My Bonsai Tree Has A Girlfriend

And Other Spring Teasers

Wistful bonsai pines (he’s an elm) for early-blossoming cherry

Look at him there, wistful. Craning out of the window, pining for her (no pun this: he’s a Chinese elm). Hard not to remark on the cruelty: she is always just out of reach, but bedecks herself in pretty cherry finery, dropping petals he’ll never reach. I just want him to focus on studying (he lives in a study, after all) and grow to be healthy and happy.

But as the Ambassador once said to the Foreign Office minister, we all get like that every now and then, especially in spring. Who can fail to be beguiled by her – spring - even when she teases us for weeks on end? We’ve had St. Brigid’s Day; we’ve had pagan Imbolc. St. Valentine has been and gone, missing by a day the Buddha’s departure Nirvanawards. But still, really, no spring; not yet the little shafts of light that fall from Heaven.

Candlemas is the one I feel the most. I cannot help but identify in dim, dark February with the existential fatigue of St. Simeon who (a) messed up a translation (been there – regular readers will recall me telling my Japanese teacher not to ask about my cucumber); (b) was punished for a professional cock-up (there but for the Grace of God go I); and (c) by the end was just shattered, knackered, over it (cf. February – at least he was suffering it on the Med): now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.

Late 15th Century Russian Icon of St. Simeon meeting Jesus at the temple. Unclear if he is supposed to be holding a microscope - he may have forgotten the Greek word.

Simeon was one of the translators, in the Third Century BC, charged by Ptolemy II with translating the Torah into Greek to add to Alexandria’s Great Library. He disagreed with the other translators about the use of the word parthenos (assumed for the purposes of this myth to mean virgin) in the prophecy of Isaiah: no virgin could bear a son…? Chastised for that error he was, in essence, cursed by an angel to wait around three hundred-odd years to see the prophecy he had doubted come to pass. Good thing he was hanging around the temple on just the day Mary came to present her son on the fortieth day after his birth (not sure where the flight into Egypt fits in to all of this). Scripture does not record how he knew she was a virgin.

A host of snowdrops by our back door

Waiting 360 years for the advent of spring in the year 1 AD is, I grant, more punishing than having to hold out from having lights on trees to having blossoms on them, even if the interval feels not far short of three-and-a-half centuries. We’ve got prosperous clumps of yellow, white and purple round the trunks of our still bare trees in London now, veritable Pride Parades of snowdrops and crocuses. But give us what we want, the bees and me: nebulae of cherries and apples, plums and the rest, blossoming promiscuously down all the streets and avenues when I close my front door and head for work. Lettest thou thy servant depart according to thy word and I promise there’ll be no more translation errors: Japanese, Greek or otherwise.