Diddly Squat: Pigs Might Fly (Diddly Squat, 3) - Softcover

Green-winged testicles

I have always been very suspicious of people who have
hobbies. Because a hobby carves a hole in your soul and
diminishes your humanity. It turns you into a mono-
culture, capable of speaking about and doing only one
thing. Some people live to work and some work to live.
A hobbyist works and lives to collect stamps. It’s a dan-
gerous thing.
I know this because, back in the early Seventies, Esso
launched a marketing scheme where customers could
collect a set of footballing coins. You got a coin with
every four gallons you bought and I became so con-
sumed with this, I used to make my dad drive everywhere
in third so he’d use more petrol.
He was a travelling salesman at the time and had an
account with Blue Star garages, but the only Blue Star
garage that sold Esso petrol was on the Finchley Road in
London. ‘Well, can you ? ll up there?’ I’d say tearfully.
‘Not really, because we live in Doncaster.’
My sister had the notoriously di?cult to ? nd Kilmar-
nock coin and I seriously considered murdering her
for it. I also considered murdering schoolfriends who
wouldn’t do swapsies. This is why I know that hobbies
are dangerous.
Look at golf. One day you slip into a pair of Rupert
Bear trousers and head o? for a game with some friends.
It’ll seem pretty harmless, but sooner or later you’re
going to hit the ball in such a way that it goes in vaguely
the right direction. And that’ll be that. Next thing you
know you’ll be so consumed with the need to improve,
you’ll be spending all your money on better bats and
you’ll practise constantly, in the rain and on your own,
until eventually your wife will leave you. And you won’t
notice for three months.
It’s the same story with light aircraft enthusiasts and
internet onanists. Hobbies become all-consuming. One
minute you’re catching sticklebacks on a lovely summer’s
day in the Test and the next you’re friendless and damp
on the banks of a terrible canal in Birmingham.
We are now starting to see the same problem with
people who collect orchids. It starts harmlessly, when
someone buys you a pretty example as a house-warming
present and it ends with you on the dark web, at three in
the morning, trying to ? nd a man who’ll go into the
? elds at night and steal you a variety that’s on the edge
of extinction.
I wish I was joking, but in recent months gardeners
and landowners in Kent and Sussex have been reporting
a spate of thefts from their wild? ower meadows. They
go to bed at night, happy that a rare lady’s slipper orchid,
worth about £2,000,to the hobbyists, is growing on their
land, and they wake in the morning to ? nd nothing but
a hole in the ground.
It’s not only a pro? table crime but easy too. Unlike
Range Rovers, orchids don’t have steering locks and
alarms. Furthermore, if you’re caught, and that is highly
unlikely, the penalties are likely to be less severe. Yes,
section  of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 
provides for a ?ne of £5000,and six months in jail, but
that’s never going to happen because, at the end of the
day, all you were actually doing, m’lud, is picking wild-
?owers. And people have been doing that for years.
Back in  someone dug up an orchid called summer
lady’s tresses from a site in the New Forest, and as a result
it’s now extinct. Thieves stole what was thought at the
time to be the last lady’s slipper orchid in 1917. And
collectors damn nearly wiped out the lizard orchid. They
must have known, because even I know it, that you can’t
dig up an orchid and expect it to thrive in your garden or
on your hall table. Because it won’t. It’ll die.
I suppose it’s the hobbyist egg collector mentality that
was all the rage in Victorian times. Bo?ns would announce
that there was only one great crusted lesser-spotted