Borges and Me: An Encounter, by Jay Parini

estimates indicate that because of the loss of insects on which they feed, the UK had 44 million fewer wild birds in 2012 than in 1970.

Domestic poultry now accounts for 70 per cent of global bird biomass. In other words, if the total weight of birds on the planet is totted up, only 30 per cent of that figure is represented by wildlife.

The jauntiness with which this campaign of destruction was launched is heartbreaking. The Swiss chemist who invented DDT was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948. American advertising featured smiley cartoon animals singing ‘DDT is good for me-e-e!’ A propaganda film shown to East Africans, who were doubtful about the safety of the chemical, showed a British colonialist dousing his porridge in DDT and eating it with gusto.

The blitzkrieg of change has ensured that most wild species subsist in degraded and fragmented habitats, and have fallen to a fraction of their former abundance. Potentially catastrophic climate change is under way. A mass extinction event has been unleashed.

Goulson is dismayed by the blind ignorance of natural history among schoolchildren, teachers, and educationalists. The compilers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have done their part in normalising the extinction process by removing such words as acorn, fern, moss, conker, bluebell, clover, otter, magpie and cauliflower.

Worse still are our legislators. Goulson was invited to give a 20-minute talk at the House of Commons. One or two MPs listened attentively. Another 70 came to be photographed in front of a large poster of a bee, so as to show their Green credentials to their constituents, all the while talking disruptively among themselves and not listening to Goulson.

Goulson has thin hopes that Conservative politicians will discover that a function of conservatism is to conserve the diversity of life. What wastrels, in the most deadly sense, our MPs seem to be.

Silent Earth is studded with engaging descriptions of such insects as the emerald cockroach wasp and bagworm moth. Goulson also gives a plenitude of practical suggestions for greening cities, creating ecologically enriching gardens and balcony pots, and providing pollinators.

This is a crusading but not a preachy book. It will make excellent reading for retired people who, as Goulson notes, volunteer so much time and effort to ecological good causes. It will also make a welcome present for thoughtful adolescents who want to understand the planet and their place in it.

I was charmed, enthused, dismayed and grieved by Silent Earth. It recalled to me the 17th-century divine Thomas Fuller picturing the emblem of charity as a child feeding honey to a wingless bee, while brandishing in the other hand a whip to drive off the drones.

We need Fuller’s charity to cherish the insects and scourge the polluters. in love with a fellow student who saw him only as a friend. When he wasn’t thinking about her, he was thinking about death. This may explain why, when Borges suggested a wild goose chase across the Highlands, he jumped at the opportunity.

Off they drive in Jay’s rusty Morris Minor, which Borges has soon named after Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. They are bound for Inverness to surprise a Mr Singleton, with whom Borges has been enjoying a long correspondence on Anglo-Saxon riddles. His mother has written out the man’s phone number on a scrap of paper he keeps in his pocket. ‘You brought that from Argentina?’ asks Jay. ‘It was not so heavy,’ Borges replies.

Alas, it turns out that Mr Singleton lives in Inverness, New Zealand. But even this disappointment does not dampen Borges’s enthusiasm for the grand vistas he cannot see. It is Jay’s job to describe them. This is easier envisaged than executed. Once, after pulling Rocinante to the side of the road so that Borges can pee on its front wheel for the umpteenth time, Jay is so foolish as to mention that the sea looks quite dark. ‘That is not specific enough!’ Borges cries. ‘Talk about the running waves, the white horses on the water. Dark is not detailed. What are the colours? Find metaphors, images. I want to see what you see. Description is revelation!’

So Jay tries harder. Standing before the Carnegie Library in Dunfermline, he speaks of its heavy-lidded windows, and of the roof’s sagging brow, which reeks of disapproval. The master, approving, sails inside for a ‘wee peep’. After introducing himself to a Mr Dunne as the former director of Argentina’s National Library, he modestly concedes that, when all is said and done, ‘God is the one and only librarian.’ Without missing a beat, Mr Dunne replies, ‘The first librarian here was Mr Peebles.’

The locals they meet further down the road show similarly clipped forbearance. There is the widowed Mrs Braid, who rents them a room in Killiecrankie, on condition that they finish their ablutions before ten, as the only way to her only loo is through her bedroom.

But Borges, who has downed three pints with supper, is unable to keep to the agreement.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. ‘It’s not an hour since he’s done his duty.’

‘He’s old,’ Jay explains. ‘His bladder’s weak.’

‘I’m older,’ she harrumphs, ‘and my bladder’s fine.’ But her late husband’s bladder was otherwise, as she goes on to recall at some length. So she makes allowances. As does the doctor who

‘Don’t do it! You’re the only one who knows how the printer works!’

Homage to Caledonia

MAUREEN FREELY Borges and Me: An Encounter By Jay Parini Canongate £14.99

When Jorge Luis Borges went to St Andrews to visit Alastair Reid, his friend and translator, in the icy early spring of 1971, he’d been blind for almost 20 years.

But having dreamed of seeing Scotland all his life, he was not to be deterred by a worldly impediment. Especially when under the influence of his host’s hash brownies, he welcomed every patch of the St Andrews waterfront with open arms, quoting verse to the waves and sweet nothings to the sea breeze until a ditch or a pot-hole felled him.

All this must have made him a rather difficult house guest. That may explain why Reid suddenly took himself off on an urgent errand, leaving Borges in the care of a lost and lonely American graduate student who had never read him.

Jay Parini had crossed the ocean to escape his mother and the draft. Neither had left him in peace. His mother was still after him to apply to law school. And just to look at the teetering pile of unopened letters from the draft board was to invite nightmares of Vietnam, where his best friend was already serving.

It was almost worse, though, to ponder what he might do instead. He was a virgin who wrote poetry. He had no idea if it was any good. He was hopelessly