The Cuckoo's Wings

Five ducks hobble slowly down the path that winds between the twin lucerne plantings, the line they form bespeaking their differing phases of experience. Beyond the gate – hung within the fenceline I finished when this year was just beginning – hollow yellow rattle waves amongst the uncut grasses. No window has come in which we might take the hay. So far this summer, the meadow goes to seed.

Its diverse slope rises until it meets the lane which then winds on steeper, topping the hill that our house and its eight acres shelter under. As you top that rise yourself to look down at us, the curious shapes my wooden fences delineate – straddling streams and enmeshed between still growing trees – surround the dilapidated white stone in an awkward embrace, all elbows and swollen fingers.

The fences erected by previous generations here – my grandfather’s efforts and the working lines of the property’s earlier, farming owners – wrack and huddle their skeletons in corners. Sometimes I try to hoist them into life with props and bailing twine and cable ties. Some lines are slumping, some are already subsumed. And beneath them of course, the hedgerows’ humps – roots growing over stone walling that’s lost to the touch now – hint at the age of this meadow, with its spring water source and shielded rocky plinth for dwellings. They’re interleaved – the layers of effort and the growth that’s overwhelmed them, the next generation’s trials. Moss-covered, it’s impossible to tell any difference between.

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This is a story of generational belonging; of the tools we use to shape our world and of how it shapes us in return. It’s a subject of exigent importance. Here, we live in several staggered generations, each of us trying, in our own way, to make this place a better one. Outside it, events roll on with increasing rapidity – and growing bearing on the choices we make.

I am writing – as is consistently the case – with my earplugs in and my ear defenders on. And when I say writing, I mean of course processing celery. The cast iron pan on the Rayburn stitches me into a three minute circuit, my chaotic notebook is weighted open on the countertop, my mother and my little girl weave in between – passing pans over shoulders and gliding around hips – making two separate lunches and loudly and intermittently reading Agatha Christie, while at the kitchen table (inexplicably occupied, for the most part, by a massive bone saw) Woef sits at his laptop, his solar radio spewing Jeremy Vine in a novel and profane form of photosynthesis, still indomitably – as Woef does everything – attempting paperwork.

Soon Fran’s due to jump through the door as she takes a break from retrofitting suburbia to eagerly announce the birth of her first meat guinea pigs. Baked peelings of potatoes are emerging as surprise guests from the oven – goat bound. Fountains of celery as yet unprocessed shoot from the sink. Buckets of further peelings and leaves and unidentifiable lumpy mud are scattered across the already fairly narrow kitchen floor. I haven’t exaggerated the general ambience that surrounds my attempts to put words on the page by one iota. But no one has fallen over anyone else. No one has shouted – today.

“It’s so…” an old friend told me, visiting this week, “…so fucking Waltons.”

The Waltons, I responded circumspectly, did not eat guinea pigs.

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No, this is the twenty first century. In fact, we’re already twenty three years in. Only this week, the first video of an enthusiastic shopper paying at the checkout with her palm scan hit Twitter – to do battle with the hashtag competition of #CarbonTax, #WW3 and #DiseaseX.

What curiosities have been produced by the tools that humans make.

Successive generations, razing, rebuilding, sculpting, honing, have shaped our environment beyond recognition and recollection. Yet our landscape, now no more than the workshop and playground of our lives, sees new threats emerge regardless, no longer wild in nature.

What comes next?

We few here are equipping ourselves for the future with the tools of the past; scythes and pitchforks, stirrup pumps and cast iron wheels are amassed between the battery powered chainsaws. Here on the farm, with The Waltons 2.0, it’s year number four of assembling the architecture for some effort towards a replacement society.

Walking with Goats exists as a sightseeing tour of its brick walls, pitfalls and – of course – numerous cultural highlights.

Thank you, as ever, for joining us on the ride.

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I had a smart phone for three days last month.

After more than a year without one, the need to drive to a variety of unknown urban locations across the UK led me to ‘upgrade’ from a monthly payment that rented me absolutely nothing to a monthly payment that rented me long periods of enraged misery. After those three days, I posted it down the back of a radiator.

‘There you go!’ I declared in pyrrhic victory. “Now I don’t have you anymore!’

Goats, of course, don’t use tools. They’ve taken an entirely different approach and hired staff – which has proven to be a particularly successful tactic because their humans, by contrast, are unanimously excited about the wide variety of equipment they’ve contrived amongst themselves.

