Blackberry

Blackberry used to be a kind of technology.  F had one for work.  

While the technology may have succumbed to the march of time and development, the real thing, which has long scrambling vines liberally armed with backward curving prickles (like sharks' teeth, once caught difficult to tear yourself away from) and the ability to take root wherever the vines touch the ground, is tenacious and well adapted to colonize any space left fallow for a season.

Birds eat the berries and poop the seeds across the countryside.  The vines themselves can grow many metres in a year and touch ground in lots of places to establish new bases from which to expand.  They might be an alien life-form.  I have already told you that next door is a feral landscape fast approaching a veritable wilderness and haven for wildlife, but what was less obvious, until we really got into it, was the extent to which it was secretly invading our backyard (from both sides as it happens).

My humans had one of those weekends where they barely sat down even to eat and I got tired of following them about to check on their activities.  Repair Café (F), in-garage repairs (Mr B), a trip to pick up stuff to be the bean fences at the allotment, loading up all the  components of a shed dismantled from the end of our yard and a trip to deliver that, and a wander into the village to get the makings of meals, followed on Sunday by a half a day of cycling and half a day clearing the invasion of blackberry from our backyard.

Much of this was 'off-site' and I wasn't invited to participate.  Garden clearance was a different story.  Mr B lit a 'bonfire' in the barbeque (always a good afternoon's entertainment) and burned all the blackberry as F hoicked it out.  It burns really well even when green and fresh.  He also burned a barrow load of old fence palings from a big pile behind the lilac tree.  Half the pile is still there - it looks like a good home for hedgehogs so its dismantling has been left for warmer weather.  (A new pile will be built somewhere else; Mr B has to repair the fence where the old pile had been).

We all sat by the dying embers and had some 'snacks' and, until it got too dark for humans to see, watched a robin exploring the exposed surfaces of the rotting wood pile by the back fence, seeking out bugs to eat.

F read somewhere a long time ago that the use of aerial photography since WWII has enabled someone somewhere to work out that Britain's countryside has about 40% more blackberry cover now than it had at the time of the second world war.  That might not be entirely a good thing if it really is an alien species invasion - you humans might all end up being hooked into some lair where you will get digested by 'the food chain'.

Supervising building works - more on that in my next post.

PS.  F says thank you for all the replies to the post she hijacked off me to write about life choices (or life accidents).  There is much much more that she could write and respond on in the interesting comments that were contributed, but I discourage too many hijackings of my blog.  It could become a bog rather than a blog.  However, good guidance does seem to involve a question of how many ideas kids get exposed to early in their development, about which they can build pictures of what their adulthood might be; that and life's accidents - the things that happen to you when you are planning other stuff.  There does seem to be an argument for teaching kids to develop good 'peripheral vision' - to being open to the things that are happening on the edges of their focus, and curious enough to want to find out about them.