Liquid Gold by Roger Morgan-Grenville

Author:Roger Morgan-Grenville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2020-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

On the way home, I found myself thinking about counterpoint.

Viktor’s life was lived to the rhythm of his bees, simultaneously independent and interdependent. It wasn’t like some Country Life article, replete with soft-focus images of the Oxfordshire countryside that was his workplace, and it was a hard life that was permanently lived in the shadow of things that could go catastrophically wrong, through no fault of his own. But it was a life that dovetailed with the seasons it passed through, day and night, summer and winter, wet and dry, and the end point of it was that, if he did his job properly and had a little bit of luck, he would be there again the following season, maybe bigger and better. Most of what he knew about beekeeping had been absorbed from his father or the day-to-day stuff he did around the farm. He didn’t have a PhD to show for it, but he could tell more about what was going on in a hive just by giving it a cursory glance than any professor of agricultural biology. Leaving aside the government, the customers and the weather, I got the impression that he was happy with the life he lived.

I compared it to my own life of early morning flights to distant trade shows, of traffic jams and apologies. I thought of those Chinese factories belching carbon monoxide into the Pearl River Delta sky, filling container ship after container ship with the end product of silicone, plastic, steel, wood or iron that they happened to be producing. And of the ceaseless westward gravitational pull of western consumer for eastern product, of store shelves full of things that no one really wanted, but still someone would buy, and of the smoking landfill sites signifying that moment when ‘someone’ realised that it was a dopamine kick after all, not a real need, that had driven them to make the purchase in the first place. And of the institutional stockholders for whom ‘enough’ was simply a six-letter word that had no more part in their lives than the theory of quantum mechanics. And I thought of the one thing we all take as read, and never question: that each year we must grow more than we did the year before, and that each year we will need more landfill sites to get rid of it all. The men in suits will go on bellowing at us through social media and on the television to buy more and more, until one day we start to sink under the weight of the useless things that surround us. And the thing that really hurt was that I was one of them. I had that suit.

When you give the impression of someone who is content in who and what they are, it is a difficult moment when you have to admit to yourself – let alone to anyone else – that you are not. Just as it is difficult to identify that precise moment when you went from being fundamentally at ease with who you are to fundamentally resentful.

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