last week, I didn't do that, obviously. But I was outside, seeing how much of my oil had been stolen that day, when a barn owl swept no more than 8in over my head. I didn't see it coming and, more astonishingly, I didn't hear it either. This was a medium-sized bird with a face that has the aerodynamic properties of a satellite dish, travelling at maybe 40mph, and it wasn't making a sound.
It swooped over a hedge and then, out of nowhere, it was attacked by a brace of crows. The owl twisted and turned but the bastards kept at it.
Pecking. Grabbing. Ramming. Not since the late summer of 1940 had the skies over Britain seen such a dogfight.
I can only assume the owl was out early that night, before the sun had set, because it was hungry. And because it was hungry, it wasn't as strong as it should have been. Plus, it was like a Stuka, designed for fast dive-bombing, unlike the crows, which were the F-15s. The result of the drama was inevitable and soon, owly was dead.
We're always told that in nature everything is bright and beautiful and animals kill only for food. It's only humans in general, and Scandinavians in particular, who strangle and stab for fun. So I figured that the owl versus crow contest was a one-off and that I'd witnessed something unusual.
It seems not. Three days later, the papers ran a large photograph of a
sparrowhawk standing on an upturned starling. You could see the panic in the starling's face and the cold detached killer look of a Nazi zombie in the eyes of the hawk. It was a brilliant picture with more drama than you'd get in a week of television.
And it gets better. After I'd finished the newspapers, I picked up a copy of
Country Life, where there was an even more amazing photograph. It showed a great grey shrike standing by the carcass of a mouse that it had impaled on a large thorn. Not even the girl with the dragon tattoo thought to do that to her victims. Small wonder its nickname is the butcher bird.
This is a creature that can peel the skin off a toad before eating the innards. It can lure other birds into an ambush by mimicking their cries. Oh, and it kills by beating victims to death with its beak.
It is a rare sight in Britain these days, but if you can't find one, don't despair because the much more common thrush can entertain you by smashing a snail to pieces on a rock.
Abroad, things get even more gruesome. On one African holiday, I was watching a little monkey preening itself in a tree when, out of nowhere, an eagle arrived. There was a bit of a kerfuffle during which the bird quite simply emptied the monkey. When the dust settled it was sitting on a branch with a bloodstained beak and what appeared to be a monkey glove puppet on its foot.
Then, on holiday last month, I sat at the breakfast table each morning, watching all the birds fight over which one would get to the breadbasket first. There was a sparrow with a wonky leg we called Peg, and all the other birds, sensing his disability, picked on him. For them, a bit of warm croissant was less important than annoying Peg.
During the day, I liked to sit in a treehouse watching the fairy tern chicks — almost certainly the cutest creatures on God's green earth — defending their patch from adult ingress. They'd stick their arms out and fluff up their down and charge at birds four times bigger.
As Sir Attenborough was not on hand, I had no idea why they were doing this. But being confused didn't detract from the show. I mean, I hadn't a clue what was going on in
Inception either but I still watched to the end.
There was a story last week about a singer who decided to take the money she'd earned and start a bee farm in the sticks. It all sounded a bit yoga and yoghurt to me at the time but now I'm not so sure.
Because all the things you see and love on the television — apart from
The One Show, obviously — can be found, for nothing, in your garden: murder, violence, intrigue, bullying, beauty and heroism.
Plus you can get involved, rewarding the heroes and punishing the villains. Which is why, after the crows had killed the owl, I got my shotgun and, with a plaintive cry of "Don't pick on the little guy", blew both their heads off.
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And here's the
Sun column.