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May 2, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
49:44
Delingpod 18: Mike Daunt
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod And I was sitting innocently at my desk one day, wondering who I should have next on the podcast.
And then I got a call from an old friend and he said something which made total sense to me.
He said, spring is here and we need to do a podcast about how wonderful spring is in England.
And I thought, yeah, absolutely we do.
So, welcome to the podcast, an old friend.
His real name is Mike Daunt, although I prefer to refer to him by his nickname.
I can't tell you what the nickname is because it would be rude.
However, the name of this edition might give you a clue.
I'm going to call it Fat Old Country Matters.
Fat Old Country Matters with Mike Daunt.
Mike, welcome.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
I love that.
It's already made me laugh.
Now, Mike, you may remember from the last glorious podcast we did together, is the fishing coach to the stars.
I mean, among his other many talents, you've taught Chris Tarrant to fish, Eric Clapton, Jeremy Paxman, Max Hastings, and I could go on and on and on.
Yeah.
Duchess of Devonshire.
Well, yes, that was very...
Yeah, I suppose I can go into that, yes.
You can?
I mean, she's dead.
Debo Devonshire, who is one of the nicest...
She's dead, tragically.
One of the most lovely people you could ever meet.
And teaching her the timing of the cast.
Her estate workers adore it, because you have to say to yourself, not the old one of, God save the Queen, but you say, Cor, fuck me now!
And to have the Duchess Devo shouting that across her lake gave a lot of people a great deal of pleasure, including me.
So that's the rhythm that you adopt when you bring the rod back.
Bring the rod back, wait.
Call, fuck me, now.
Absolutely.
Bring the rod back, wait.
And that's when you say, core, fuck me.
Core, fuck me now.
Simple.
That's how you taught me to fly fish on the river Itchin.
And I knew that you weren't making a pass at me because you are rampantly...
You weren't trying to fuck me now.
You're rampantly heterosexual.
But I can see that it's part of your charm, Mike.
The reason I think you're the most popular fishing teacher...
Is that a fishing teacher?
A fishing teacher, whatever you like.
I don't care less.
One of the reasons you're so popular is that you make it funny as well as informative.
Well, it is supposed to be fun.
It's a sport.
But you do it for amusement, for happiness, for joy, not to take it terribly seriously.
And if you make a terrible mistake, who gives a shit, quite frankly?
Well, I suppose it depends, doesn't it, who invites you?
I mean, I imagine there was a certain kind of sticky person who owns a...
What's it called?
A stretch of...
A beet, is it?
Is it called a beet?
You have a beet on a Salmon River shore.
What's it called when it's not a Salmon River?
It's called a stretch, I suppose.
A stretch?
No, it hasn't got any particular name.
So I imagine there are certain posh people who own stretches of rivers or beets of rivers and they are very keen on etiquette and on the rules about how you...
What kind of fly you're allowed to use?
That's very much, in fact, I'm afraid to say that if they've owned their rivers for a long time, then you don't get that sort of behaviour.
And I've always said that without exception, great fishermen are always, without exception, poachers.
I mean, if they want to catch a fish, they won't stick to a dry fly.
They will use anything they can to catch a fish.
They will say in the pub they got it on a dry fly and they're lying bastards.
Oh!
So, are you saying, Mike, that when you invite me for my annual trip to the Itchin, which I think people who know about fishing will know that is about as good as high...
That and the Test, absolutely.
That and the Test.
Actually, which is better, the Itchin or the Test?
They're about equal.
The Test is the more famous.
Right, yes.
World famous.
But maybe the Itchin is more kind of recherche and known to the cognoscente, maybe?
Absolutely, very much so.
So when I come from my annual trip to the Itchin to go fishing for trout, if I just put a worm on my rod, on my hook, is that going to be...
Are you going to be cross with me?
Provided I didn't see it, which I would carefully turn my back to make sure I didn't.
It would make me laugh considerably.
But I imagine that actually...
Do trout go for worms?
Oh, boy, and hard.
Oh, really?
Oh, I mean, the old adage, if you want to catch a trout, put a worm on, that is an absolute killer, a real, total killer.
Oh, okay.
So how did the practice of fly fishing evolve then?
It's a very strange thing, but obviously, I mean, certainly from a trout fishing point of view, it's very different from a salmon.
When you're fishing for trout, you're emulating the food on which it mostly feeds, which is flies on the surface and the subsurface, they are limps, and that is their main food.
Yes, they will always take a worm in preference to anything.
Why?
You ask me, because I have no idea.
They don't see them naturally.
You might get the odd worm being swept out in a flood from the riverbank, but not normally.
They'll never see a worm, yet they go for mad for them.
Okay, and what about salmon?
Salmon love worms too, exactly the same.
