2017-12-16
494
Writing my last Diary I was cold, having just arrived from Kenya, which was about 40C at its hottest.
This week I am writing with the mother-and-father of all chest infections – popping antibiotics and steroids like Smarties. Lulu and me have just got back from the Arctic Circle: northern Sweden, which was -21C. I thought clean, cold air was supposed to do you good. So how did I get this particular debilitating nasty? I suppose it could be the rapid temperature shift – of 61C. More likely I sat near somebody full of contagious cold – aeroplanes are notorious for spreading virtually every disease known to man.
Never again. But the real question is: will the Government now demand repayment of my old man’s heating allowance? A ridiculous payment anyway, in the majority of cases – but one that I intend to keep taking while the Government persists in wasting so much of the tax I pay. Dropping bombs on Col Gaddafi to turn Libya into a dysfunctional, dangerous state is only one expensive and disgraceful example. If only we had statesmen instead of career politicians, most of whom have never done a proper job.
The purpose of our trip was to visit the 400-year-old Jokkmokk Winter Fair in Swedish Lapland. The Sami (once called Laps) call Lapland “Sapmi”. We went with our friends Tilly and Alan Smith, owners of Britain’s only free ranging herd of reindeer – a fit and healthy herd in the Cairngorms – which makes Tilly and Alan Britain’s only authentic reindeer herders (a fact confirmed by the Association of World Reindeer Herders).
The winter fair was staggering, giving a real glimpse of life on the frontier – a people still living lives of nomadic hunter/herder/gatherers but with some home comforts and central heating in their far-from-traditional winter homes. The fair was opened with a procession of reindeer led by Per Kuhmunen in Sami dress – he is an owner/herdsman who sold Tilly and Alan some more reindeer in 2011 to improve the genetic pool of the Cairngorm herd.
At the Jokkmokk fair there were bundles of skins – fox, beaver and pine marten – for sale. No badger skins – coarse badger hair is not the warmest. But there is a hunting season in Sweden for badgers, and 35,000 are taken out each year. With hunting seasons for two major predators, badgers and pine martens, is it any wonder that capercaillie – woodland grouse – are so common in the forests of Sweden that 21,500 are shot for the table in the hunting season? It’s a very different tale in Scotland, where certain conservationists prefer wildlife to be left alone, out of balance, with the result that the capercaillie is almost critically endangered – more about this in my next Diary.
In the nearby museum there was Sami music and singing, including the famous “joiking”. Joiking has been described as “hearing the sound of one’s soul”.
Пропущенные абзацы
| A | I suppose the consolation for my sauna suffering was doing the whole thing under the Northern Lights. I found them extremely moving, even spiritual – plugging us into nature in a complete and mysterious way. Lulu, on the other hand, was disappointed – for although in photographs the “lights” show up in 59 shades of green, to the naked eye they come in shades of white with a background of light olive green – still incredible. |
| B | The food stalls at the fair served reindeer meat: dried, smoked, roasted, minced and sausaged, and all of it very tasty. I loved it but Lulu was soon reindeered-out. There were fish too, Arctic char in particular: a beautiful salmon-like fish of the cold lakes. I was taken char fishing on Windermere a few years ago, I recall. It wasn’t successful – the boat sank. |
| C | We stayed with a Sami, John Erling Utsi, a film-maker and writer, and nephew of Mikel Utsi, the man who reintroduced the reindeer to Scotland 63 years ago. John is a man totally consumed by the rights and needs of the Sami people, and he has his own herd of reindeer. He lets them forage in the forests during the winter and then sees many herds head for the mountains in the summer. |
| D | But everything is not perfect. An English company, Beowulf Mining, wants to start a huge open cast mining operation in the Jokkmokk area, on traditional Sami reindeer herding land. It wants to extract several minerals including copper and iron. I hope the Swedish government has the strength to resist the overtures and nonsense about “growth” and “sustainability” – two direct opposites – and protects the culture and rights of its indigenous people. |
| E | Lulu has another view. Despite the news this week that saunas may cut the risk of heart attacks, she thinks that a contributory factor to my illness could be the hottest sauna I have ever had, followed by – you guessed it – a roll in the snow: deep, crisp and extremely cold. Lulu has the pictorial evidence. The editor, I suspect, will have censored the images on the grounds of good taste. But it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life: I certainly drew the line at being spanked by maniacs wielding birch twigs. I think various bits of my body, in addition to my lungs, will take a long time to recover — and will certain parts of my anatomy ever reappear? |
| F | There were numerous stalls selling all manner of food and things from life on the edge; ornate knives, fishing nets, fur hats and fur shoes, ideal for -21C. Of course, what the animal rights, anti-fur protesters in England cannot understand is that properly obtained and controlled wild fur is renewable, sustainable and, in winter, warm. About 400,000 wild fox skins are wasted in Britain annually, something the Sami people cannot understand. |
Прочитайте текст и выполните задания 26–30. В каждом задании запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
On the Sunday of last weekend's bank holiday I had what I think of as a perfect day. Some of my pleasure in it is easily explained, with causes that would make sense to anyone. There wasn't a cloud in the sky from dawn to dusk, nor a breath of wind to ruffle the sea. Our little boat motored through islands that looked as though they'd been mounted on a mirror, and at our outdoor lunch table the butter in the dish turned to ghee. In southern England this kind of weather might attract a nod of approval, but in western Scotland, even in the fine summer now ending, it wins an Oscar for best direction.
