I actually spotted that concept in a book on permaculture that I’ve been reading recently – but when I looked up the source of the quotation it turn out it was first used by the philosopher Alfred Korzybski in 1931 when warning his readers of the danger of confusing concepts with reality. I think it was used a bit around a once fashionable management/self improvement tool some years ago known as NLP (neuro linguistic programming). It was pretty much a load of old pseudoscientific snake oil but we had one bishop who went in for it as a way to sharpen his communication skills. The trouble was it usually clattered into every conversation with all the subtlety of a steam traction engine so it didn’t really work with us professional sceptics.
However, as a useful counter to trusting in maps too much it can’t be faulted. The two photos at the top were taken today on the allotment as I worked there in the pouring rain trying to figure out with the aid of a long tape, a calculator and a load of steel pegs trying to figure out why I couldn’t fit the prospective polytunnel on to the allotment plan.
Much cursing later I discovered that my schematic map had tidied up the rough edges on the allotment so much it had become a bit fictional in places; not least because there is not a straight line or a right angle or a parallel path anywhere on the entire plot. I had been seduced by the ‘draw rectangle’ tool and the embedded grid at the expense of accuracy. There aren’t many days when Pythagorus’ theorem is the most useful tool in my life but this afternoon I offered up a small prayer of thanksgiving to Bill Willams who taught generations of us to be better mathematicians than we deserved to be. Wiping the rain off the mobile I discovered that I could calculate the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides and then set my right angles square and accurate. I was so pleased I even fixed little flags on my four corner poles.
That done, I realized that it’s going to be a close thing to get the polytunnel legs into their respective holes but – as I explained to Madame later, it’ll be such a snug fit you might imagine that I did it deliberately. I do love a bit of civil engineering and we’re so looking forward to using the tunnel to extend our season at both ends.
The hotbed is now up to 20C and so as soon as this storm is over – it’s blowing a hooly outside – we’ll start sowing. In a couple of weeks we’ll be setting up the second propagator – the first one’s full of basil plants at the moment – and we’ll begin again. The next season is always the best and there’s always an excuse for the last one and so we soldier on. Winter can be fun too.
