For the first time in my life I have a garden to look after – myself.

It is a Big One. In it and around it swirl buzzards, kites, owls, badgers, deer, foxes, rabbits, hares, frogs, hedgehogs, bats, moles, more moles, even more moles and all sorts of other phenomena. The barn owl is interesting: it emits an eerie wheezy noise.

The deciduous English countryside is about as benign a climate as one can imagine. Not too hot for too long, ditto not too cold.

But Nature even here is unrelenting. Our house, my civilisation, are under constant selfish harrying from rain, creatures, insects and plants!

Were it not for all the tools and chemicals invented down the ages it would revert to a ruin and sink into brambles and creepers, teeming with Nature. Keeping all that at bay is exhausting and expensive work.

Prolific Marxian Terry Eagleton opines on the subject of Civilisation and Barbarism in the Guardian today.

Some of it is over-written in a lumpen-Leftist way:  For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation – a coercion known among other things as the political state.

If my garden is anything to go by, Nature is trying to wrest civilisation away from me by ‘violence’.

But this is a good point on which Leftists and Conservatives ought to agree:

… civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence – one reason why culture remains so politically vital.

Maybe this is one reason for anxiety about immigration or UK Euro-scepticism.

And why the EU now spends so much taxpayers’ money on state-funded Culture? NB the profoundly Liberal Fascist idea here that spending on Culture appears not to count unless it is via EU mechanisms.

Ho hum. Back to my unending struggle with Nature. 

If you’re so smart, creepers and nettles, invent one of these.