What to believe and what not to believe

Why is it that when I tell my children that I will (i) throw away disputed toys, (ii) put them to bed without any dinner if they don’t start eating or (iii) that we won’t go on holiday if they don’t stop fighting that they regard my threats as having zero credibility?

It’s not just because we’re talking about threats.

They do not believe me when I tell them, for example, that I am no more likely to be able to finish a particular level of Super Mario Brothers than they are. They carry on asking me just the same, clearly disbelieving my protestations. 

When I tell them that if they don’t go to sleep, they will feel like shit in the morning (or rather, they will make Elvira and I feel like shit in the morning), they treat my exhortations with all the scorn that toddlers can muster.

No, they do not believe me on a lot of things – a good number of which are in fact true.

And yet, having once idly suggested that there we might see a gorilla in the woods where we walk the dogs – Roger Jr and Tancred are absolutely convinced that the area is infested with man-eating, fence-smashing giant apes.

Notwithstanding all my attempts to show that this cannot be true – primarily because I MADE IT UP – they remain adamantly wedded to the "there are gorillas and they will eat me" thesis. 

Why do they believe me about the gorillas but nothing else?

Sticky Buds

My childhood will look very little like the childhood my children have. I spent most of the summer holidays wandering around with a pack of other feral youngsters, roaming a specified radius but essentially unsupervised and returning only to be fed or when darkness fell, whichever came sooner.

Children’s TV was broadcast for only an hour or so a day. If you had said “handheld games console” we would have pictured something along the lines of Frogger, powered by 8 non-rechargeable D-batteries or an AC adapter with about 3 inches of cable.

Yes, kids today blah blah blah. Ain’t it awful?

But one thing has not changed, and that is the delight and horror children can extract from the mundane flora of the United Kingdom.

I have been introducing my boys (Roger Jr and Tancred) to one of my favourite leisure plants, and nothing has made me more proud as a father than to see them getting as much enjoyment out of it as I ever did.

I speak, of course, of the sticky bud – Galium aparine, also known (I discovered literally today) as goosegrass.

What a plant! You can throw it at people – and it sticks to them!

An unpopular child's fate

Seriously, in the early 1980s in Suffolk this is what passed for fun: chasing one another around wood and scrubland wielding bundles of creeper. Losers would quickly be made to resemble a green man.

That was really its only application. It was passed down from generations of schoolboy lore than stored and dried for long enough, sticky buds would turn into the legendary stinkweed – however, no one I knew ever achieved the alchemical Great Work.

Yes, I have introduced my children to sticky buds and now happily feel the lash of barbed plant matter on the back of my neck every time we take the dogs for a walk, and merrily pick burs off washed clothing with a wry smile upon my face.

I do, however, think it is important to teach my offspring about right and wrong. And so, having shown them all that is good in the vegetable kingdom, I have also warned them about the natural enemy of the toddler – the nettle.

I remember nettle stings hurting a lot more when I was a young ‘un. Judging from Roger Jr and Tancred’s reaction to even the most evanescent contact with them, this is down to my advancing enleatherment rather than nettles having become less malicious.

Plant morality in action

In the woods near my house, the age old battle between good and evil is being fought out once again. A stand of nettles, towering a good five feet high, has been flattened – not by vengeful stick-wielding infants – but by sticky buds, creeping and climbing all over it. 

Much like the Nazi war machine in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, the nettles crumpled back to the ground, with only a few isolated pockets of resistance holding out.

But what’s this? A plant not of my childhood has intervened and is pursuing its own, unknown agenda. Bindweed.  Nettles may be evil, but there is at least a straightforwardness and a nobility in their evil. The old certainties are being pushed aside, as bindweed spreads its insidious tentacles around the grappling combatants.

A metaphor

Where did it come from? What does it want? We simply don’t know – it’s alien, it frightens us. It doesn't sting but you can't chuck a load of it on someone's back either without them realising either. And it keeps on coming. 

And that is how the place where I take my dogs to the toilet provides a metaphor for the times we live in today. 

Space Raiders

I have never bought a pack of Space Raiders, nor do I know anyone who has. I am nevertheless very familiar with the image to the left.

Which led me to wonder – or “got me to thinking” I might say, if this was “Sex and the City” and not “Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.” – why are there empty packets of this low-price, corn snack in my back garden?

And outside Tancred’s nursery?

And – in fact – every damn place I ever look, why is there a discarded pack of Space Raiders?

They say that in London, you are never more than 6 feet away from a rat. I’m not sure if this is true. It would probably be true if you substituted “a rat” for “a dickhead”.

Well, I would hypothesise that between you and the rat – or dickhead – there is at least one screwed-up, indestructible, radioactive-smelling bag with a picture of an alien on the front of it, which the rat (dickhead) is avoiding.

They’re everywhere. I can feel those over-sized, black, almond-shaped eyes on the back of my neck right now.

