Reassurance in a spiky world

Today’s subject is beauty. But first let me paint you a picture. It is winter. It is night. The rain is beating on the curtained windows. The fog is stretched before a throbbing fire. As the astute will have guessed, the fog is a typographical error, but let it stay. For, as Lear’s fool put it, it’s a naughty night to swim in, and not even a typo should be sent out into it.

So the fog is stretched before the fire and the dog is stretched beside it and, as you may recall, the rain is beating on the glass, and the wind is trying the roofing nails, desperate to flip the iron and get at the fog, the dog and me.

To be warm and dry on such a night is a voluptuous pleasure and bed beckons soon, but there is a late-night treat to be had first, a postscript of beauty. We all do well to have beauty before bed.

Taking care to wake neither dog nor fog, I reach around the wine glass for the remote control – oh why don’t we have remote controls for other things, for the dog, say, or, better still, for Trump (oh, Donald, you seem to have fallen into the sewage pond again)?

I press the little button. An electronic This field is no romantic wilderness, ping and but the 18th-century ideal of nature. within seconds a million pixels come together to form an image. And my heart stirs like woken dog.

The image is beamed live from the other side of the world, a reminder that the planet tilts on its axis and soon it will be our time to be warm. And what it shows is a cricket ground, a test match cricket ground at that most pregnant of moments, when five days of play are about to begin, when the players are about to trip down the pavilion steps and go at each other according to a set of rules. And the scene is beautiful. Heart-liftingly beautiful. You think I jest? I do not jest.

The ground is green, eye-wateringly green, and green is the colour of life itself, of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, the world that we are part of and that sustains us. But this field is no romantic wilderness. Rather it is the 18th-century ideal of nature. The grass is a carpet, mown to the comfort of human feet. It harbours neither weeds nor snakes. And the mower has imposed a pattern on it that gratifies our wish for order and dominion. The scene gives us the same sense that parkland does, of a natural world under benevolent human control, a close-cropped Eden, a pure Augustan beauty.

Beyond the green is a little wooden fence repainted in the whitest white, and beyond the fence is a congregation of thousands, drawn to witness a struggle. For this is a place of combat, an arena, the word deriving from the Latin word for the sand they spread on the floor of ancient stadiums and modern bullrings to absorb the blood.

But here the combatants will spill no blood. What once was life and death has been transmuted into sporting ritual that mimics war but is not war. The names of the players change from year to year but the ritual they enact remains the same.

And even as I think the thought, here come the players jogging on to the faultless turf, all dressed in white like vestal virgins. Excitement stirs. Here is a rite of summer about to be played out. Here is order, continuity. Here is reassurance in a spiky world. And it is beautiful.