TOUCH WOOD

Only yesterday a visitor touched wood as she talked about her plans. No, she didn’t avoid walking under a ladder. No, she didn’t make a fuss about breaking a mirror and she has a dog but no cat (black). She probably belongs to a generation that gives up on such tricks. She probably doesn’t believe in any major religion. She knows it’s more like whistling for a wind than anything else. The moon in its phases offers plenty of scope for good or bad fortune and is a ready recipient of responsibility for the way things are in this mixed up world. The roving planets in the solar system are part of a pattern that shapes itself regardless of the plight of earth’s creatures.

So it has been in the stone age, the bronze age and the iron age. Through all the changing scenes of life explanations of human behaviour and of the elements have been held responsible. Shakespeare knew better: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, /But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

Like horse-brasses, handsome ornaments in themselves, such habits illustrate a belief that the world is full of dangers that have to be warded off by appropriate means. What could be better than a shoe by the front door from a 16-hand horse ? And what could be a clearer declaration that somebody else is blameworthy? It is fate rather than a Maker who shows himself in these matters.

Mostly we have grown out of such untidy beliefs. We have Brian Cox and colleagues who can offer rational explanations of our plight. But no better explanation can be offered than that there is both mystery and meaning in our terms and conditions of life. If life is meaningless and just one thing after another, we carry a heavy burden. But the very existence of major religious faiths is a hint that we may be barking up the wrong tree if that is the best we can do.

KIELDER

Covering 250 square miles, Kielder is the largest forest in England. Every year 475,000 cubic meters of timber are supplied to sawmills, etc.

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