Diary – 7 December 2002

The 13th Earl of Haddington (cr. 1619) was minded to revise his theory about crop circles to incorporate pixies, he told me the other day while we were enjoying a pre-dinner cigarette at the chimney piece of a grand dining-room in Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. Lord H. – a whiskery, engaging gent in tartan trousers – has done a good deal of research into the subject, and has come to some interesting conclusions. He has now established to his satisfaction that crop circles are not made by aliens but – if I understand him rightly – by dead people. His working theory is that the patterns are an effort to communicate using alchemical formulae associated with the god Hermes. Hermes being a prankish character, these can be a little opaque. Take the example he mentioned: a formation that seemed to be in the form of an animal. It had one big shape for the body, a head with two curly-wurly antennae, and a sort of ladder coming out of the back. When Lord H. arrived at the scene, he took out his dowsing rods in the hope of pinpointing the origins of the energy that had flattened the crops. To his surprise, the rods swivelled not, as he had expected, in the direction of the nearby long-barrow, but towards a thick patch of brambles. Hence, pixies. Lord H., little the wiser, asked the powers that be for clarification. On the motorway back home it came to him: it was a snail. (‘My friend thought it was meant to be an insect. But it’s not an insect. No legs, you see? And the ladder – a snail trail.’) Now, here’s the clever bit. The generic Latin name for the snail is Helix. There were two snails in the field. So: double-helix. So: DNA.