Things are changing though.

Almost unnoticed amidst the imperturbable momentum of man’s advancing dialectic with the use of tools, a key milestone was passed just last month for instance, from which there can be no returning: the AI generated Heidi trailer can never be unmade.

Arriving, as it has done too, at a watershed moment in my own personal relationship with the tools of rural life, I am left devoid of any choice but to inaugurate this episode of Walking With Goats with the ebb and flow of its Alpine aria.

Steel yourself before clicking the link.

While the one and a quarter minutes of existential horror engendered by this pastoral Frankenstein makes it difficult to credit ex Google VP Geoffery Hinton’s warnings about AI’s imminent takeover, it should at least give humanity some pause for thought.

Is AI a tool, or is it our evolutionary progeny? Or our girlfriend? If it’s our life-coach, can we trust a single thing it has to say? Will it soon step up to a new role as parent, teacher, or overenthusiastic security guard? It seems very soon there’ll be nothing AI doesn’t do.

In fact, unfortunately, the question isn’t any longer whether we can use the word ‘sentient’ to describe a form of intelligence that blithely weaves together clouds and dog grooming and grandpa lips and floating cows and children suffering from tortuous hysteria into one bucolic acid trip from hell. The question is: what’s dinner going to taste like when that’s what’s making it?

Eager to divest ourselves of the work that underpins our own survival, everything from food to health to individual cognition will soon be placed into AI’s entirely metaphorical hands. The Swiss Army Tool of Everything is here.

And worse:

As I received in depressing riposte from a close family member of one the world’s leading designers of AI, asking whether it was likely to usurp our planet: will Artificial Intelligence actually – regardless of all aforementioned flaws – do a better job of running it than human beings have?

The greater the exactitude with which we’ve learnt to analyse and measure our habitat, after all, the more disconnected we’ve become from it. And the greater our disconnection, the more damage it’s suffered at our hands.

As AI robs the final vestiges of truth from our known world therefore, this episode of Walking With Goats is wrought as an effort to turn back the cuckoo clock. To step down from the cloud and put our feet back on the ground.

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This is Nettle:

Nettle was contrary. As daughter of our Queen, Thorne – and denied her milk, unlike her brother – it was necessary for her to be more contrary than any other Baby Darling, and she achieved it. Princess Nettle disagreed with everything.

Here she is, for instance, watching television:

Here she is refusing to go outside:

Nettle’s cry was the ejection of a tightly knotted matt of unfriendly consonants. Her horizons were a low and panoramic target range.

“I’m not sure I like this baby,” I hesitantly admitted to my mother.

Nettle didn’t care.

Everything inside Nettle wrote a plot of rebellion against the social structure she’d been born within. I despaired of her then.

I have a different opinion now.

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Ted Kazynski, AKA The Unabomber, rebelled against the social structure he was born into as well. Embittered child of the C20th century, after he’d hoiked it out to Montana to skin red squirrels and bolt together lethal devices compact enough to fit into a regularly affordable postage category, he sat down to gift the world his ‘Manifesto.’

Our tools, he contended, were restructuring us.

Technology was innately at odds with human freedom – and it could not be moderated or reasoned with or resisted. Tech was a colonising force. It could be defeated only through revolution.

And, while Industrial Society and Its Future’s several hundred thousand million words of politically polarising – albeit bullet-pointed – diatribe stands out as an absolutely rubbish Christmas present for anyone, it does have a few good points to make on the subject of technology’s inclinations.

As the giggling owner of that excitingly recognisable palm print could attest to – without having to go through the inconvenience of thinking anything herself – technology succeeds by mimicking then appropriating what Kaczynski describes as The Power Process; the human’s own need to succeed. This it does by enabling humans, facilitating decreasing effort (and aptitude) on the human’s part. The human becomes excited. They now only need to readjust the angle of their little finger to watch a nuclear bomb go off in high definition, order spaghetti carbonara for dinner or communicate the ephemeral nuances of their innermost feelings to a thousand mile away loved-one by accenting an image of a sparkly heart with a circular face.

‘That was easy,’ the human thinks to themselves with great satisfaction as they sit back, continuing to evolve the soft, receptive synapses and decreasingly opposable thumbs that enable their enormous success. ‘I must be very clever.’