I have two theories about this.

The first is sociological.

• Premise 1: Space Raiders are the crisp of preference for the sorts of people who throw empty crisp bags on the floor.
• Premise 2: Space Raiders are cheap.

You may be wondering how, unless I handle these empty crisp bags – which is, to me, only marginally less revolting a prospect than handling discarded underwear – I know this.

Well, I did actually Google Space Raiders this morning. That’s the problem with the internet. You come up with all these ideas about what things might be and why they might be, then you Google it and you find out the truth (or something like the truth).

It is the death of the imagination and of memory, when you can just find out the reasons for something or what something you half-remember was really like with a few keystrokes.

Marcel Proust would have had literally nothing to do with his life if he’d lived in the internet age. He could have just Googled “Madeleine smell” and got four million results.

Anyway, I disgress. I learned from the Space Raiders Wikipedia page that they are:

“A British cheap snack food, intended to fill the same niche market as crisps”

Which seems to the untrained eye an unnecessarily cautious description.

So Space Raiders are cheap and are eaten by people who drop litter. You do not see anywhere near as many discarded packs of, say, Waitrose Hand Cooked Sea Salt crisps.

Get to the point: Space Raiders are prole feed. They are eaten by people for whom a tracksuit is formalwear and whose bin is the great outdoors.

Malevolent little eyes...

OK, that’s theory number one. Coherent? Well-reasoned? Yes, but theory number two is MUCH more ambitious.

Space Raiders packs are not the abandoned containers for low-cost crisp-style corn snacks AT ALL.

They are in fact an invasive species of fungus or algae with astonishing powers of mimicry.

Stay with me. Let’s assess the evidence (you will by now be familiar with what I call "evidence"):

• No one I know or who you know has ever eaten any.
• No one knows how they got where they are.
• No one is willing to touch or remove them to find out once and for all if they are what they appear to be.

I believe that back in the 1980s Space Raiders were a real brand of crisps, featuring cartoon intergalactic pirates and shit like that. Natural selection has favoured members of this invasive species which encourages people to leave it alone – and so they have grown gradually to resemble the most unpleasant kinds of litter, re cheese-stink plastic bags.

They’re an algal bloom, spring from the contaminated earth like a red tide. That alien face is the plant world’s crude attempt to replicate the appearance of a Monster Munch monster – and it has succeeded to the degree that no one wants to look closer as soon as they have established what they think they’re looking at.

Do not touch, or it may release its spores in your face

I find it astonishing that mainstream science has not recognised this. We are all in terrible danger. Space Raiders are coming. 

More Lost Soles

Has it really been a month? Well, yes.

What have I been doing all that time? From what is about to follow, you would draw the conclusion that I had been lurking around woodlands inspecting litter.

That is not untrue, but it is a rather one-sided picture. I have been doing other things as well, many of them connected with my secret “real world” identity.

Apologies, then, if (i) you missed me or (ii) you thought I really was the 12th Century Norman king of Sicily.

And with that preamble still ringing in our ears, let us return to the mysterious world of abandoned clothing.

“Do we have to?” I hear you cry. 

To which I reply, "shut up".

OK, here we go - every parent's minor irritation: the lost single glove. No story here. Kids do it all the time. That's why some (insane) parents attach their offspring's gloves together on a piece of elastic. Clearly, getting beaten up every day of winter is a price worth paying to avoid having to buy a new pair. 

I don't know what this is and so I can't even begin to speculate about its story. 

Naturally, I don't touch any of this stuff. I might be strange enough to photograph stuff I find lying in the woods and in the gutters, but I do draw the line at physical contact. 

Is it a shirt? Is it some pants? Is it a onesie? No, I don't think it's a onesie. 

I suppose I will never know. 

This is a good one. A hoodie up a tree. Who left it there? Was it too hot? Why up a tree? I hypothesise that someone was playing football (or possibly kabbadi - why isn't that on TV any more?), took their top off and forgot all about it. 

Unlike most of my "captures" this looks pretty clean. Can't have been out in the elements for long. Perhaps someone came back for it shortly after this picture was taken. 

Now this is quite a haul. One boot, one sock and a pair of waterproof trousers. The other boot I found a few feet away, in case you were wondering. 

Oh, you weren't? Well, that's where it was anyway. 

I cannot begin to imagine the circumstances that would lead someone to take off their overtrousers, their boots and one or both socks while in a Yorkshire woodland. 

Well, I can imagine them. But I can't imagine them not needing to put them all back on again after finishing in order to get home without being caught. 

There comes a point I suppose where the most perturbing fact about all this becomes, not the never-to-be-told stories of the lost garments - but with what appears to be an unhealthy obsession on my part. 

It was funny to begin with. Especially when it was pants. Look, here are some more! Left in the middle of a footpath! 

But it's starting to look peculiar now. I think I had better stop.