That's a killer worm for a salmon.
Because in a way, I mean, I've been, I think, salmon fishing twice in Scotland.
Never caught anything.
But it was on a stretch of the D. It's pretty, pretty okay.
Very famous.
And it struck me at the time when the salmon were not biting that actually what I really wanted was, never mind the casting practice, I wanted a salmon to bite so that I could wrestle with it.
Quite right.
And reel it in, you know, play it.
I mean, it's what everybody wants.
And tragically, and I say that word with desperate sadness, Scotland was the birthplace of salmon fishing, worldwide.
And it is now, the salmon is beginning to become an endangered species.
Yes.
And this is an utter, utter tragedy.
And if I want people that I've taught...
To catch a salmon, I do not tragically take them to Scotland.
I will take them to Russia or to Iceland.
Right.
And there's an awful sadness to say that.
It is sad, isn't it, to think that salmon fishing in Scotland is basically over.
Now, why is that?
Well, there's huge numbers of reasons.
I mean, there rarely are.
And nobody actually knows the complete reason.
Salmon farms haven't helped because the sea lice, which that produces in huge numbers, which then attack the wild salmon, which doesn't do them any good.
The predators do them a lot of damage.
I mean, if you see the cormorants particularly, which are a seabird, and they are now in huge numbers in Scotland particularly, and if you see the smolt, which are the young salmon, trying to migrate to sea, or the par,
before they get to the smolt stage, trying to live in their water, And then the cormorants come, and there was one shot the other day, thank God, legally, the poor chap's got his beastly bloody license to shoot effing cormorants, and he opened it up, and it was stuffed, heaving, and that was only an hour after sunrise with smolt.
Masses and masses, every single one of those is a young salmon.
And we are now not allowed to shoot corners, which is complete madness.
Mike, I wanted to ask you about this, because actually, even though you've just come here innocently to talk about the joys of the spring, actually, you happen to have coincided with a bit of topicality, haven't you?
In as much as Chris Packham, this BBC wildlife...
I think it's sort of townie attitudes imposed on the country.
I think what he's trying to do, and I may be wrong about this, I think he knows absolutely bugger all about anything, particularly the country side.
And what he's doing is trying to appeal to the townie who is listening to his programmes.
That is my opinion.
And he should be fired instantly.
He knows so much of nothing, and yet he's talking about something which is terribly important And, for instance, these cats, they're the most desperate things for our songbirds.
And every single cat, by law, should have a collar on with a bell.
Personally, I love shooting cats, but that's what I call it.
Deeply unpopular.
I had a right and left once, and I'm sure I'm going to get killed for saying that, but there we are.
I was very proud of it.
So was my uncle.
We had a cat drive out of the barn.
Terribly unpopular to say that, and I'm sure I'm going to get letters of misery and anger.
No, I'm sure nobody will mind it if you've been shooting the old cat.
It gave me great joy.
As a small boy, aged about 15, that was.
But they should certainly have bells on their necks.
They're an effing nuisance.
They do terrible damage to our songbirds.
But if I could steer you gently back...
Let me just explain, for the benefit of special friends who don't know the story, that...
Chris Packham is a slightly scary...
I mean, he's got that thousand-yard stare.
He's got autism, which I think may explain his slightly obsessive nature.
And also his lack of empathy for humans.
I think he's very big on animal rights, but not so big on the communities who work with animals, particularly people in the country.
But Chris Packham...
With the help of his conservationist, environmentalist friends, Mark Avery, who used to be at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds.
Prevention of birds?
Not the prevention of birds.
No, prevention.
That's a kind of bitter joke.
It is called that now because the RSPB has got into bed with the wind industry, which of course slices and dices birds on an epic scale.
That's by the by...
So Chris Packham has got in league with this Mark Avery character and also the new head of Natural England, which is the quango which runs rural affairs on behalf of the government.
It's supposed to be arm's length.
And it's got a new guy in charge, a guy called Tony Juniper.
Who is a green activist and it's bizarre that a green activist should be put in charge of the British countryside when Green activists, their interests are antipathetical to those of country folk who work with nature, don't they?
They keep the balance of nature.
So what Chris Packham has done with his campaign group is persuade Natural England, which is hardly like pushing an open door when you've got a greenie in charge, persuade Natural England to revoke the licence...
That allows landowners, gamekeepers, farmers and so on to shoot pest birds on their land.
And these pest birds range from crows and rooks, magpies, which are...
Crows?
Crows.
Which you want to see real kindness.
I'm being very sarcastic.
Just watch a crow with a young lamb pecking its eyes out whilst it's still alive.
That's right.
I see this quite a lot around where we live, because there are lots of lambs around us, and they do.
They peck lambs' eyes out.
They also, of course, attack songbirds.