On such a day people never tire of comparing foreign places unfavourably to the familiar-yet-new scenery set before us, as though a deceptively plain secretary had taken off her glasses and loosened her hair in the cliche of old Hollywood. Greece, the Seychelles, Bali, the Grand-Hotel du Cap Ferrat? "Why would you want to go there?" someone will say. "You can't beat Scotland on a day like this." In the Kyles of Bute last weekend, that seemed undeniable. The narrows between the island and mainland Argyll had an unreal beauty. Knobbly green hills were flecked with sheep and patterned with bracken, cottages shone white among the rhododendrons and twisted little oaks along the shore, precipitous stands of pine trees looked down on a shaded anchorage, the occasional sail hung limply in the disappointed hope of wind.
But if the weather came first in this reckoning of perfection, the company wasn't far behind. Four of us – me, wife and daughter plus an old friend – know each other as well as anyone can and relish the same things. We baled out our aluminium skiff, which is a boat as basic as my boating skills, and I prepared for the terrible moments when it seems the outboard will never start; the fear of public humiliation is never far away in marinas. But it started at the fourth tug and I managed to steer us astern without hitting anything – we were berthed
awkwardly – and soon we were chugging north out of the bay. I've done this journey dozens of times, as a passenger on pleasure steamers, mail boats, yachts and coasters, but only recently under my own command (our son is the sailor in the family), and rarely as slowly.
It took two hours to reach Tighnabruaich. We saw the usual sights on the way. The hillside where a 19th-century landlord planted trees in the shape of the British formation at Waterloo; Sir Richard Attenborough's holiday farmhouse; the group of Edwardian villas that look as though they've been transplanted from Muswell Hill; the beautiful little harbour where one of George Stephenson's nephews built his now vanished castle. A large ketch lay at anchor off a small island in the narrows, so we sailed around it and called out to the owner, whom we knew, and were happy when one of his passengers shouted back that at that very moment he was reading a book written by one of us.
So we were all in a fine mood when we reached the stone jetty opposite the Royal Hotel and pulled our skiff up the pebbled beach, fussing over the reliability of its mooring in the face of a rising tide. Then we walked 50 yards to an empty table, where we had fish and chips and watched the butter melt. "What a cracker, eh?" said a yachtsman as he passed us, nodding towards the sky. "Perfect," we agreed then, and went on agreeing among ourselves for the rest of the day. It wasn't just the weather, the landscape and the company, it was the sense of freedom and achievement that messing about in a boat can give you, and in my case something else, both larger and vaguer, that had to do with a book I read as a teenager.
| 26 |
Which of the following was the most obvious reason for the author’s pleasure on the day he describes?
| 1) | picturesque landscape |
| 2) | the weather |
| 3) | eating outdoors |
| 4) | it’s being a holiday |
| Ответ: |
| 27 |
Which of the following is compared to the secretary from “the cliché of old Hollywood”?
| 1) | A popular foreign resort. |
| 2) | Scotland. |
| 3) | Beauty of a long known scenery. |
| 4) | The sea. |
| Ответ: |
| 28 |
The author describes his boat as …
| 1) | a very simple vehicle. |
| 2) | an old and unreliable one. |
| 3) | made from a cheap material. |
| 4) | one which is hard to manage. |
| Ответ: |
| 29 |
Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a sight on the way to Tighnabruaich?
| 1) | Trees on a hillside planted in memory of a famous battle. |
| 2) | A celebrity’s farmhouse. |
| 3) | Muswell Hill. |
| 4) | A little harbor. |
| Ответ: |
| 30 |
The phrase “What a cracker, eh” referred to the …
| 1) | sky. |
| 2) | weather. |
| 3) | melted butter. |
| 4) | author’s company. |
| Ответ: |
