Nature study

On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky tusks on their noses. This vertebra is about three inches across, embedded in bone expanding into waisted wings, like a propeller. If I were the award-winning Scots poet Kathleen Jamie I would be describing it better.

A whale vertebra, for her, felt ‘grainy, not quite cold’, and smelt of wax crayons, which are, or were, made of whale oil. She was in the Whale Hall of the Natural History Museum in Bergen where the dusty skeletons of 24 whales hung by chains from the ceiling. They were being cleaned, before removal to a modern display. She sat under the jaw of a blue whale, ‘as if under an awning’; she sat inside a humpback’s ribcage and helped scrape the gunge from the bones with toothpick, toothbrush and sponge. Compared with this intimacy of access, the currently fashionable ‘interactive’ displays, usually on a screen, are nowhere.

Sightlines is a collection of essays about how to see what one is looking at. What is nature, Jamie asks, where does it reside, what is it we are being exhorted to ‘reconnect’ with? The kind of nature writing with which she is making a name for herself is a subset of travel writing, some of it internal. Her mother’s death provokes her into visiting the cut-up room of a path lab, to watch the consultant slicing finely a length of diseased colon — images of food-processing here — and looking through a microscope at organs which resemble pink landscapes of estuaries and sandbanks. ‘Bad’ things like bacteria and cancerous cells ‘have no purpose.