This is the time of year when the birds are nesting.
And they're nests.
And the magpies come in and take out the eggs, don't they?
And they kill fledglings.
Absolutely.
So if you believe in stuff like biodiversity, if you like songbirds, and I mean, I love songbirds, and goldfinches.
Well, so should anybody.
Yeah, thank you, Mike.
So should anybody.
If you like songbirds, then you ought to be very, very pro the right of gamekeepers and farmers and such like to control the pest species on their land.
And another of those pest species on that list, on the general shooting list that you're allowed to shoot when you've got this license, are cormorants.
Which I presume means that back in the day, Mike, people were free to shoot...
I mean, I imagine that...
What are they called?
Gillies?
Absolutely.
Gillies who look after certain salmon rovers.
They were allowed to shoot cormorants?
Very much so.
But the salmon, which is just...
I mean, because it's a slimy fish...
The great British public, and certainly the great town British public, completely fail to feel, have any empathy, any feeling for this magnificent creature at all.
And they don't give a damn whether it's wiped out by cormorants or anything else.
And the other great problem is the seals, of which there are huge numbers, who eat vast amounts of salmon per day.
They eat their own weight, weight of fish in a day.
Now that nowadays is mostly salmon, but there won't be any salmon left, so they'll be like little bastards or starve.
But I've personally lain on a rock to try and protect the salmon runs and taken out seals when I had a license to do so.
There was one terrifying story when I was lying on the top of a cliff and I saw a seal on a rock and I was just about to pull the trigger of the rifle When at the last moment the seal stood up and it was a man in a suit, in a wetsuit.
Oh my goodness, Mike.
And he was within one-tenth of an inch of death.
And of course I'd never have forgiven myself.
Oh my goodness.
And he never knew that he knew this.
No, and he wouldn't have known either.
And I can now tell it publicly.
That's it.
Terrifying.
So you had presumably a high-powered rifle.
Yes.
And I didn't realise that seals were culled in this way.
Oh, very much so.
They used to be there, not anymore.
When was this?
1976.
Okay.
I can give you the actual year.
That hot summer, 1975 and 1976.
And who gave you the licence to do that?
I think the river had the licence.
Right.
And that was on the Helmsdale.
Interesting.
One of the most famous and most lovely salmon rivers in Scotland.
Right.
And back in the 70s, I imagine there was an abundance of salmon?
Oh, many, many more than there are now.
Huge abundance.
Wonderful fishing.
And I suppose there's an element of class war in here too, because I suppose that salmon fishing is considered to be a rich man's pursuit.
Well, it is a rich man's pursuit.
There's nothing you can do about that.
I mean, do you want to buy a Ferrari?
That's a rich man's pursuit.
I personally couldn't afford to buy a Ferrari and don't actually want one, but that's not the point.
The point is that if you want to go salmon fishing, yes, it is terribly expensive.
But so what, quite honestly?
It doesn't really matter.
It's supply and demand.
And there are not that many salmon rivers.
No, I agree.
I like to live in a world where there's a prospect of, should I ever become rich?
I too will be able to enjoy this pleasure.
And if not, I don't begrudge other people the joy of it.
And also it brings work, doesn't it, to the Gillies?
Very much so.
And it brings work to the vast amounts of Scotland.
All the hotels which benefit, you know, to a large extent.
I mean...
The people, as you rightly say, who can afford to go salmon fishing have the money to spend it in the hotels and on expensive dinners, expensive wines, etc., etc., etc.
And if the salmon becomes endangered so that we are not allowed to fish for them, which is getting very near and I am on the side of it, then a vast number of people are going to suffer very badly financially.
I was going to try and move your mic onto this cushion thing.
Am I doing anything?
No, you're doing fine, but I'm thinking that if I... Okay, try talking again.
How's that like that?
That's good.
I didn't realise I was going to talk quite so loud.
No, because what you were doing, in your excitement, you were sort of masturbating the microphone without...
I knew I'd...
You see, it's so easy to make Mike crack up.
All you have to do is just mention something rude, like masturbation, and he just gets all excited.
Not by masturbation.
I'm long past it, I can tell you.
Give me a good woman any day.
Yes, well...
I don't agree with that.
I don't agree with the old adage that you meet a better class of person that way.
So...
Am I right in thinking that there was a time when cormorants were routinely shot?
Yes, very much so.
As were crows.
Yeah.
Because they do damage.
I mean, it's terribly simple.
Do you want grouse?
Do you want salmon?
Do you want songbirds?
Yes, you do.
Or if you do, then you've got to protect them.
It's terribly simple.
Yeah.
I was trying to...
I try to convey this to townie people who don't quite get it.
One of the things that really bothers me about environmentalism It's that the environmentalists have created this false image of a world in which the world divides into two categories of people.
