I am in favour of discrimination. That may be an unpleasant thought for many people – but let me explain. To ‘discriminate’ means simply to distinguish or separate one thing from another. In popular parlance the word has aquired the same meaning as ‘prejudice’ but clearly they mean different things. Prejudice is to discriminate in favour of one part over another for reasons of negative emotions rather than reason. To ‘discriminate’ then can be useful or not. Consider the uses.

I once went to Carmarthen in South Wales armed with a guide book to wild flowers. I had no knowledge on the subject and to me one flower was much like any other. But forty years or so ago the rural roadsides were abundant with wild flowers – prior to industrial farming and ‘agrochemicals’ much favoured by the custodians of the countryside – farmers – but that is another subject!

Anyway, I had to creep along edge of the road with book in hand learning one by one the different flower types. This is done by colour, number of petals, stamens, type of leaf. Everything about flowers in the British Isles was in this book because someone had been there before me and was sharing the results of their journey. Discrimination between one flower and the next was a journey not only to naming but unexpectedly – enjoyment. You might think that you do not need a menu to enjoy a meal and to some extent this is true. But to go to the absolute limit of enjoyment to understand the component parts and label them, makes enjoyment complete – ask any top chef.

Perhaps this is what spurred on our Victorian ancestors to travel the globe categorising flora and fauna and filling the museums of the home country with their findings. There are drawers of butterflies in the Natural History Museum in London, each with a label containing precise information, cross referenced and catalogued. Glass cabinets reach to the ceiling as places of last resort for the bodies of exotic birds each with genus and species recorded for all time.

There is a film called The Draughtsman’s Contract by Peter Greenaway (1982), which featured characters numbering the leaves in a tree. The flavour of the time was an art inspired compulsion towards list making and categorisation. Perhaps in it’s time it was a reference to the Victorian obsession with collecting and sifting and the insights it brings.

We are passed that now. Artificial intelligence can determine the contents of a supermarket shopping bag at the check out in a second. The counting, the establishment of order is not something humans do easily using conscious thought. From the tedium of that task we moved away into the promised land. We can switch off our need to understand how things are arranged, knowing that it has been done or can be done far quicker than we can ever do. The catalougisation is over.

Even the spaces between galaxies have been found to be full of the correct amount of anti-matter to match the visible universe (once 80% of matter was missing!) The stars have their numbers even though they are too all intents and purposes infinite in number, don’t worry about that.

Don’t believe me? Well The Sky at Night this month told me that even the spaces between galaxies have been found to be full of the correct amount of anti-matter to match the visible universe (previously 80% of matter was missing!) And what we can see – the stars – all have their numbers even though they are, to all intents and purposes, infinite in number – don’t worry about that.

In the twenty first century we may sit back, put up our feet and wait until such and such a list needs checking – pick up our phones or log on and see how everything is. Pity that. I liked to smell the flowers, watch the bees and hum a little myself. The space between words and numbers – well that always has been and always will be poetry.