Sarah Palin is an obvious pseudonym. John McCain's Republican Party running-mate is clearly not a Sarah at all. It's Michael Palin in drag. There is more than a touch of Monty Python in the way that this pseudo-Palin has been launched upon the world - a fact neatly skewered in a letter published in these pages the other day. Margaret Leonard was taken with lines about Mrs Palin's “steadfast belief in the sanctity of life” and adds: “Given the pictures illustrating the piece, I find it extremely hard to believe this.” Palin was posing with the bloody corpses of animals that she had just shot.

Pure Python - a woman pouting at the camera surrounded by dead bears and neatly slotted moose, declaring that everything that lives is holy, and that she believes in the sanctity of life. The more you shoot, the more holy life gets. How can they fail to make her vice-president?

Mrs Palin seems to have a somewhat selective definition of what constitutes life - a human foetus lives, but a moose apparently does not. I suspect that a moose might disagree. A moose also might think that losing its life to provide some woman with an afternoon's amusement was a sacrifice that it would rather not make.

Mind you, a similar point might be raised by the hedgehog I saw in my back field yesterday morning. A rum sight, it had been scooped open like a small and prickly melon. Fox, I assumed; the nearest badger sett is too far off.

Killing is part of life, all right. I have seen the terrible drama of death in the wild world many times; lions killing slim and lovely antelopes called lechwe, leopards killing still lovelier impala, wild dogs tearing Bambi into pieces. The sight is undeniably thrilling, as well as being many other things. Life and death: questions don't get much more bigger, especially for the ones doing the dying.

But a carnivore that kills for food still represents an aspect of the sanctity of life - or at least, of the processes that make life work. Popping off a moose for fun seems to me a complete denial of these principles.

Magic circles

We have a tendency to give a sort of reverence to many of the more mysterious aspects of life. Fungi have always excited all kinds of complex responses, tales and superstitions, not only because they are frequently and lethally poisonous, but also because they behave in a disturbingly counterintuitive way.

We have an understanding of plants, but fungi are not plants. Humans have always been surrounded by plants, have always eaten them and, in recent millennia, have cultivated them. Plants are part of the way that we think, part of the way that we understand the world. Plants, in a way, are part of us.

But fungi will never be. They are classified into a different kingdom. In the five-kingdom scheme, we have the kingdoms of animals, plants and fungi. There are two more involving algae and protozoa, but these will only confuse us. Hold to the thought that fungi have nothing to do with plants.

Fungi have their alarming habit of appearing overnight in a spooky and impossible manner. This week, I found (not there yesterday) a series of incomplete fairy rings on my regular dog-walk. Google them up and you mostly find ways of getting rid of them - so much for the sanctity of fungal life.

They are dangerous things. If you step in a ring you will die, or be hanged, or spirited away by fairies, pixies or elves. There is an endless amount of folklore associated with these rings, and many species of fungi make arcs and circles overnight. It looks like magic, it feels like magic. There is a record of a fairy ring 800metres in diameter, dating back 700 years. That has to be magical - or sacred if you prefer.

A fond farewell

And overhead, the great departure continues. Half a dozen house martins blowing melancholy raspberries to the autumnal air as they prepare to leave for Africa. Not enough. In recent autumns I have seen 70 martins along the electric wires in front of my house, looking like bars of music: I have always wanted to play the tune they represent.

But at least there are some. It seemed for much of the spring that the martins wouldn't nest beneath my house at all. Eventually one pair turned up very late and raised a couple of broods. I am sad to see them go. They take the fine weather with them, and I am by no means certain of seeing them back.

The way of the long-distance migrant gets harder every year, with the ever-expanding Sahara desert, and the ever-more prevalent and reckless use of DDT across much of Africa - banned in this country, but manufactured here and sold abroad. Insecticides kill the creatures (sanctity of life) that the martins live on, so ultimately they kill the martins themselves.

It's a sad business, one that takes good life from the world and deprives us humans of lives that we can delight in. The sanctity of life is violated all around us, every day.

Times Recommends

• Fragility always gets my sympathy vote
• Double it and you get the real jobless total
• Has al-Megrahi paid his council tax?