There is the sort who care about nature and love Chris Packham and BBC wildlife programs and believe everything that David Attenborough has to say and to campaign with extinction rebellion and to believe in little Greta Thunberg with her pigtails.
And that the people on the other side of the argument are just bastards who don't care, who ignore science, who don't care about nature, who just want to kill, kill, kill because that's the kind of selfish bastards they are.
And this is not a true portrait of the world.
In fact, the people who most understand nature Who are most familiar with its ways are also the people who understand the need for culling, for conservation, that nature does not have this balance whereby if you just leave it alone there will be massive biodiversity and everything will flourish.
On the contrary, you only have to look at an untended, an unweeded garden.
Things rank and gross possess it, don't they?
Things soon go to seed.
And it's the same with the countryside.
And I was very lucky that I was brought up as a countryman in the middle of Oxfordshire.
I had the trees, the names of the birds, the animals pointed out to me.
And we are not, as countrymen, we are not into killing.
That is absolute, a dreadful town myth.
We are into protecting and loving our species and our animals within the countryside.
Yes, there was a time when we killed salmon to eat.
I wouldn't kill salmon, haven't done for many, many years now, because they are getting too few.
I've tracked that, 99% of salmon fish will always put all their fish back.
Now, a date.
But that's a shame, though, isn't it?
It'd be lovely to be able to kill one and eat it, for God's sake.
Hunt a gatherer.
There's nothing wrong with that.
No.
I don't agree with the massive shoots when there are 600 birds killed per day, six days a week.
Not if they're buried in a pit afterwards.
Absolutely.
In fact, I think it gives shooting a filthy name, and rightly so.
And I think it's absolutely wrong, and I want to have nothing to do with it.
Yeah.
But generally, people who practice country sport...
I know you're not into fox hunting, because you can't ride.
No, I can't ride.
And there isn't a horse built that could...
Unless it was maybe a shire horse or a war horse that could...
Carry your...
I was taught and made to ride as a small boy and I always loathed it.
I was terrified of the fucking thing.
Well, because it requires skill and courage and probably...
Neither of which I have.
No, no, no.
So there we are.
But, no, I mean...
Obviously, I'm biased in this direction, but I do believe that country people who practice country sports are not motivated by any kind of hatred of nature.
On the contrary.
On the contrary.
When I go fox hunting, I kind of want Charlie the fox to escape.
It gives me, okay, obviously the purpose of the hunt is to...
Capture Charlie if you can, but I'm always happy when he gets away.
Same when I'm out shooting.
I get invited to shooting twice a year, and if a bird gets past me, which is really not uncommon, I think, well, well played, chap.
It's like somebody getting past you in a game of British Bulldogs, isn't it?
They've lived to fight another day.
Very much so.
Very much so.
And the same, if you're playing a sound and it comes off, you raise your act to it.
Simple as that.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a lovely feeling.
Exactly.
But I mean, it really does go back...
I mean, that wonderful Oscar Wilde quote, but each man kills the thing he loves.
Yes.
And we do love them.
There is no question whatsoever.
Yeah.
Tell me about what it was that prompted you to come round here and wax lyrical about spring.
I mean, I agree with you.
Well, because 90% of the population who live in towns, I still don't, thank God.
But we are about to come up the middle two weeks of May.
Nowhere in the world is as beautiful as England.
I mean England, not Scotland, not Wales.
And the reason I say that before I get killed by the Scots and the Welsh is that the English spring, the middle two weeks of May, are so ephemeral and they're so short, but that is when England is a gentle, a gentle, kind beauty.
Scotland is a magnificent royal beauty.
And Wales has the same thing.
But it is not the gentleness and it goes on far, far longer.
This tiny two weeks.
Beltane, which is the pagan Sabbath day at the start of May, and its description is as follows.
On May Eve, people tear off branches from the hawthorn tree and decorate the outside of their homes.
The hawthorn, or white thorn as it's called sometimes, is a tree of hope, pleasure and protection.
In my area, I'm talking for myself, primroses here, also called Mayflowers, and they're still, to this day, strewn on the front doors of houses to bring good luck.
And I want people to go out into the countryside, even if you live in the town and you know nothing about it.
Mid-May, go to anywhere in the countryside, but make sure it's proper countryside, and just look around you.
You will never see anything so lovely.
I agree.
When you see the first hawthorn blossom, it is like a firework display, isn't it?
And it's just beginning now.
Yeah.
That whiteness in the hedgerows and the smell of the hawthorn.
It's quite wonderful.
It really is.
And also...
And it is called May.
Let's not forget, this is the time of year when we get the bluebell.
And the bluebell...
It's nearly over now.
Yeah.
Well, actually, no.
In our woods, it's...
Oh, it's later up.
