Old fartism

"I don't believe it!"

On Saturday afternoon, I went to watch the most incredible photography speaker in a town local to me, a man called Hamza Yassin, a Sudanese and British wildlife cameraman and presenter, best known “for his role as Ranger Hamza on the children’s television channel CBeebies and his work on British staples like Countryfile.”

Pic: Pedro Miguel Aires

Hamza was born in Sudan and, as a child, moved to the UK with his family. Arriving with very little English, he spoke at this sold-out, 1400-capacity theatre event about learning the language by watching nature programmes by Sir David Attenborough, a great man he eventually went on to record film footage for, as it goes.

Actually, Hamza says he arrived in the UK with just four words.

Please.

Thank you, technically two words, I suppose.

Pizza.

Chips.

He was diagnosed with dyslexia during his school years, but went on to study zoology and conservation at university before completing a Master’s in biological photography and imaging. In his early twenties, Hamza moved to the Scottish Highlands to immerse himself in wildlife photography, living in his car for three years while taking odd jobs to support himself and build a career behind the camera.

He is honestly one of the warmest, most sincere, completely wildlife infatuated photographers and filmmakers I have had the pleasure to listen to, in, my, life.

He spends much of his talk thanking nature, thanking the guides who, at times, have saved his life, and thanking the choices he made, the sacrifices that led to a lived experience of witnessing the miraculous nature of this world many take for granted.

We followed him through his various exploits, ending with beautiful footage of a Polar Bear swimming farther than usual to hunt prey, a result of the planet’s ecosystem so rapidly altering course.

You might think that the enduring message of this presentation might be one of great concern as our politicians embrace the live now, pay later way of living, entirely disconnected from the landscapes and fragile balances they gamble with so casually from behind lecterns, motorcades, and bloviation.

But no. This show ended with the idea that hope is not a wasted platitude. He celebrated the audience, as it goes. Because as he looked out with the house lights up, what he saw that we already knew as an audience, was that every demographic was represented, especially tomorrow’s decision makers, the ‘youngens’.

One of those ‘youngens’ was sat next to me actually. I was in seat G21, he and his mother in G19 and 20.

He was captivated by the whole thing, “Look at those penguins, Mum, oh wow, POLAR BEARS!” And then palpable silence when Hamza shared photographs of tuskless elephants and orphaned rhinos.

But there in that young lad was exactly what Hamza was talking about. There’s the hope.

I just about remember George Benson singing “I believe the children are our future.” But although that could sound a tad crass or perhaps cliché in the context of this piece, and I can see some members of my generation and beyond rolling their eyes whilst filling up their gas guzzlers with another tank of Mother Earth’s finest resource, taxed to the hilt and lining the pockets of somebody who couldn’t give a monkey’s whatsit’s, I did and do find a good level of comfort in his expectation.

As I floated home from this event in the summer sunshine, a 30 or 40-minute drive back to my home with a sublime early-evening golden-hour glow streaming through the car’s sunroof, ironically burning a little of those finite resources, all was very well with the world. I felt a calm, the kind you feel when someone has just spoken a great deal of sense, and you’ve had the privilege of witnessing it with your ears and allowing it to become a mission statement.

Then I arrived home.

My dog Barney greeted me with the enthusiasm he employs regardless of whether I spend four hours watching Hamza or five minutes stepping next door to buy a pint of milk and a carefully selected lotto ticket from Mrs Sharma.

I opened up the back door for him to visit the grass as it were, and boom boom boom boom, I was met with the usual Summer sound of the neighbours over the right-hand fence, treating me and every other household on the block to what it must feel like to visit Ibiza’s Amnesia Nightclub.

The late teenage conversation was riveting. It was a wall of noise, and in an instant, the Hamza Yassin zen I felt was swapped for the expletive-ridden physical admiration of the most recent winners of Love Island as cigarette butts were flicked over the fencing.

Clearly, the lovely Hamza was not talking about this generation when it came to rebuilding ice shelves and restocking the elephant population.