And the proliferators of their enabling technology wholeheartedly agree. Musk’s designing the logo for the agreement notification right now.

What does the tech itself think? I certainly shan’t be the one to ask it – although of course I could now.

Whether Kaczynski’s views were a result of the CIA’s MK Ultra experiments (or indeed whether he sent the bombs at all) I’ll leave for others to debate. What remains true regardless is that the once handsome, solitary mathematical genius and 16 year old Harvard entrant recognised a pattern in tech’s reproductive behaviour which we would be wise to take note of ourselves.

Beneath the façade of uplifting humanity, technology remakes its environment to pave the way for itself. It behaves in just the way that humans used to.

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The apple never falls far from the tree. It needs, however, to roll a certain distance in order to throw down any roots at all.

Nettle refused to be trained to live alongside her mother. She wanted more – and moreover, could jump higher – a little short in the leg (like Elizabeth Taylor) as Queen Thorne is. The nearest corner of the large and – I contend – luscious pen that I had fashioned for them behind the house was an old stone wall; an object of telic adolescent goat challenge. And for that reason, of human challenge too.

I am not a particularly large human, as much as I might shout or jump up and down, and the lifting and transportation of boulders is beyond me. Nor did I have access to any of the machines that might have solved my issue.

For – still half built – object of beauty that it was, it was also half fallen down, and the parts that had fallen added weight to Nettle’s side not mine. Easily she could climb – and pirouette and leapfrog – from one old boulder to the next, until she topped what was the left of that wall, and saw beneath her my lovingly pruned, tenderly fed young greengage tree – positioned with perfect symmetry but imperfect logic just outside.

Until that moment, my solution to the stone wall problem had been one of my greatest small-human achievements, or so I thought.

Using what I had, I felt I’d done very well. Weaving leylandii boughs and alder lengths in between the ladder rungs that constitute the Waltons’ 2.0 Guide to Guttering (thank you, Woef), I’d been ready to revel in my marriage of good looks and practicality.

You will notice, however, the marked absence of a greengage tree.

Divested of its perfect pompom of glossy dark green leaves and promising rose pink buds, the tree that Princess Nettle left behind was a scrawny stick embellished with the odd half chewed scrap of spit covered foliage, and she herself stood beside it as I walked into the garden, gazing imperiously back at me in order to convey her disagreement with orchards in general.

Sobbing and shouting, dragging her back through the gate, I regressed to the age of a six year old and took out our ‘Loppers,’ (an extremely useful set of longhandled ratchet secateurs) to divest myself of the misery of greengage stump ownership.

Then I picked up the phone and divested myself of Nettle ownership too.

My neighbour needed company for her own lonely goat, Ella.

Nettle wasn’t great value socially, but that day I said yes.

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The ‘Loppers’

Immediate ground clearance. Tackles anything still clinging onto life. Fast and concentrated for total control.

The Scythe

Cordless, brushless and with a variable speed control. Ergonomic and lightweight all-terrain cutter. Endless run time. (Winner 2023 Best At-Home Meditation Device – beating Hand-Crafted Carbon Fiber Wind Chimes and Temu Authentic Bronze Chime Bowl)

The EMILY

Best of the Best, Chicken Incubation Unit. The EMILY 24 Chicken Egg Incubator is complete with Automatic Humidity Adaption Check (requires pond access). Takes the guesswork out of the egg-hatching process. Rich in features. During non-hatching periods, the EMILY can perform ditching and watercourse clearance. Universal flock adaptor.

The Stair Gate

At 91cm high, the Safety 1st GOATGATE is taller than most, helping to maintain an adequate feed level for your goat throughout the night. With a U-shaped frame and 4 pressure points, it offers two-way opening to remove all old branches and an extra security double locking option preventing your goat from seeking out particularly tasty, deeply contained leaves that might lead to floor-dump.

The Retail Bread Basket (Circa 1984)

Sunblest Bread continues to be the UK’s leading supplier of convertible groundwork-ready retail bread baskets. Capable of containerising up to 50kg of aggregate within its hard-wearing plastic, and ideal for long-lasting drainage, no path, culvert or bridge is (hastily) complete without one.

The Baked Bean Tin

Keep your goat happy and healthy with this challenging all-in-one snack delivery and entertainment system. For outstanding cognitive, emotional and social development.

