Nature study

On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky tusks on their noses. This vertebra is about three inches across, embedded in bone expanding into waisted wings, like a propeller. If I were the award-winning Scots poet Kathleen Jamie I would be describing it better.

A whale vertebra, for her, felt ‘grainy, not quite cold’, and smelt of wax crayons, which are, or were, made of whale oil. She was in the Whale Hall of the Natural History Museum in Bergen where the dusty skeletons of 24 whales hung by chains from the ceiling. They were being cleaned, before removal to a modern display. She sat under the jaw of a blue whale, ‘as if under an awning’; she sat inside a humpback’s ribcage and helped scrape the gunge from the bones with toothpick, toothbrush and sponge.