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Saturday 22 November 2008

The Spectator’s notes

The Spectator’s notes

Charles Moore on the nature of the season

II. Ivy. Ivy is libelled for strangling trees. Not so: it clings, but is not a parasite. It manufactures all its own nutrients. Only its weight is a problem for trees. Being late-flowering, ivy is helpful for insects which need nectar, and allows bees to top up their winter stores and provides winter berries for birds. The Holly Blue butterfly colonises both the holly and the ivy. It lays its eggs on holly flowers in the spring, and moves to ivy in the autumn.

III. Mistletoe. ‘It is curious,’ writes the correspondent, in a steamy, adult passage, ‘that the post-18th-century superstitions surrounding it are distinctly British. One might think that the French would have picked up earlier on the erotic potential of a plant with forking played branches, paired leaves and plump berries full of a white, sticky juice.’ Then she explains that, because mistletoe grows neither on nor under the earth, it became the plant which alone could kill the beautiful Norse god Baldur. Druids (see Getafix in Asterix) cut mistletoe with a golden sickle; but if the plant touched the earth, it lost its power. Pliny is responsible for the error, still believed today, that mistletoe will not germinate unless it passes through the digestion of a bird. In fact, it is mostly spread by birds wiping their beaks on trees. My wife has germinated it, she says, by scraping post-Christmas berries into the bark of various apple-trees, though February berries are the best to ensure germination.

People sometimes warn against the idea that ‘man is the measure of all things’, but there is a literal sense in which he is, or should be — measurements themselves. This has been brought home very clearly to me by a short, sharp new book called About the Size of It, The Commonsense Approach to Measuring Things, by Warwick Cairns (Macmillan). The book identifies ‘the great, unwritten, unspoken unacknowledged Principle of Measurement’, which is that ‘people can’t always be bothered to do things properly’. As a result, we measure things, for daily as opposed to scientific purposes, roughly. When we do this, in almost all cultures, we use our bodies. Thus a human foot measures out a building plot; the width of a human hand, working vertically in a way human feet find difficult, measures the size of a normal brick or the height of a horse; a yard is a stick as long as your leg; a pound is about the weight you can easily hold in your hand, and so on. The only system of measurement that is hostile to these human origins is the metric one. A kilogramme of apples, for example, cannot fit in your hand. Metric is an imposition; other measurements arise from the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, and therefore work.

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