what's the difference

What's the difference

‘What’s the difference between a pound of feathers and a pound of lead?’ used to be the trick question for too-clever children.  ‘Find the difference between...’ still confounds maths starters.  They’re tiresome questions, in my book.  I don’t think I much like measuring, and I’m certainly no Gradgrind.  I find my resistance to fact gets more obdurate as I grow older. 

Yesterday, on the beach near Blakeney Point, we explored the first sculptures in the ‘Aisle and Air’ exhibition, North Norfolk’s summer project which celebrates the work of 40 artists with local connections.  I was entranced by the camera obscura hidden inside what looked so convincingly like a Victorian beach hut that at first I walked straight past (why, though, since Cley has never been that kind of beach, at least not in my experience?).  When you step inside and pull the door closed behind you, sunlit shore and that blue cloud-scudded sky appear by magic, upside down, on a kind of shelf in front of you.  If you linger, the picture becomes clearer.  Was the sun brighter, or were we used to the dark?  That was enough science for me, though.  Outside again, grappling with the mechanics of pinholes and refracted beams (or should that be reflected?) was as tough as grasping the speeds and distances involved with Voyager 2’s departure from our solar system.  I’m not proud of my ignorance, but often my head feels too full of other things to take in the hard stuff.

Names are different.  Roses have lovely names and for me this is part of their sweetness.  ‘Paul’s Himalayan musk’ is the first in my new garden and I can’t wait for the heady scents and blown petals of its first flowering.  Madame Alfred Carrière is next on my list, white tinted with a blush of pink; or Blairy Number 2, a deeper pink I first met on its scramble through old trees in my favourite nursery in Horningsea.  Who are these people whose names are now firmly attached to beauty?  I could find out, but I don’t care to.  Or perhaps it’s that I feel I don’t have time.  This weekend the hedgerows were full of wild roses – dog roses, Andy called them – and campion and some kind of dandelion and honeysuckle and one or two yellow flags, and agrimony: ‘a letter away from acrimony,’ I said.  No comment.  There were orchids, too: a couple of bee orchids, unmistakable once you’ve found the perfectly formed miniature bee inside the cup, and lots of marsh orchids.  ‘And what are the stumpy dark red ones?’ I asked.  ‘Marsh orchids.’  ‘So what are the tall purple ones then?’  ‘Marsh orchids.  They’re the same.’

There’s no logic.  Earlier, in the garden, we examined the contents of the moth trap.  I took a picture of the elephant hawk moth for the curiosity value of its pinks and greens and sent it to a friend.  The small elephant hawk moth was the same, only smaller.  ‘No,’ Andy said.  ‘It’s a different species.’  You really get value for money in moth names, though: from straightforwardly descriptive – ‘buff ermine’, ‘snout’ – to the more lyrical ‘dark arches’ and ‘footman’, ‘heart and dart’ and my favourite, ‘setaceous Hebrew character’.  Andy’s into micros now but I can’t find it in my heart to be interested in these tiny pale things, the lbjs of the moth world.  I sit and watch while he patiently identifies and lists and counts, and wonder about the joker who added ‘uncertain’ to the lepidoptery corpus.

I suppose being a collector makes you a soft touch for subsets.  Moths are a secondary interest at least for my birder brother, but probably I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself later in the day joining the hunt for a dragonfly, the poetically-named red-veined darter.  Slightly different from a birding expedition, this involved quite a bit of creeping in silence along a track, and standing around staring at grass.  It seemed impossible but by the end of half an hour or so we’d seen a few, including one almost swallowed by a bull, and one I’d spotted myself right in front of me on the path.  They’re long, and very red; but ultimately it takes more than a glimpse of something so small to keep my attention.  This morning I was remembering those beefier insects – cockroaches? crickets? – that join the dancers at the Saturday night open-air milonga in Córdoba, Argentina.  The locals didn’t seem too bothered by them, but having something the size of a small mouse perched on your arm or landing with a clunk on your shoulder was a challenge for Fred and me.  Anyway, this ruby beauty was a first for Andy, and logging firsts seems to be a significant part of this kind of collecting.  

I count myself fortunate to be a fellow traveller, though I imagine I make a tiresome companion for an expert.  I go for the obvious: avocets in their glamorous blue stilettos, and the disarming spoonbill, balanced grumpily on one cartoon leg, shifting now and again for a bit of clumsy preening with that ridiculous beak.  Anything that can be seen with the naked eye is a bonus.  The bittern disappointed by its absence.  Top bird treat for me this weekend was watching a swallow feed a nestful of babies, all wriggling eagerness and hugely open mouths, outside Drove Orchards in Thornham.

On the way home, a last stop to look for a squacco heron (shouldn’t that be squacko?)  What’s the difference between the squacco heron and an ordinary one?  ‘Smaller’ is sufficient to dissipate my already flagging interest.  I ponder instead the way we are both, I think, in our separate ways, engaged in the fight to preserve what is precious. On a writers’ retreat at Le Verger recently, host David Lambert was amused by my persistent questions about the names of trees, a symptom of what he sees as a European obsession with classification.  If you asked the question in Trinidad, the answer would be ‘Is a tree!  Has beautiful red flowers...’    Whilst I look for labels, probe and juggle words, Andy sorts & catalogues what he sees.  Similar and different in the way that siblings often are, we are both caught up in the search for meaning, to find some order in a disordered world, to make sense of our experience.

Footnote: 'Aisle and Air' is curated by Isabel Vasseur and runs until 5 August.  The beach hut (I can’t remember its title) is the work of Paul Ebben and Peter Swann.