Green men

English - and I dare say foreign - cathedrals often have green men lurking in their stonework, that is to say faces, sometimes grotesque, carved in among the foliage, maybe on the capital of a column or on the boss of the vaulting. There are quite a lot of them, for example, at Ely and maybe they were once painted green.

This morning I came across my very own green man, lurking in the top of the leylandii hedge which can be seen out of my study window. Very real and vivid it was too when I first saw it, now more or less vanished. But a point of contact with the medieval masons who presumably got the idea from similar experiences. Did they use magic mushrooms to enhance the effect?

The technical term is, I believe, projection, the projection of the contents of one's head onto something in the real world, something I used to play at with the randomly dotted flooring of late night tube trains after taking on drink. It was surprising what one could sometimes find in the dots.