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The definition of the word ‘tool’ in the Nuttals’ Dictionary (itself an invaluable one in my view) is an ‘implement or instrument for effecting or facilitating mechanical operations,’ or ‘a person used as a mere instrument by another.’

It is sometimes said that they have no intrinsic nature.

It would have been nice, I think sometimes when I sit upon my lawn, if the ‘Loppers’ had dissented, fought against my hands that day. Asked to sever, instead they might have inverted the mechanism that activates their formidable jaws – to feed perhaps, or somehow guard my little tree. But a tool can’t rebel. It distils the intention that gave it life.

There is a photo pinned to the board that hangs behind of my latop, of my daughter’s face when she was nearly two. Everything is there; the seeds of the person she’s becoming now. She’s getting a joke, you can see, that someone off camera has only just told. And – looking out from a set of features the genes of which could be shown on a family tree – a spark of life fills her eyes, unique and all her own.

I get it – and I reckon I could give it right back, those eyes say.

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It was a long time ago that I came back to Mid Wales – and I struggled with it for a long while after. My father became disabled very quickly; rheumatoid arthritis, which took him from chainsawing to not being able to hold a fork over the course of about three months. There were long periods that he improved and wasn’t bed – or chair – ridden, but fundamentally he never really got well again in the next eleven years and he died before he reached the age of seventy.

I didn’t want to be here, though I felt I had to come. I still railed against it. I didn’t want the rural life, not at twenty five years old.

I’m forty four now.

In the hay meadow, in the wake of Storm Betty, I slowly work to clear the hedgelines of low hanging branches and reinforce our failing fence with the electric rope I’ve accumulated, suspending it from the willow’s knuckles. I think about my father trying to teach me to use tools when I first came back, and how I didn’t want to learn.

In the dappled late summer sun, alongside the irrepressible voice of our little stream, I reposition my body behind the handsaw the way he once showed me – and couldn’t himself for the last part of his life. And I think of him telling me how it wants to cut straight.

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No telling whether this fence will keep them in. Goats don’t like to be contained. Thorne crosses the Yummy Field to which access has been denied for so many months, swaying regally herself – the way she does – between the hay that Storm Betty has so far denied as harvest.

She reaches her nose towards the clear white line that I’ve have already strung.

‘New Fence will be Hurting soon,’ I warn her.

Looking at me steadily, she proceeds towards my wheelbarrow then, where loose hanks of the electric rope still lie waiting to be hung, takes one frayed white end into her mouth and begins to chew.

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I am losing the use of my own hands now.

Next to the photograph of my daughter, there are two letters pinned, which my father wrote to her and posted, so that she could experience being the recipient of a letter herself. One of them invites her to tea next Tuesday. The second’s an invitation as well – to go to the seaside with him and my mother. It’s the same handwriting, you can see, but each line is a little less steady. That second letter was much harder work.

I drop things now as well, pens and cutlery, the way he used to. Sometimes I struggle to hold tools like the Loppers or my own ratchet secateurs. My relationship with tools is changing in many ways though. It’s not just a process of loss, though this is hard to explain.

I was out the other evening, cutting branches for the goats’ stair-gate mangers – and I was crying because my hands were very bad – and it was raining down into my face, like the sky was crying into me too. And reaching up, I saw how each of the branches that I cut was suffering the loss of its leaves. Eaten away, I think, by some bug or alder beetle, so all that was left within their shapes was a filigree of bones and veins - and up beyond that lace, I saw a sky full of luminous, pearlescent grey.

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Sigfried Giedion’s unparalleled and exquisite history of technology, Mechanization Takes Command, offers up, in fragments, the narrative that underlies tech’s evolution. It also contests – I feel – the argument made by so many transhumanists: that artificial intelligence represents humanity’s child.

Beginning on the subject of movement (as an architect, Giedion’s historical constellations were all mapped in Cartesian space), the book charts how mechanization was first enabled by an inventor named Étienne-Jules Marey.

Marey’s obsessive ambition was to capture, represent and so comprehend the fluid movements of a bird in flight, and his success in this endeavour marked the inauguration of the mechanized era. Such movements, he complained, were beyond the human eye’s ability to interpret. And so he devised a machine capable of rendering the shapes of a dove’s transforming wingbeats onto the medium of a smoked glass cylinder. The three dimensional understanding he gained would come to inform novel images, sculptures, and eventually the automatons that so fascinated nineteenth century gentry. Its groundbreaking approach would subsequently birth the scientific management of production and, in the end, the assembly line.

