Scratching towards the point...

Karl Andersson's wanking habits, my Scotch thistle, the influence of crowds and other thoughts

A burnet moth drinking nectar from a noxious weed that MUST BE DESTROYED

If the rain comes

They run and hide their heads

They might as well be dead

If the rain comes

If the rain comes

According to my Beatles Anthology book, John Lennon said that Rain is about people going on all the time about the weather. Clearly it isn't, though. He's talking about our reluctance to accept things as they are and embrace the loveliness of Naychur, exactly as it is, man. As John isn't around to contradict my interpretation there's no point in @ing me about this.

Rain comes into my head often. Like the other evening when I was wondering how best to control but not destroy the centrepiece of my garden (aka the meadow).

The centrepiece is a 'noxious weed' that escaped my predations last autumn, while preparing the ground for the kind of wildflowers I wanted to see this year. When I did eventually spot the spiky rosette of thistle I'd already done more than enough digging and scarifying and decided to leave it be.

Long story short, it turned out to be a magnificent Scotch thistle that - along with the knapweed I intentionally cultivated - proved to be the biggest hit of the summer for local pollinators.

A bee on a noxious weed that MUST BE DESTROYED

This piece started out as an intended critique of materialistic mechanistic views of the world, spinning out from googling something about this Scotch thistle. Thinking of the obvious utility of this plant for bees, daylight-flying moths, numerous other insects and therefore birds, I naively set about researching how to prune this monster so that it doesn't come to dominate but continues to thrive in a reasonably contained area. All I found were pages of advice on killing and eradicating it. Prompting an eyes-to-heaven moment of thinking everything in modernity is geared to controlling and removing that which may be inconvenient.

I needed a scapegoat and it didn't take long to find one in the shape of Francis Bacon. Soon I learned that he was basically a Very Bad Man who advocated the 'torture' and 'enslavement' of nature in order to exploit and twist everything that is pure and good to our modern convenience.

I set about finding some great Francis Bacon quotes to riff over what a twat he was and how we might do well to reject such soulless mechanistic interpretations of the world, quickly to find that he's already been the target of all the usual suspects for wrongthink. Which gave me pause.