They are peak.
They are peak right now.
In fact, I walked through our bluebell wood yesterday, and it's one of the best bluebell woods in the country, so I'm not going to name it.
And...
I learned from Country Life, which did an excellent article on bluebells the other day, that the bluebell is the most popular...
It's the favourite flower in...
Good!
And I was thinking, as I wandered through the bluebell wood yesterday, trying to take photographs which captured its splendour, and you never can.
It never looks as good on a film as it does on...
You must leave your country, you must leave your townhouse...
And drive to see it.
But at the same time, you need to look at all the different flowers and the hawthorn.
My favourite is the gentlest of them all, which is the cowslip, which is a little tiny flower, and thank God it's protected.
To me, the cowslip is the essence of spring, and I absolutely love seeing it.
It's got a lovely, lovely yellow.
Absolutely.
Just going back to the bluebell briefly.
Sorry.
When I was looking at these drifts of blue, and it's kind of unearthly blue.
In fact, you don't often see blue in nature.
No, you don't.
Huge amounts of green, obviously.
Vast amounts of yellow.
Don't ask me why, because there's a lot of yellow.
A lot of yellow.
A lot of white.
And you get, I suppose, reds in gardens.
But blue is quite...
Very little blue.
I would agree with you.
I hadn't thought of that.
And I... And my wife, who's massively into flowers, has got this book of wildflowers around the world, taken by photographers who travel around the world.
And there's normally maybe a week or two-week window where these wildflowers are at their absolute peak.
And there are places in California you can go to where you can see these wildflower meadows and flowers.
You go to...
Crete is very good.
I once went to Crete, and in the higher mountains of Crete, you see these all manner of orchids, be orchids, and...
But I was thinking that if I didn't live in England and I didn't have these bluebells on my doorstep, I would be looking at photographs of these, wild photography who can make them look good, and I'd be thinking, oh my God, I would travel 10,000 miles to see this site.
This has got to be one of the great wildflower sites in the world.
And you're absolutely right.
And here it is on our doorstep.
We can go and see this stuff.
In the beach woods of Oxfordshire particularly.
They're wonderful.
Yeah.
We can marvel at it.
So I agree with you that that two-week window in May is very, very...
And, of course, we've got the wild garlic or the ramsons, which yesterday I turned into a wild garlic pesto.
And delicious, too.
Yeah.
Mix it.
You whizz up these leaves in the liquidiser with parmesan.
And you can use pig nuts, which are these...
I know what you mean.
They're the bulbs.
They're quite hard to find.
Or you can use toasted walnuts or toasted pine nuts and mix them with olive oil.
It makes a very great pesto.
Yeah, what else can you do in spring?
What a wonderful question.
Well, I mean, there couldn't be an easier answer.
And it's totally summed up that all the animals want to mate, as do we.
It was very coyly and beautifully put by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who remarked...
Sorry, bollocks.
That's all right, we like bollocks.
Sorry, can we...
No, did he say that?
Did Lord Tennyson say bollocks, Mike?
I can not believe it.
Do you know what?
I like the fact that you are finally revealing what he actually said rather than what he said in the expurgated version.
What he actually said, because I wanted to get it actually right, was that he coyly wrote, in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
That's right, yes.
And I thought that was rather a nice old quote.
There's a much better one.
Well, not much better.
There's a more basic one, which was made by my uncle when I was a young boy of about 12, 13.
He had a lovely house by the River Kennet.
And we were all there for Sunday lunch and afterwards for tea.
And it was in May, those two weeks in May, and he was sitting in his armchair reading the Sunday Times.
And he suddenly looked around him.
He stopped and he said, the amount of fucking that goes on here is quite disgusting.
He went back to his Sunday Times.
And who was he talking about?
Was he talking about you?
He was talking about the geese and the birds and the ducks and everything.
And he was quite right.
Everywhere you looked around his beautiful garden, people, animals and people were mating.
It was fabulous.
I did something that made me sad the other day, Mike.
I was driving along one of the back roads and ahead of me in the road was a stupid male pheasant with another of his mates, by which I mean a fellow cock pheasant.
And they were strutting around and they were so busy strutting around, flaunting their plumage and stuff, that he didn't have time to get out of the way of my car.
And so I killed him.
And then as I drove sadly further along, I saw a couple of hens in the ditch.
And they were obviously being impressed by the male before he died.
And I thought, you stupid sod.
And at the same time, I felt really sorry for him because I thought, you know, you were about to get your end away there.
They are incredibly, stunningly stupid.
They are, aren't they?
Really.
More than any other bird, much more than partridges, anything else.
Hens, cock pheasants in particular.
Are mind-bogglingly stupid, rather like the leading members of the Tory party at the moment.