The robot bird breathlessly advertised over recent months is its direct descendent, as are Sophia’s synthetic hands. Relentlessly imbued with the imperatives that birthed it, mechanization now takes command of the world so enthusiastically mapped and measured by its makers. Devoid of their inimitable contrariness though. Technological fruits bear only the seeds that bear themselves.

And what were those imperatives, which we once implanted? What underlying force looks back through Sophia’s eyes?

The exploration of man through science has demonstrated an unquenchable lust for knowledge – rendering our quest on every inch of the natural world. But what is caught in multifarious minutiae can still be blind to simple truth . Whatever we capture, it is no longer free.

The only actions Marey’s machine was ever capable of describing were those of a harnessed bird. Strapped to the armature and its automatically illustrative pen, Marey’s dove flew in circles. Every wingbeat drawn was an attempt to flee.

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On the second day of September, as though by proclamation from above, the sun arrives and we are able to take the hay.

In the lucerne patch that leads out to the field, my five ducks seek and weave, finding worms and ditching the streams I’ve dug since moving back. In boggy soil – as there was behind the house when I arrived here with my London clothes in boxes – the deep lucerne roots would rot and fail.

We know it as alfalfa for the most part; sprouted and plastic-packed in our health food shops, Crouch End or Hackney. Left to grow perennially though, alfalfa’s intricate rooting network will reach depths of fifty foot beneath the soil.

Through the kitchen window, Dilys spots me.

First of our female ducks – and grandmother and great grandmother to many others – she raises her elegant white neck and opens and closes her mouth to me through the window. I can never say no to her. Dilys knows which side her bread is buttered – and where the dog bowl lives. The quiet patter of feet across the kitchen floor follows any open door. Barriers have been erected to prevent her sorties into the house, but Dilys runs like a metronomic torpedo. Forget to close one for a moment and Fifi’s supper’s gone.

She’s comfited herself in the abundance of our home and yard, Dilys. She’ll never leave. I cracked her first baby from the egg myself; Lemonade. A prideful and commanding daughter, who now rivals her mother for her clutch size each year – on principle.

Clara, then, was Lemonade’s first daughter. But Clara was different again; less forceful than either of her predecessors, yet freer – and braver too. Each summer her forays were wider and her boundaries lighter – until this year, when she took her own favourite daughters and was gone.

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Nettle will be coming home soon. It turns out that my neighbour’s goat - side by side with her own daughters now - would really rather prefer her lawn Nettle-free.

I visited – and called out to the now sizeable Princess through the gate – and she came running up. My fingers between the bars, I stroked her forehead and sang her the So Beautiful song that she grew up with, and Nettle looked back me, very still.

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One day soon, when we live in a world where all human emotions are depicted by 1) eating lunch in the park, 2) mutually engaging in light outdoor pursuits, or 3) concernedly frowning over a letter, we will wait with longing for any curve ball.

Though after buying Mechanization Takes Command, eBay does decide to offer me The Kama Sutra.

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In the hay meadow, under the deep and remarkable September heat, I lie and drink a pint of Woef’s homemade cider, The Haymaker. I turned the field by pitchfork over eight or nine hours, after our kind neighbour cut it for us with his tractor. I’ve met a scything group this year – but no one’s diary quite revolves around these few, precious hot days in the same way mine does.

The view from the meadow fades to blue, like the sea I took my daughter to this year, to camp along with our friends. I remember watching them walk in silhouette before me down to the shoreline; all their differing heights like the turrets of a castle.

From the meadow, I can see the raked lines of many generations’ lifework – and in the midst of them, white windmills too. For good or ill. All of it, for good or ill.

Whatever future we want to build, we must be prepared to pick up the tools ourselves.

My little girl runs between the rows of gold green hay in the texture of the summer evening, pulling conkers down from the horse chestnut tree.

All day long, the boom of the military range thirty miles from us has shaped the air. Running over, she gives me one and she asks me if they were named after the word to ‘conquer.’

And I say I don’t know, lying there in the cut grass and holding it, like a tiny world inside my hand.

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Images by Francesca Swift and Woef.

Portrait of Nettle by Neal Atkins

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