Notes from sunny Jersey

For the outlanders among you, I’m talking about the biggest of the Channel Islands, not the state-sized suburb of Manhattan.

We’ve spent the past few days there, with Penelope regaling the local concertgoers with her music, and me acting in my customary capacity of groupie, roadie, driver, caterer, performance coach and shrink.

When not busy performing these functions, I used the local material to weave another tissue of vituperation against modernity. My targets ranged from vulgarity to something even more sinister, and it’s in that order that I’ll mention them.

First, as we drove through St Helier, the island’s capital, we saw several houses exhibiting I’M TAKEN signs. At first, I thought the women living there were thus telling potential suitors not to bother – they were happy with their current husbands and/or lovers.

But the locals kindly explained that the sign was a cute way of saying SOLD. ‘Cute’ is one word, ‘vulgar’ is another, and it’s more accurate. I’ve heard of anthropomorphism, but this is ridiculous. Endowing houses with an ability to talk is pushing the usual estate agents’ inanity too far. Obviously, that profession lacks normal defence mechanisms triggering an alarm whenever vulgarity threatens.

And speaking of vulgarity, we took a long walk on a long pier jutting out in the direction of France, 11 miles away but looking closer due to an optical illusion. There were several benches along the way, each donated by the family of a deceased person. The little plaques showed the dear beloved’s name and dates, along with commemorative messages.

One of them said: “You are gone but continue living in our hearts, just a step behind.” Another found an interesting metaphor for dying, “Gone fishing”, probably alluding to the poor man’s hobby. That reminded me of American gangster films where dead Mafiosi were supposed to be “sleeping with the fishes”.

I have no opinion of the Mafia idiom, other than doubting its verisimilitude. But those we saw are vulgarity at its soppiest. Grieving for someone close is an unfailing test of taste: it’s at a moment of emotional turmoil that people show their dignity – or lack thereof.

A friend of mine who lives in Shropshire actually collects vulgar and tasteless epitaphs at the local cemeteries. I’ve seen the list, and the Jersey samples I espied are mild by comparison to some of the entries. But they are still bad enough. Today’s lot confuse sentiment with sentimentality, which is a vulgar category error.

Now for the sinister part. A local amateur pianist died last year, and his widow wanted to sell the concert grand he left behind. Having found no potential buyers on the island, she asked the Steinway office in London to do the honours.

They happily accepted the commission, but with one proviso. Since the law prohibits importing ivory into the UK, the instrument’s ivory keys had to be ripped up and replaced with plastic ones.

Now that piano was made 100 years ago, at a time when public morality still fell short of today’s dizzying ascendancy. One can safely assume that the animal that kindly provided its tusks for the keys is now dead and has no further need for its megalomaniac teeth.

In any case, one can see no immediately obvious way of returning the pieces of bone to their original owner. So what exactly is the problem?

None exists, not in the realm of reason. But modernity, adumbrated by the so-called Age of Reason, has abandoned that realm for another one, that of signalling what it considers virtue and what is in fact its cloyingly sentimental idiocy.

The official reason for the ban on ivory is that vile poachers are threatening to make elephants extinct. One would think that those swearing by Darwinism would accept such a calamity as proof of natural selection. People are fitter for survival than elephants, which is why they can make powerful rifles and shoot the animals. Moreover, some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited ‘our planet’ are now extinct. So what makes elephants so special?

Instead of banning ivory we should ban poaching. Otherwise, we might as well burn every painting in every museum just because some of them are sometimes forged. Same logic.

However, rather than staging such a bonfire of pictorial vanities, authorities routinely burn piles of tusks, even though their original owners don’t need them any longer. Actually, I’m reasonably sure that not all dead elephants are killed by poachers. If biology is to be trusted, some must die a natural death.

Why not use their tusks to make the kind of piano keys that, unlike plastic ones, don’t make the pianist’s fingers slide off? No rational reason suggests itself, unless we think that ivory is a malum in se.

Also, apparently our animal worshippers have found another ingenious way to save elephants from poachers. They saw their (elephants’, that is, not poachers’) tusks off, thus making poaching commercially useless.

Now, God (or was it Darwin?) gave elephants those huge tusks not only for us to make piano keys but also for them to survive. The animals use them to gather food, strip bark from trees to eat, dig, lift objects and defend themselves from predators. The tusks also protect the trunk, without which the animals would be unable to eat, drink and indeed breathe.

In other words, sawing tusks off a live elephant is almost guaranteed to make it a dead one. But on the plus side, the animal won’t be shot. In any case, why burn the sawn-off tusks? Why not sell them to Steinway?

Sentimentality, which is annoying in the case of epitaphs, here becomes sinister. It’s a symptom of the worst kind of paganism, smoothly progressing from animal worship to human sacrifice and everything in between. Such thunderously proclaimed love of all living things disguises contempt of man, for whom all living things were created. Or, if not of man in general, certainly Western Man and his whole civilisation.

The last item is linked with Jersey only tangentially. It’s a Daily Express headline I saw on a newsstand there: “Bishop quits job and apologises after ‘all-male orgy in rectory goes wrong’.”

I can only commiserate with His Grace and offer a prayer that his next all-male orgy goes right. I don’t dare think what that might be.