Well, if you had a stupid off between male cock-pheasants and the Tory party, I think the current Tory administration...
Might well win.
They'd win.
They would.
Exactly.
They're so stupid.
And actually, I mean, not that I'm a great believer in murdering members of the government, but nevertheless, I'm not sure that we wouldn't be better off if they were in the roads being mowed down by people like me.
But they would walk straight under a car just like a cockfest.
They would.
Unreal.
But I do want to talk about another terribly important omen of spring, and that is the cuckoo.
Ah.
Nothing.
And suddenly at this time now, in April, because I'm doing this recording in April because I want everyone to get to realise the first, those middle two weeks of May.
But about now, you should, and I emphasise the word should, hear the first cuckoo.
Tragically, they are an endangered species.
They've got less and less and less.
I haven't heard one this year yet, and last year I only heard one the whole time.
But, and this is an incredible fact about the cuckoo, I know that we all know that they lay their eggs in another bird's nest, mainly meadow pippets and various other birds.
The really incredible thing about the cuckoo is not that fact that it lays its eggs in another bird's nest and it emulates the eggs of the other bird.
That is not what is the amazing thing.
The really incredible thing of the cuckoo is that when it then migrates, the adult birds usually in August and the young when they fledge the nest in September, they fly to Central and even Southern Africa alone.
Nobody guides them.
Nobody has any idea.
They do it completely solo.
To me, that is a miracle.
Why do they go off on their own?
Because it's too bloody cold in this country.
Right.
And they want somewhere warm.
And they migrate to central or southern Africa.
And God knows what guides them.
Somehow they get there alone.
Well, this will make you envious.
A month ago...
I heard a cuckoo.
Well done, well done.
But it wasn't so well done because it was in Morocco and it wasn't here.
It was in Marrakesh.
So it hasn't migrated yet.
No, no.
And we went for a walk in the, not the High Atlas, I suppose you could call it the Low Atlas or the foothills of the High Atlas.
And we heard a couple of cuckoos there.
And our guide, I don't know whether he was right, told us that last year the conditions were so favourable for cuckoos in Morocco that they didn't even bother to leave.
They didn't bother to come north.
Well, I think that's wonderful to hear that.
I'm very pleased to hear that.
But it's not, is it?
Because it means that they're not doing the right thing.
But if that will preserve the cuckoo and they are getting less and less and less...
Please, God, could it continue?
I mean, you haven't heard any this year, have you?
No, I haven't.
Not one.
But I want to give you a little tiny thing about the cuckoo as well, in a totally separate context.
And this is an Irish folk song of a Colleen, which is a lovely word, a Colleen, meaning a young girl, talking to her suitor, and she refers to the cuckoo in very slightly different terms.
And she says, My darling, says she, I can do no such thing.
For me mother often told me it was committing sin, me maidenhead to lose and me sex to be abused.
So have no more to do with me cooking's nest.
Which reminds me, Mike, as well as being an ex-military man by unhappy accident, you were a bit rubbish, weren't you?
I was dreadful.
You also wanted to be an actor, didn't you?
More than anything else.
My father wouldn't allow me to.
I know.
But you can do your country accents and your Irish accents really well, and you have the morals of an actor.
I take that as a huge compliment.
Yeah, it's very sad.
And, okay, so...
And one last...
Sorry, James, to interrupt you.
I want to give you two little things again about the May and the spring.
And the first is a weather forecast.
Which is, if the ash is before the oak, and we're talking about the leaves appearing on the trees, if the ash is before the oak, then we're in for a soak.
But if the oak's before the ash, then we're in for a splash.
This year...
The oak is well, well ahead of the ash, so I suspect we're going to have a long, hot summer again.
That's good.
Absolutely.
I think this has been confirmed by other sources, hasn't it?
I think we're in for the next two or three months?
I think that's right.
Which will cover Glastonbury, which is good for me.
And also, on the 1st of May, 1st of May, 1st of May, out your fucking starts today.
Do you know what?
I remember feeling that every year at Oxford, which people don't like me to remember.
They think I'm showing off.
I can't help it that I went there.
It's part of my life.
But I remember when, as May Day approached, the girls suddenly looked so much more available and attractive.
It is so true!
And one really did want to shag.
And even now, even now as an old man, Having done my work, done my procreation and obviously not having sex hardly ever at all these days, like all married men, I still get that...
I feel the sun rising.
The urge!
Even you, I imagine.
Even me at my ancient age starts twitching.
Yeah.
It's a lovely, lovely feeling.
It's a joy.
The sun's warm and suddenly, yes, it's a joy.
Yes.
Even if it does have to only be your wife.
It does remind me this time of year that as Englishmen we have won the lottery in life.
Oh, and how.
Oh, and how.
Just wait till the second two weeks of May, the middle two weeks of May.
