Last night my mum came round to help me release the ladybirds. We’d been messaging abstractly for some time about our parallel plant issues – I’d noticed small clusters of what looked like cottonwool or bath foam, collecting at the base of the leaves on my favourite plant. This is not just any plant, I should explain, this is a plant that’s more of a fairytale, more of a fable. Its leaves are large and sprawling and, after teasing for some time with finger-length pink buds, it will flower at dusk, each bud opening like a huge water-lily and emitting a deep, sweet smell like expensive vanilla. By morning the flowers are dead, rubbery and obscene, dangling limply from the stalk. The problem, my mum told me, was mealybugs, attacking my plant – and there was only one real way to get rid of them.
The mealybugs arrived at a moment in my life when I was trying to push back time. I’d never wanted to before. Don’t roll your eyes friends, yes I wear old-fashioned clothes, but swishing around in a 70s dress doesn’t mean I also want to return to lechery and power cuts. No, my focus today is on gently pressing technology away, just for a little while. You see, my daughter has just started in Year 6, the final year of primary school, and last week came home vibrating with a particular kind of agony at the realisation that “everybody else” had a mobile phone. I was not prepared for this conversation – I’d assumed this was a bridge we would cross (drag ourselves across, bleeding, “Save yourself!”) when she moved to secondary school, but I gave it a good go, I think.
