Opening Lines: Amongst us stupid people, I think finally weeds are having a moment

I’ve always had a certain respect for weeds. They have been worthy adversaries.

I was never much of a gardener, but I have had my fair share of battles with weeds.

Two, to be specific: thistles and ragwort. I don’t know whether it’s still a rite of passage for eight-year-olds to go out into a field for the bones of a day with nothing for company but a slasher or, if you had a degree, a scythe.

But maybe it should be.

The Young People wouldn’t be out cyberbullying or putting snapchat filters on themselves would they? (Correction: Of course they would. If I had access to the world’s information and my friends’ insecurities while out cutting thistles I would have cut precisely four thistles a week).

Ragwort was a worse job than thistles. They had to be pulled so there was no glorious slaying as you wiped out communities.

Each one had to be defeated in hand-to-hand combat. On hard ground your hands would slip off up the stalk so you just ended up with a slightly massaged ragwort and yellow hands.

Along with docks, these there are the only weeds specifically listed under the 1936 Noxious Weeds Act. You’re supposed to keep the weeds down so that they don’t spread to a neighbour’s farm and ragwort makes cattle sick if it’s in silage.

And for appearances’ sake.

Weeds in a farm made it look abandoned, as if the farmer was inside watching Loose Women while gates rusted, cattle wandered, the fields went to seed and The Father turned in his grave.

I don’t know who cuts thistles now. Maybe it’s been outsourced to India or Amazon do it with drones. More recently my nemesis have been the hardest bastards of them all, the dandelions.

The dandelion, like the poor, are always with us. Except the poor are often always with us because of the systematic gaming of society by the military industrial complex whose only goal is further self-enrichment and consolidation of power because they’re all psychopaths. Whereas all dandelions need is a gap in the path.

They watch while you pull the easier weeds first. You delude yourself rampaging through the chickweed and the other weeds with names that go back centuries. Here are a few made up ones that sound plausible: Parson’s Buttock, Scaldygoat, Shepherd’s Codpiece.

Whatever, soon you are left with nothing but the lifeless remains of scutch grass between you and a dandelion. You fight and scratch and scrape and think you’ve eliminated them.

But you haven’t. When you go inside, out in the shadows a root is stirring and will be all set to give you the middle stem in defiance within a few days.

But fair play to weeds – they get the job done. I don’t agree with their methods, their outcomes seemed entirely selfish and they don’t seem to do much for the community.

They are just like most of capitalism.

But it turns out many weeds were secretly giving back to the community.

Dandelions and thistle and buttercups and cow parsley were helping out the bees and butterflies and mudgeflies and the beagleworms. (The last two are made up. My wildlife vocabulary is not very diverse).

People in the know have been talking about biodiversity for years but amongst us stupid people, I think finally weeds are having a moment.

We are realising that our countryside shouldn’t look like the course for the USPGA Championship, with golfers with names like Stank Lino going around happy with their golf game.

But to do that we need to change our definition of beauty. Messy needs to be seen as good. The Tidy Towns are going to have to have redefine tidy.

It might have to include bee and butterfly counts in its criteria rather than just hanging baskets.

And it provides plenty of cover for the likes of me to say to the dandelion and the thistle: “good job, carry on. I’m off inside to watch Loose Women.”