Walking home the other afternoon, I passed a car with a weed growing around one of its tyres. I found myself stopping, so I looked to see where the weed started and where it ended – it went almost all the way around it, like a snow chain.
It was only when I was right down near the tyre, surrounded by the smell of weed and rubber, that I realised I had done exactly the same thing during the first lockdown. Not with the same car, but one similar – which, like so many cars in so many cities, sat in the same spot for so long that the weeds took over and started using it as a climbing frame. For two odd, vertiginous seconds, it was lockdown again. Then I found the start of the weed in the crack where the pavement met the road, along with a cigarette butt and a damp lottery ticket, rotting leaves and other weeds, including a tuft of mentuccia.
