After a certain amount of unsubtle lobbying, Madame bought the final two volumes of Geoffrey Kibby’s magnum opus for my birthday but wouldn’t let me open the package until Sunday morning. She is a strict traditionalist in such matters, but then we were swept away to a family gathering before I had time to settle down and look at them. The gathering was fun but only highlighted the growing generational gulf between those who play computer games and the rest of us who treat mobiles and laptops as useful tools and prefer talking to each other. It was early evening before I was alone with the books and they are very good indeed. All I need now is a good microscope and some dangerous chemicals.
However I should point out that Geoffrey Kibby took four years to produce volume one because all the illustrations were hand drawn and painted. The subsequent three volumes were illustrated with the help of an iPad and a very good computer programme in less than two years. Sadly I left the Apple ecosystem some years ago after a contemptuous young sales assistant held up my old Macbook by one corner and declared it not repairable because it was too old. At least I think it was the laptop he was talking about! With a good deal of help from my son I moved over to a Chromebook at half the price and rather quicker to begin work.
The revelation that the illustrations were done on a tablet came as a bit of a shock because they’re so good, so I’ve bought a stylus and downloaded a free programme on to Madame’s Pixel Tablet. Work has now ground to a halt because the allegedly intuitive programme looks as if it needs a degree in computer illustration before I find it remotely intuitive. Madame thinks it would be better to keep on with pencils and watercolours.
Over the last few weeks I’ve fallen in with a bunch of Natural History desperados for whom spiders are the most beautiful creatures on earth. Their Facebook group which I was invited to join outpaces the British Mycological Society postings by two to one. So a decently obscure specimen can flatten the battery on my phone in half a day. Madame suspects me either of having an affair in code or being completely mad.
I find that the fierce concentration on identifying specimens creates a wonderful quiet space in my head at a time when what’s going on all around is feeling like living in a psychotic vision. We’ve reached the point where I have to leave the room during news bulletins and I’ve come to think that COP 28 – in fact most of the ideas being circulated about heading off a climate catastrophe is nothing more that the usual hubristic nonsense that sees us as owners of the Earth. The Earth doesn’t need us and we can’t own it -we’re just noisy, wicked and destructive tenants and although I came to understand that – generally – the bereaved don’t follow Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grieving to the letter, I can see elements of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in abundance at the COP meetings and in most of the planning for our (very short) future. The good news – if there is any – is that all parties could be on the same trajectory; just at different places on it. In all my experience of bereavement – and there’s a lot of it – the worst thing you could say to anyone is “time to move on”. However; that doesn’t excuse wilful and deliberately destructive bad behaviour. If the Earth is our parent – and I can’t see it any other way – then the plagues we are enduring are admonitions for our bad behaviour. I’m not turning this into a religious argument because so far as I’m concerned any chatter about God is heretical because it’s (by definition) inadequate. What’s wrong with reverential silence?