Leave your townhouse and please, please, I beg you, go out into the countryside.
Yeah, but I worry that these people, not the special friend who listens to this podcast, but other people...
Other people are increasingly buying into this Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, Chris Packham, utter bollocks view of nature.
Which is that they don't understand how carefully managed it has to be.
I mean, you mentioned culling seals.
You mentioned culling cormorants.
It's not that we don't like cormorants.
I mean, I love their glossy feathers, that sort of purplish tins they've got.
Absolutely.
And magpies are unbelievably beautiful, but desperately destructive.
Yeah.
And what do you want?
Songbirds or magpies?
Because you cannot have a mass of both of them.
I'm not saying that you need to wipe out the magpie.
That's the last thing you should ever, ever do to any species.
But the songbirds need protecting.
There's no question.
Now, I think without being rude about a mutual friend of ours, I nevertheless want to raise the topic of a man that we both love very much, Michael Gove.
I'm actually very...
I was extremely anti-Michael Gove until you kindly introduced me to him, rather unfortunately.
The story is wildly funny, and I now like him a great deal.
Well, no, it was a weird concatenation of events, wasn't it, which led to your encounter with the Gove, which was, you'd invited me for my annual treat, where I go fishing with you on the itch in, and you'd said, if there's one bugger I can't stand, or something like that, I can't remember exactly.
If there's one man I don't want to take over from dreadful Theresa May, it's Michael Gove, who I think is a treacherous little shit guy.
That's right.
You remember the phrase.
You thought he was a treacherous little shit.
And I said, you may think that, Mike, you fat old country matters man.
But actually, Gove in the flesh is a delightful person.
And I bet you, if ever you had the chance to meet him, he would charm the pants off you.
Not literally, obviously.
But he would charm you.
And by weird, weird coincidence, I then went off with your fishing rods.
Because I don't have a rod of mine.
And they were...
Were they hardy rods?
Yeah, they're all hardy and sage.
Worth about 200 grand a rod.
They're not cheap.
No, not cheap.
They are the best in the world.
And it so happened that you were coming up to London and I was able to leave them at Gove's house and you were able to go to Gove's house and pick them up and that was the beginning of your delightful friendship.
Well, the reason for it was more than NDL's because...
The reason I suddenly liked him was very simple.
I banged on this very beautiful and very nice front door in Hammersmith.
I'm not giving you a dress, but the really lovely front door.
And I banged on the door and Michael Gove himself answered the front door.
And I rather pompously said, Mr Gove.
And he said...
Don't you mean treacherous little shit?
And my opinion of him flew through the ceiling at that point and he kindly had me and gave me a bloody great glass of whiskey and we liked each other from there onwards and I invited him fishing.
So he has many, many qualities but unfortunately being a halfway decent environment secretary is not one of them because...
Look, he's read my book, Watermelons, which I think is pretty thorough in its demolition of the Green Scam.
He's spoken to you about the plight of the Salmon Rivers.
Well, I particularly pushed the plight of the Salmon Rivers.
It's something terribly dear to my heart.
I love, love our Atlantic Salmon.
It's an amazing creature.
And it is being decimated by meganzas, gooseanders and cormorants.
Yeah, OK, let's not go into seals as well, but that's beside the point.
But the birds in particular.
And Michael said to me, and this was the comment of a man who doesn't sadly know what he's talking about because he hasn't studied it properly.
And he said, you can't really get me to talk about that because I like birds.
He's never going to understand because he likes birds.
So do I like birds.
But they've got to be put in...
It's got to be put in, you know, you can't like birds like cormorants and love a species which is becoming endangered because of them.
I think in that sentence, that sentence speaks volumes about the mindset...
I'd call them the left.
It's an odd accusation to put against a Conservative minister, but I think it is an essentially lefty, liberal, squishy view of the world that...
That people who want to cull predator species, pests, are somehow, in the case of birds, that they don't like birds in the way that those who want to protect them do.
You know, that somehow Chris Packham has a better handle on how to care for bird life than, say, a gamekeeper.
And I'm simply not sure that that's the case.
In fact, I think it's a terrible slur on real country folk who love...
I love looking at...
I love the green woodpeckers.
I love the yaffle.
That noise they make as they dive.
These are things...
When you live in the country, you see enough wildlife to start appreciating not just for their shape, but for the patterns of their behaviour, the noises they make.
Very much so.
When you live in London, you can't become an expert on birdsong.
You wouldn't know what a yaffle sounds like.
I'd never seen a green woodpecker until I moved here.
It's a lovely thing.
And the same way that the sort of mewing noise, the sort of cat-like noise that a buzzard makes.
That, to me, is one of the most lovely noises you can hear.
And owls, little owls and barn owls, you can call into one another at night.
