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. 

Where did all the jackdaws come from?

I used to sponsor a jackdaw.

Back in the early 1980s, my family and I were regular visitors to Norton Bird Gardens in Suffolk – a place which, I discover to my dismay, no longer exists.

Norton Bird Gardens, that is. I am reliably assured that Suffolk still exists. It has a website at any rate. 

Anyway, much as at today’s zoos you can pay hundreds of pounds to sponsor a lion or a dugong or something – for which you can expect one signed photo a year – so then for an undisclosed sum I got my name on a sign outside an enclosure housing one common British bird.

My brother, if I remember rightly (Mum? Dad? Corrections below please), sponsored a magpie.

Two other things stick in my memory about Norton Bird Gardens.

1. Trees laden with more crab apples than I have ever seen during the summer. I’m not sure if they came from here, but the memory of those trees is tied up inextricably with a memory of making what seemed to be a never-ending supply of crab apple jelly.
2. An upright complete circle of bricks. To me as an under-10, that was an architectural marvel far surpassing the pyramids, the Taj Mahal or anything else wrought by the hand of man. 

So, the jackdaw was called Jackie and the magpie was called Michael, and we preferred to look at them – and try to run around the brick circle – than all the exotic birds that made up the rest of the collection.

My parents must have felt then much like I did the other week when we took the kids to Blackpool Zoo (approx £50 plus travel) and all they wanted to do was go on a poxy climbing frame and chase geese.

And so it is that I feel in some way responsible – culpable even – for the astonishing proliferation of these two species of crow in this country over the last 30 years.

Magpies, it need hardly be said, are now everywhere. Back when I was a kid, the best chance you had of seeing a magpie was to look for a dead one hanging off a farmer’s gate.

Clearly the joy imparted by the sight of two of them was a function of their relative scarcity. Nowadays, it’s wishes, kisses and secrets never to be told all over the bloody place.

But until very recently, it was pretty unusual to see a jackdaw. You generally had to go to “proper countryside” away from the presence of human beings – at which point you got out of crow territory and into either rook or jackdaw land.

Woodlands? They belong to jays.  

Towns? Pigeons.

Motorway service station car parks? Pied wagtails. They should just change their name to “car park bird” and have done.

Is it just me or are jackdaws encroaching on human habitats? I’ve seen them near my house. I’ve seen them in Boston (which is borderline human habitat, I know).

What does it mean? Surely, this is YET ANOTHER sign of the impending end of the world. Only 252 days to go now. Make sure you befriend a jackdaw before then – you might need him. 

There is a snake in my pocket

I know I promised an article on baby poo when I next returned to the matter of science, but that has fallen by the wayside after I discovered this (pictured) on coming into my office this morning.

My iPod headphones had somehow wrapped themselves around one of my chair's wheels. It took me quite a while to extract them.

This is an extreme example of a phenomenon that has been troubling me for some time:

How is it possible that you can put headphones into your pocket in some degree of good order, only to take them out moments later a gigantic, tight mess of knots?

I can only conclude that they are living entities, which start moving as soon as you take your eyes off them so as to entangle themselves (sort of) like the ourobouros of legend.

Or perhaps alternatively, there are unseen pocket-forces at work, causing the cable to tie itself up?

On the train, I see a lot of people wearing headphones. I don't see them wrestling with them like I have to every day. What am I doing wrong?

Vegetable theft is no laughing matter

For two years' running now, someone has stolen the pumpkin I put out on my doorstep on Halloween. This year's effort is pictured, about two hours before it was nicked. As you can see, it's not exactly a work of art.

No trace of it has been found, apart from the lid which I discovered at the end of my pathway in the morning.

Loads of other pumpkins were out on doorsteps down my road, but only mine has been taken. Is it the crows? Is it my reptilian nemesis from Northern Rail? Or do I have more enemies I don't even know about?

Who is doing this? Next year, I'm going to hide in a wheelie bin all night if that's what it takes to find out who is waging this secret vendetta against me.

Beware the crows

You can break down the UK into three kinds of environment, defined by the prevailing forms of bird life.

Number one, urban areas – pigeons overrun cities and town centres like a swarm of leprous medieval beggars.

Number two, songbirds definitive of nice suburban and rural areas, characteristic of places like "leafy Surrey" and villages full of holiday homes with names like Cricklewickle-on-the-Dinglywingly.

Number three – the crows. Denizens of places most simply defined as "bleak". Stick up a housing estate on some moorland, the crows don't go away. Because it's still bleak. They remain, eye witnesses of ancient human sacrifice and the horrifying rites of our ancestors. Today, they hunch sneering down at council estates and wind-battered farm houses, miserable dog walkers and the crap-strewn gardens of residential A-roads.

Crows don't just look creepy. They are creepy, as this article I read in a local paper about a "crow court" makes clear. A group of crows is called a "murder" for god's sake.

Wherever I go (outside areas 1 and 2 above) I can be sure that if I look around, I'll spot a crow, watching me. At least, it looks like it's watching me. Against the sky – even the fart-grey skies of the Yorkshire autumn – the silhouette of a crow is like a black hole, sucking the light from around itself to achieve an almost reflecting darkness.

And this is why I believe crows are not birds at all, but rather extra-dimensional entities. That's not a bird watching you from on top of that lamppost while you wait at a lonely bus-stop as the last of the sun's rays fade away. It's a window straight to hell, and something's peering out at you from in there. Read anything on here and you'll know what I mean.