The Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Every Christmas Eve, I start re-reading Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. And every new year, in the first week or so, I finish it.

Hardy's more intelligent country-folk are endued with what sometimes seems like near-miraculous powers. The Yeobrights in Under the Greenwood Tree are able to find their way across the heath, in total darkness, able to tell where the path is simply by the feel of the ground under their feet - even with their shoes on. And this is not an asphalted or paved path, do not forget - merely a rabbit-path, or one occasionally traversed by walkers.

In the first page of Under the Greenwood Tree, we are presented with something equally super-human. I quote Tommy H himself:

"To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.  At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.  And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality. 

On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence."

So the folk of Mellstock can tell what type of tree it is, by the sound it makes as the wind passes through it. To one of those dandified pen-and-ink-bottle London types who read Hardy's work, it probably sounded totally plausible that these peasants, suckled at Mother Nature's bosom, and rising each day with the lark and the daffodowndilly, were able to know trees by the noise they made.

But I wonder. Young Keith was born and raised in Husborne Crawley. Yet it doesn't seem to have made the slightest difference, judging by the way he walked straight into the brook last night on the way back from the White Horse.

But if Tommy H were with us today, what activities would he describe in such a way?

"So accustomed to the keyboard on a netbook was she that she could, in the dark and by the light only of a few copies of The God Delusion flickering on the fire, touch-type her blog at 50 words per minute."

"He was long familiar with the sounds of each motor car that passed within the walls of the garage. So that, without even lifting his eyes from Page 3 of the Sun, he could recognise which make, and which model, was the car that pulled up outside. And even, from those little irregularities in cars that he had previously serviced, he could tell the registration number."

"To those less familiar with clerical wear - a Methodist, or maybe a Congregationalist - such nuances would have gone unnoticed. But so attuned was he to the changing of the liturgical seasons, the subtleties of incense use and additional candles, that he could tell the red from the purple chasuble in the darkness of the vestry, with no artificial lighting, by the gradients in their smell."

"He could break an entire corporate accounting system into its 3rd Normal Form Entity Relationship Diagram, simply by looking at a couple of journal entries and passing his hand over a report of the previous week's idoc failures."

"So perfectly tuned was he to the finesses of the religious Social Media milieu that he could detect several forms of 3rd Century heresy simply by the "beep" noise Tweetdeck made when the tweet appeared."

"After 15 years working on the checkout, she no longer needed to look at the products - knowing from the bar code exactly what the price was, and what the customer was buying. Sometimes a new product would come along her conveyor belt. Holding the product up to the light, to see those 13 digits better, she would nod and quietly say, "I'll remember 'ee, next time.""