All these things you notice living in the country, but you also understand that nature is red in tooth and claw, and that in order for these birds to exist in a kind of state of biodiversity with all manner of species, then you have to stop any one species getting out of control.
Same with...
With Badgers.
Now, another friend I've had on this podcast, I've never had Gov on, because I worry he'd be too politic.
I think you should get him on.
Maybe I should.
I had Tom Holland on, and Tom Holland and I have a sort of friendly...
Friendly rivalry on the issue of wildlife conversation.
Tom is obsessed about hedgehogs, like the one I ran over the accident the other day.
I love hedgehogs.
I love hedgehogs.
We all love Mrs Tiggywinkle.
I mean, they're great.
And when I was a child, I used to see loads of them often.
But there aren't loads of them anymore.
And we know why, don't we?
What's the biggest predator of the hedgehog?
I seriously don't know.
Oh, the badger?
Oh, no, that's quite true.
Yes, I hadn't thought of that.
Absolutely.
As the badger population has exploded, so the hedgehog population has diminished.
And all that Tom Holland wants to bleat on about, I'm sorry, Tom, and I go over as of a similar mindset, is, oh, but we humans are encroaching on their habitat and we must learn the ways of the hedgehog and we must rescue more of them.
Yeah, Tom, you can rescue every other fucking hedgehog on Earth, but you're still not going to save them from their main killer unless you acknowledge who the main killer is.
It is Brock the Badger.
And in the old days, in Victorian times, villages would join on badger hunts to go and dig up the badger sets and kill the badgers.
Not because they hated badgers.
And not because of whatever, what's that disease that they're supposed to spread?
TB. TB, yeah.
But not because of that either.
And I think we've lost so much understanding of our natural environment since we all moved to the towns.
And that knowledge is not being replaced by Chris Packham's Spring Watch and Autumn Watch, which are programmes which are put together by hardcore green activists.
They're not...
Ill-educated.
Yeah.
I would use that word intentionally.
Unknowledgeable.
Working on a romantic principle of the countryside and not the practical and genuine countryside.
I just hope that...
Well, I think it's unlikely.
I can't imagine that anyone listens to my podcast who is a green ideologue.
But I hope...
It would be nice to think that if just one Greenie were to listen to you and understand that even though you're a fat old dinosaur, to put it in the nicest way...
I do love you dearly, James.
Thank you.
...that actually you have an understanding of the natural world, which is...
My sheer luck, because I was brought up to it from the age of nothing.
And have a passionate love for it.
But how are we going to persuade all these townies who've bought into this green fantasy that somehow, if only you leave all the birdies alone, and if only you leave all the seals alone, that nature's going to find this wonderful balance?
But by doing exactly what we're doing now, and that's to try and get as much of it into the open as possible.
Yeah.
That's all we can do.
But I worry that it's not going to be enough.
I worry, actually, that what's been happening...
I've been looking at the events of the last few weeks.
I'm looking at the way...
Let's examine what's been going on.
You've had a series of weeks now of extinction rebellion protests in London by this really quite hard left green activist group, all the kind of the swampiest of protesters.
And the police have been doing really remarkably little to stop these people blocking the public highway.
They closed down, was it Westminster Bridge?
It was Waterloo Bridge.
They closed down Waterloo Bridge for a week.
Now, I think that's not the kind of behaviour that is acceptable in the world's most pulsing metropolis.
I mean, London is the capital of the world, one might argue.
But, and this is a big but, and you're probably going to hate me for saying this.
Oh, for God's sake, what?
I'm a great Attenborough fan.
I think he's an extraordinary man.
And he is absolutely right that we have got to take...
Climate change is terrifying.
Oh, bollocks, mate.
Yes, it is.
No, you're doing absolute fucking bollocks.
I'm not.
I promise you.
You have almost undermined the whole bloody podcast.
Look, we're going to have to have a chat about this.
There's not space, I think, now to do it.
I'm not going to convert you.
A, you obviously haven't read my book Watermelons.
And B, no, climate change is not.
Climate change is a natural process.
And Attenborough is talking out of its...
Well, anyway, I'm now so traumatised.
I am actually so traumatised, I cannot continue with this podcast.
I need some lunch.
I've never managed to do this to him before, ever.
No, no, no.
You have reduced me to silence.
I'm shocked.
It doesn't mean to say I'm not very fond of the silly old bugger.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I'm still fucking coming on for that fishing trip.
You're banned!
I'm not having you fishing!
Okay, you're listening to The Delling Pod, with me, James Delling Pod, and my former friend, the fat old countryman, Mike Dorn, who is available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and fishing coaching, if you can afford it, which you probably can't.
I don't think many people can.
No, no, no.
Right, well, more next week.
Bye-bye.
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