His wife corroborates this with a friendly nod and away we go another idle conversation struck up at a country show

His wife corroborates this with a friendly nod and away we go, another idle conversation struck up at a country show.Attending terrier, lurcher and ferret shows is a bit like watching cricket. "I see you came prepared though," I add, nodding at the man's brown ankle-length woollen overcoat (circa 1947). It has gone stiff."First time I've put a coat on for several months," I say to a fellow spectator and his wife as a conversational gambit. Pet ferret owners now even have their own bi-monthly magazine, GoFerret. The judge is calmly taking the ferrets out of their cages one by one and examining them. Beyond a huge medieval hedge, the sky goes even blacker and it starts to rain. I fetch my waxed jacket from the car and return to the ferret cages.

For the last five months my jacket has been lying at the bottom of the wardrobe. And, following the trend being set in the United States, the majority of these are being kept as indoor pets in flats and apartments, where the only rabbits they will ever see will be on the Bugs Bunny show. In the last four years alone, the ferret population has more than doubled - from 600,000 to 1.5 million. It is its willingness to go to earth, they say, and kill rabbits that makes a ferret what it is.

"Pets!" they exclaim scornfully, as the judge gets your overweight ferret out of the show cage and holds it up to the light. Unfortunately for the purists, I am not alone in preferring a plump, cuddly ferret to a lean killer. I haven't entered my three ferrets this time, because I have let them get too fat. At small country shows such as this one, people can be very disparaging about a fat ferret, because it is a sure sign that it is being kept exclusively as a pet, and a ferret is strictly a working animal. I AM STANDING in a field on the southern edge of Dartmoor watching the ferrets being judged at the last South West Lurcher, Terrier and Ferret Show of the season.

Work, get your exams, get your modern job in a modern industry, pay your modern taxes, die.Is that it? Is there any way in which taking this young man to the harbourside at Hydra and showing him the word for milk would help him? Would his world expand again if he suddenly saw that he carries, in his skull, the most astounding instrument and joy of all, or that if he looked to windward, beyond the Peloponnese, he would see the hill where men invented thinking, brought out of empty air the tongue he now speaks, and named the very thing we still seek to calibrate: the cosmos itself.Well? What do you think?. And I thought of a young man I know, 17years old, with a fine brain and an amiable disposition, whose life is dwindling into a barren waste of drugs and monosyllables; and I wondered whether it is not the very modern, young world so beloved of Mister Blair which is doing him in. back in London, beneath the inevitable grey cloudbase, I sat in a cafe eating greasy glaucous eggs and listening to two sleek thugs shouting punitively at each other about money, and wondered what underpinned their lives, or whether they were just utterly adrift in the present. And when Winston Churchill, in the early Fifties, wrote that "The appetite of adults to be shown the foundations and processes of thought will never be denied by a British administration cherishing the continuity of our island life" he was clearly talking balls, unmodern balls, old man's balls.And yet ... and we expect that sort of unhelpful, unmodern thinking to be financed by taxpayers' hard-earned money?No It can't be. and next thing you know, that person might start thinking about democracy - the rule of the demos - and the strange absurd Perry 6 and his young, modern "think-tank" Demos, and whether little Mister Blair was all he seemed and whether the tree we were barking up was indeed the right or only one ... Where's the money in it? Where's the commercial use? What's more, it's disruptive.

Anyone who can sit in a cafeteria and work out, letter by letter, that it's called "To Polloi" and start thinking about that a bit is, in a little while, going to start thinking about the demos as well, and how that one was a system of exclusion and disenfranchisement: how if you were of no account, and certainly if you were the owner/operator of a uterus, the demos was not something you were part of ... They must have seen it, two and a half millennia ago, drawn it up milkily in their minds and given it its name, and as the words appear from their unfamiliar script it is indeed like the stars coming out.No use, of course Pointless. In a fast-moving modern technological young society like ours, there's no use for knowing Greek, ancient or modern. Here on the breafkast-menu is something which must be milk and the stem of it - gala - suddenly bursts into leaf: galactose, Galatea, galaxy: the milkiness of stars: the Milky Way. There'll never come a day when we have an NVQ in sitting-on-the-dockside- weeping-over-a-minority-alphabet. The reason my lips are moving is because I am trying to unravel the Greek alphabet. And the reason I burst into tears is because occasionally I succeed, and a word will emerge from the orthographic darkness, and bring with it such a myriad of associations, such a singing, planetary music of connections, like tendrils, like roots, like guy-wires, that bursting into tears seems the only thing to do.I imagine it must be like this to be adopted and suddenly to find your natural parents; to be exiled and suddenly brought home; to be bisected and suddenly to find your completion.