While politicians gather in Paris to save the world from runaway climate change, a Frenchman committed a global-warming faux pas on a runway closer to home.
Over the weekend, Arsene Wenger led Arsenal on to a jet at Luton airport for a 14-minute flight into the wilds of Norfolk, where his team were playing Norwich City. The decision was greeted with derision by Plane Stupid, Friends of the Earth and even some Arsenal fans. Wenger defended the flight by muttering about roadworks, which conjures up the arresting image of perhaps the cleverest football manager on Earth breaking away from Prozone to scour the Highways Agency’s website for traffic updates on the A11.
Let me humbly suggest that Arsenal’s flight was logistically illogical. It would be difficult to complete the door-to-door journey from Arsenal’s training ground via Luton and Norwich airports to pre-match hotel in less than 90 minutes; a coach would cover the 107 miles in two hours because, since the Gunners last played Norwich, a new dual carriageway has removed the remaining bottleneck on the main road into Norfolk. Or Arsenal could savour another improvement to the Eastern Powerhouse: the ageing trains that whisk you from London Liverpool Street to Norwich in 1hr 42 have just been upgraded to feature plug sockets.
Arsenal’s 14-minute flight wasn’t pointless – they got a draw, after all – and, hearteningly, the reaction to it shows how superfluous flights are increasingly viewed as an embarrassing social gaffe.
It also served as a reminder of the fascinating gulf between capital- and provincial dwellers. To many Londoners, Norfolk is flat and empty, and on the road to nowhere. In turn, many Norfolk residents resent London’s bloated sense of its global importance.
Arsenal’s team are DFLs – “down-from-Londoners” – in these parts. A Radio Norfolk phone-in caller last week demanded gates on the A11 to stop their weekend incursions, but both capital and countryside would probably benefit from more friendly discourse. And it is in the spirit of friendship that I offer my favourite Norfolk reaction online: “Just remember that you can always tell a Londoner … but not a lot.”
What would Virginia tweet?
The writer Paul Kingsnorth is leaving Twitter and gives his reasons in a thoughtful blogpost entitled What would Ted do? Few living writers that Kingsnorth admires are on Twitter, and he suggests that none of the dead ones – from Ted Hughes to Emily Dickinson – would stoop so low. Whether we are writers or not, I suspect we all share Kingsnorth’s discomfort with social media, but if the greats could converse online would they really resist its lure? It’s easy to imagine Virginia Woolf retweeting suffragettes, Gustave Flaubert Instagramming his lunch and DH Lawrence flirting on Facebook. Whether they’d find the focus to write The Waves, Madame Bovary and Women in Love, I’m not so sure.
A diet of worms
Struggling not to be depressed by the news recently, I’ve cheered up with a reliable form of therapy: a good book. In Being a Beast (published next year), Charles Foster attempts to live like an urban fox, a red deer and a swift. As a badger, he digs himself a sett and eats earthworms. It sounds like nature-writing parody but Foster is funny and profound and his empathic mission shows our kinship with other species. This idea is supported by scientists who have discovered that despite having very different vocal organs humans and birds use the same mechanism to talk and sing. Considering all that we share with other species is comforting, seeing ourselves on a more equal footing with other animals could inspire all kinds of positive action to save our planet.
