H ippolytus scratched his generous belly, took a long pull at
his drink, and informed me that his family had been living in the Chaco for 500 years. He is the head of a community of the hunter-gatherer Guarani Indians, the drink was a curious cold herbal tea called mate, and the Chaco is the remote and empty bit of Paraguay — which makes it very remote and empty indeed — favoured by brightly coloured birds and oversized toads. But he reminded me irresistibly of one of those squires of the shires who tell you how long their families have been hunting in Herefordshire or gathering in Gloucestershire. Perhaps it was the way he scratched himself.
Or perhaps it was because I have, without noticing it, become the person the papers have decided I should be. A month or so ago a story appeared in the Sunday apress stating, with the kind of self-confident journalistic authority that will brook no contradiction, that I had been fired from the Today programme on grounds of poshness. This seemed a little unjust. since I spent that Sunday filming a BBC documentary with polygamous Malian families in a distinctly unposh suburb of Paris. It also turned out to be untrue. But the story took off, and despite the BBC denials it was repeated in so many newspapers that it came to be accepted as fact. My formative years as a journalist were spent in the sybaritic but professionally puritanical television newsrooms of the early 1980s; broadcasting while drunk and incapable was positively encouraged — indeed some very famous and clever people were paid large sums to do just that. But to allow the remotest hint of personality or prejudice to cloud the clear prism of journalistic objectivity was to commit a crime beyond forgiveness. We were taught to scrub our prose to purity. Now I have, without asking for it, suddenly acquired a view on the world and an official journalistic personality. And it is rather fun; I am coming to enjoy seeing everything through my new journalistic prism of poshness. So when Hippolytus described the traditional Indian festival to which he was inviting us, I could not help reflecting on the similarities with a hunt ball; the general idea, it seemed, was that everyone should put on silly clothes and behave extremely badly.
Ihad come to Paraguay to make a programme about the European Union aid budget, but the prospect of an indigenous Indian version of county raucousness was altogether more enticing. The Guarani keep at it for four days, fuelled by a drink called chicha: boil up a maize mash, simmer for several hours, then stir overnight and leave to fer
ment for a week in tropical temperatures. The result had the smoky quality of a very posh malt whisky indeed, and could easily have been poured from one of those bottles with an impossible concatenation of Celtic consonants on the label.
he Guarani have developed the most inspired device for making the party go with a swing. The men are required to hand over their bodies to their dead ancestors for the duration, the ancestors thereby being allowed to fulfil any especially cherished fantasies or ambitions denied to them when they were alive. They put on brightly coloured masks as a symbol of the fact that they have lost all responsibility for their actions, and hit the chicha pretty heavily to induce an appropriately receptive mood for whichever dead relative is dropping in. Unfortunately the same rights are not granted to women, although they too are encouraged to knock back the chicha. It must lead to some awkward conversations once the consequences become apparent: 'Don't blame me, it was Great-uncle Robert who. . . . 'That's all very well, but Great-uncle Robert's been dead for 30 years and isn't in a position to go hunting and gathering for a growing family. .
he festivities began with the slaughter of a goat. Showing footage of animals being killed on television is always tricky — dead humans you can get away with, but dead animals tend to provoke a cascade of viewers' complaints — so the producer, Guy Smith, and I asked our cameraman, Nildd Millard whether he could shoot the scene 'tastefully'. Nikki, who grew up on a sheep farm in Aus
tralia, gave us a witheringly pitying look. He was quite right: there is no tasteful way of filming a large mammal having its throat slit. It was done swiftly and skilfully over a pit dug in the back garden, but there was an awful lot of blood and the gurgling sounds were most distressing. To our great delight, however, it turned out that the goat in question had been given to the village as part of the EU aid programme we were reporting on. I suggested beginning the film with pictures of one of our new Guarani friends sawing away at the beast's throat and commentary along the lines of 'Your tax euros paid for this goat to be ritually slaughtered. . . 'I was told not to be so childish.
he Chaco is a very long way from Brussels, and part of the point of our programme was to investigate what the EU is getting up to with your money there. It brought us into contact with the newly appointed EU ambassador Stella Zervoudaki, a woman of awe-inspiring energy who steamed around the countryside giving the Commission's aid projects the kind of rigorous going-over that would make a Chris Woodhead school inspection in Hackney look soft. Dress is pretty informal in the Chaco — you are likely to spend a good deal of time pushing your four-wheeldrive out of the mud. But the ambassadress made no concessions whatever to the local conditions: petite and blonde, she turned up in the middle of the wilderness in high heels, black chemise and cream trousers, with a long silk scarf looped dreamily round her Eurocratic neck. We filmed her sitting on a stool in a Guarani compound surrounded by the men from the village, hotly debating the virtues of the EU programme to help them develop a bee-keeping business. Something about the scene was, dare I say it, gloriously imperial.
Elen CNN scarcely penetrates the Chaco, and the Britain I returned to was bewildering: the countryside shut down by disease, and my office a no-go zone because of a bomb. Whenever I have been away for a while I indulge in the cyber-sin known as 'ego-surfing' — searching the Internet for your own name. It is not quite as shameful a habit as it sounds. The cuttings libraries which newspapers keep are like the Stasi files in the old East Germany: once they record a crime it is never to be erased, so it pays to see what is being written about you. And, sure enough, I found a correspondence about modern media mores in the letters pages of the Birmingham Post which appeared to be entirely based on the story that I had lost my job on Today. As the editor of this magazine will know, a conviction for poshness is never spent.
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