Letter from my island 02

 

Alone and unattached, or with fox-family and friends, the unwelcome canine creature for whom I have little sympathy, is not the only island animal for which I have hard feelings. Even the squirrels that run around the cottage before darting up a tree, fail to melt my heart, at least since the time when I used to grow strawberries. Of course, I was not naive enough to think they would be left undisturbed by local land-based or airborne marauders if unprotected and so they were carefully covered with netting. It was a good year for them and they were admired by friends visiting from the other side of the planet. Suddenly my friends called out to me.

”Don't get angry,” they said.

Angry? Why Should I get angry?

They were laughing.

I followed their gaze, and there was a squirrel, which had managed to lift up the netting though I fondly thought it was firmly secured, sitting on the ground, happily munching my plump red fruit!

Then there are badgers. I have admittedly only seen one on the property in the past year or so, but there used to be a whole family somewhere very close by. They would regularly come out for an evening stroll when it was getting dark, keeping to the edge of my place as though there was a public right of way there. Innocent enough, you might think, but given half a chance they would tip a dustbin over and spread everything in it around the landscape, something the fox must have learnt from, although I have never heard of him trying to get at anything so large and with a lid.

Most people visiting the island would rank the roedeer above the squirrels as the most attractive of the island fauna. They ooh and ah over them and think they are so graceful and pretty. Residents hate the sight of the them. Let them get anywhere near your vegetable garden and it's goodbye to all your hard work and epectations. In the growing season, when the island is full of the food that they can keep them in the pink of condition, they will nonetheless go for the little you have carefully nurtured and maintained against all the odds. And they won't just take a lettuce and be satisfied with that, but will go along a whole row and bite the tops off every one!

Towards the opposite end of the size scale are the much-despised slimy slugs. There are two varieties that set alarm bells ringing in these parts, the longer black 'forest slug' and the fearful brown invaders commonly known here as 'murder slugs'. Many are the tips that are bandied about for dealing with them. One that I have tried is to sink little pots of beer in the ground around the vegetable plot. Sure enough, no sooner had I done so than it became evident that the creatures will do anything to get some free booze. Their advance party must have spread the word far and wide and soon every slug on the island was heading in this direction!

Okay, many drowned in the drink, but their numbers are unlimited. Moreover, it didn't take long for assorted birds and beasts to discover there was good ale-marinated grub to be had in those sunken pots. I would come out in the morning and find they were no longer in the ground, but had been lifted up and tipped over to get at what was inside.

So what to do? Even with only the smallest horticultural aspirations, life is a perpetual battle against these voracious, heartless invaders – and I have hardly mentioned aerial bombardment by winged creatures of varying sizes, all with evil intent. I have but one card up my sleeve, one that I tried to a very limited extent very late in the season last year. I hesitate to speak too quickly, but a full-scale trial is due to begin in the spring.

Letter from my island

 

Letter from my island (in the Stockholm archipelago)

This morning, looking out at the snowy scene and noting how an overnight fall has completely covered the areas I cleared only yesterday, I saw the fox crawling underneath the cottage. He has become a regular, uninvited visitor. But should I not feel sorry for him? He wants shelter. He wants food. The trouble is, his visits invariably spell trouble.

There are no recycling bins on the island for plastic or metal, only for glass and newspapers – near the jetty, about one-and-a-half kilometres from here. To throw plastic and metal containers in the ordinary rubbish, which is collected every other week, would leave me with a bad conscience, especially with regard to plastic, so I collect them and wait for the recycling boat to come, which it does twice a year. I have been tying them up in refuse bags and leaving them on a trolley outside, ready to be wheeled away when the time comes. Hmm... It's no longer possible. The fox gets there first.

His sense of smell tells him immediately whether anything has contained food, regardless of there being traces left or not, and he will stop at nothing to get at it. I have placed a heavy log over a bag, but what use is that against one so skilful and sly. He will somehow get it, and although he may not be good at untying knots, will gnaw his way through the bag, drag it away and spread its contents far and wide. So now the bags are piling up in the tool shed, where he has little chance of reaching the bolt that keeps it closed.

Or has he? My nearest neighbour assures me he is by no means the only representative of his species on the island, so I suppose he could return with some of his friends and relations and stand on each other's backs. You may think it's very unlikely, but I have underestimated him before. And lived to regret it.

Alfred Nobel and his Prizes

It's that time of year again, when speculation is rife as to who will receive the prestigious, and lucrative, NobelPrizes, with acclaim or criticism from the media pundits and others once the winners are announced.

Whether Alfred Bernhard Nobel realised what a stir he would create, we cannot know. He was a man of great contrasts. A Swede born in Stockholm in 1833, he spent most of his life abroad. The inventor of dynamite and other explosives, he was even called a 'merchant of death', but aimed to promote world peace. A skilled chemist, he wrote poetry in both Swedish and English, and prose in other languages too. The son of a man who twice went bankrupt, he became one of the wealthiest people in the Western world.

His great wealth did not bring him happiness, however. He never married, suffered from loneliness and was in delicate health from childhood. Only in the last three years of his life did he have a home of his own in Sweden, where he had bought the Bofors (pr. ‘Boo-fosh’) armaments factory. He nevertheless died in the Italian resort town of San Remo on December 10 1896. And December 10 is the day on which the Nobel Prizes are ceremonially awarded each year, the Peace Prize in Oslo, the others at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

His will was written in Swedish without legal guidance, which led to much delay in its implementation as it was disputed. It stipulated that the greater part of his estate should be invested and the income distributed annually in the form of prizes to those conferring the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year within the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and what he called ‘brotherhood among nations’, but which we know as the Peace Prize.

Swedish institutions were to award the first four prizes: the Royal Academy of Sciences (physics and chemistry), Royal Caroline Institute (physiology or medicine) and the Swedish Academy (literature). The Peace Prize was to be awarded by a committee of the Norwegian Storting, or Parliament, as Norway was joined to Sweden in a union under the Swedish crown during Nobel's lifetime. A sixth award, the Economics Prize, was added in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden in his memory.

There is no doubt that Nobel had a great interest in each of the fields he mentioned. The Peace Prize is the one that is most intriguing. Nobel believed that when the great power of explosives was understood, nobody would use them for military purposes. He knew from personal experience what devastation they could cause. In 1864 the factory where he had been studying nitroglycerine was blown up killing everyone in it, including his 21-year-old brother Emil. Nevertheless, he maintained his factories could well put an end to wars sooner than all the peace congresses that were held.

He was also influenced by his friendship with the Austrian Baroness von Sutter, a pioneer in the peace movement. She was herself awarded the Peace Prize in 1905. But as with the Literature Prize, some of the laureates selected in Oslo, such as Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973, and Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, have been highly controversial, while others generally considered to deserve the award, such as Mahatma Gandhi, have been unacknowledged. And when the first Literature Prize was awarded to Sully Proudhomme in 1901, Sweden's foremost author August Strindberg, who never received the prize, and more than forty other prominent Swedes wrote a letter of apology to Tolstoy.

The stipulation about conferring the greatest benefit on mankind in the preceding year has been more closely observed for the Peace Prize than for the others, with juries otherwise tending to look back at what candidates have achieved during their careers as a whole and not only in the very recent past.