I have a difficult relationship with nature, which I believe is how it should be. Last week, I put my dressing gown on after getting out of the shower and felt a prickling sensation on my thigh. A wasp flew out, and my leg swelled up, and I cursed these beasts I am compelled to live alongside, and the loving friction we create.
As spring creeps in I’m out among that nature again, among the trees and the grasses, and the wild garlic with its stench and flowers. At the back of my local park there are acres of the stuff, largely left alone despite the Sunday Times recently describing it as “cultural currency”, a “disruptor, as everyone puts down their mobiles and goes out to forage” and “the root of all joy and smuggery”. Where I live, though, the garlic causes yet more friction, as distant neighbours take to NextDoor to complain about families collecting it in quantities they resent and others explain it’s a weed or a wildflower, which benefits from picking and, besides, shut up. And for all my suspicion of the outside world, my insistence that nature is too green and badly lit, this is one thing I do agree on: nature is for everyone, in all its horrible glory.