And then it occurred to me, like Jeff Goldblum turning into an insect in that comical horror flick The Fly, I was becoming something too, only not a fly. I was manifesting Victor Meldew.

I feel I should fill some gaps here, just in case you live in a country or timezone where you have never heard of this character.

Victor Meldrew was one of Britain’s great comedy creations, played by the actor Richard Wilson as a man permanently exhausted by this modern world and everybody in it. To British audiences, he became the patron saint of weary frustration, forever colliding with bad service, pointless bureaucracy, and noisy neighbours.

His famous war cry of “I don’t believe it!” became shorthand for total disbelief at the collapse of common sense. But beneath the grumpiness, there was something rather melancholic about Victor as a character. He wasn’t really angry at one thing; he was angry that the world seemed to have sped up, become noisier, stranger, and less considerate to his eyes.

He was, in many ways, a frustrated suburban philosopher, one parking ticket away from complete emotional collapse.

But here’s the concerning thing for me: his character was played by a perfectly cast actor, who was, when the show launched, nearly five years younger than I am now!

That’s more than slightly alarming because Victor always felt, well, I don’t want to put an age on it, but really, so so so so much older and so so so so much more grouchy, or at least how I view myself.

That combination of permanent disappointment and muttering at wheelie bins somehow added decades, quite clearly.

The music was blaring, and I mean really blaring, and from the occasional mention of Alexa being transmitted through a beefy sound system they bought back from Ibiza, ironically, following the passing of a good friend who left them this kit, I wondered if, for a moment, I could possibly hijack their wifi and rebroadcast opera from my iPhone.

Oh God, I thought, I have actually turned into the thing my eldest tells me I am in danger of becoming from time to time.

Fortunately, my youngest saved me a little by saying, “I don’t like their music much,” which he could hear through a door midway through the house, that was slightly ajar.

I’m needlessly and emotionally invested in whether somebody a garden over really needs quite that much bass for five o’clock on a Saturday.

This has become, if not terminal, certainly dangerously in need of quick intervention, before my old fartism is allowed to flourish.

I’m saying stuff like, ‘It’s not the noise exactly, it’s the complete disregard,’ which is precisely the sort of sentence people say shortly before joining a parish council and writing strongly worded emails about hedge heights.

But why is it always the same with these garden gatherings? Nobody ever seems to discuss literature, penguin guava, or whether otters are making a comeback. No. It’s always shouted conversations about whether somebody “still fancies Callum even after what happened in Magaluf,” transmitted at a decibel level normally associated with airport runways.

I can’t even find justification to complain about the noise because it keeps our kids awake, mainly because my eldest has just said he’s off to the King’s Head to get smashed.

Old fartism probably needs keeping in check because memory, and mine in this case, is clearly so wildly selective. I’ve started acting as though my generation spent the late eighties sitting politely in knitwear discussing watercolours, rather than falling out of pubs and modifying our Ford Escorts to sound like low-flying military aircraft.

I suppose I’m thinking my generation was more saintly, which is unadulterated tosh, isn’t it, because let’s face it, most teenagers are simply doing what humans have done forever, gathering in groups and talking nonsense at unnecessary volume.

And so with the sound of beat mixing emanating loudly from over the fence, I have retired to my studio, and shut the sound proofed door, to have a word with myself and consider how I, at their age, something like New Year’s 1986, jumped through my parents’ wood slatted fence through to the neighbour’s garden as a dare, more than two sheets to the wind following a vat full of Woodpecker cider singing Bandaid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmastime.’

True story that, thanks to it becoming family legend.

Meanwhile, back to my experience of the show.

In the carpark lift, despite having chatted with friends for a while following curtain down, I kid you not, I caught up with the boy I’d been sitting next to, with his Mum.

“I was right next to you two,” I said, “Did you enjoy the show?”

“Oh, very much,” said the Mum. “We have his book, and we love all the shows.”

There really wasn’t much time in the lift between ground and floor two, but just enough to ask, “So, do you want to be a wildlife photographer?” to the lad, as we stepped from the lift.

“Yeah, that would be awesome,” he said.

Recalling that this afternoon, balance was restored.