DIARY
STEVE JONES Ihave been indulging in nostalgie de "escargot. My work on the genetics of snails began exactly 30 years ago (can that really be true?) and has never really stopped. Age and a certain lack of new ideas restricts me nowadays to revisiting the scenes of ancient triumphs. For the last couple of weeks it's been the Pyrenees, first sampled in 1968. This year's plan was to see whether there is a fit between genetic diversity in the snails and the complexity of their habitat. An idea based on satellite imagery helps: scatter 50 brightly coloured plastic balls into the vege- tation and then take the view from space, following the course of the sun from sun- rise to sunset and asking how many balls are hidden from its rays by vegetation at different times of day. Lacking the resources for a satellite, we use the next best thing, a ladder. Slowly ascending and descending this, one calls out the number of balls seen from each angle. Simple, cheap and ludicrous — but it works.
Not surprisingly, a foreigner in a hedge shouting from a step-ladder attracts a cer- tain amount of attention. One of the appeals of field biology is that it provides an immunity to embarrassment alien to daily life (although I have balked at explaining why I was in someone's garden with a torch at midnight — collecting slugs, of course). I was disconcerted, though, by the roar of coarse laughter which once greeted the reply to a question from a group of Greeks as to what the English word for a snail-collector was. The answer, malacologist, has as its root in the Greek term for soft and floppy; which explains the ribaldry. Apparently, in Greece, mandolin-players have the same humiliating problem.
Al professions have their hazards. For the malacologist it is the dread query: 'Do you eat them?' In my case the answer is emphatically no, because I know what they eat. In the early days of Thatcherism (which marked the end of snailing as a serious sport) I was working along the coast of Banff, the forgotten shore of Britain. Into the cold and nacreous light of a June evening emerged a limping character straight from the pages of Stevenson. Lurching across the dunes, he asked what I was doing. On hear- ing the truth, he exclaimed in purest Scots, 'Me, me, these are terrible times!' only to disappear into the mist. So confused was I by this mythic experience that I almost did take the snails home and eat them. Fortunately, though, I remembered what the snails must have had for breakfast and desisted. The Pyrenees lack the stolid air of the Alps, whose ambience has been destroyed by sidling, the most selfish and vulgar of sports. The Alps today are Croydon with mountains: a series of resorts, each with the charm of a motorway service-station, linked by a network of lifts resembling nothing more than a section of the National Grid. Twenty years have damaged the Pyrenees, too: what used to be wilderness is rapidly turning into suburbs. One of our sites has been bulldozed for a ski-run, used for three months a year but hideous for 12. That does not stop me from driving up the ski roads rather than trudging two thousand vertical feet a day as in the old days. The damage is worse on the Spanish side, where the Barcelona middle class is rushing to build holiday flats in the mountains now that the coast has been despoiled. There is an anomaly on the north of the range: the village of Llivia is a small piece of Spain marooned within France for obscure rea- sons of mediaeval politics. In the old days, driving into Llivia through the signs that threatened dire penalties for non-residents who crossed the frontier, one seemed to step back 20 years. Nowadays, the village is hidden by a wall of apartment blocks immune from the French planning laws; stepping forward, no doubt, to the whole of the range in a couple of decades. Anyone depressed by Bognor in February should try Llivia in July. Three years ago the town of Gospic in southern Croatia, where our group was based when doing the snails of the Balkans, was burned to the ground. Oddly enough, the blood hatred between Serbs and Croats is not accompanied by any changes in genes (either of snails or of people). In the Pyrenees, though, there is a giant patch of genetic distinctiveness both in people and snails — in the centre of the range, spanning the frontier. Why, nobody knows.
though the homogenisation of Europe makes the idea less attractive than it was, I have long had a visionary plan for the Common Market: that every member of the Community should shift its popula- tion round by one country, anti-clockwise. The French should move to Germany, improving the food; the Germans to Britain, making the place work, and the Spaniards to France, adding a much-need- ed sense of relaxation. With the expansion of the EC, though, there is the frightful prospect of a Scotland populated by Nor- wegians, making it even gloomier than it already is.
Back, finally, to the ruined castle of Montsegur, high in the eastern Pyrenees, site of the destruction of the Cathars in 1244. This interesting sect (some of whose Balkan adherents — the Bogomils evolved into the Bulgars) believed that material things are evil, the creation of Satan. Salvation could be gained only by self-denial; their leaders, the parfaits, were holy men whose purity and rejection of greed led to universal respect, even from erstwhile enemies among the aristocracy. In fact the whole business sounds remark- ably like the Labour Party as led by Tony Blair. One can see how irritating their aggressive displays of piety must have been to those forced to live in the real world of indulgences, palaces and holy relics (read, pension schemes, second homes and vin- tage cars). The real error of the Cathars was to get up the nose (dans le blair, as the French say) of the establishment; and like the Labour Party, they were ruthlessly extirpated by the first of all political Cru- sades. Just like that party, the Cathars had something of a premature revival 20 years ago with posters announcing the imminent return of the Bishop of the Cathars. His address, rather unfortunately, was a post office box in Frankfurt. Nowadays there are great gangs of New Agers in•the mountains, many claiming a passion for Catharism. Is there a political message here?
Steve Jones is professor of genetics at Univer- cepou.40.,---, stiy College London.
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