MAN’S WORLD

In which our Southern charmer is finally antagonised into heroic action by an enemy so formidable and well armed, that his defeat is all but inevitable.

- Joe Bennett declares war on his most formidable enemy yet.

Once you have thistles you have thistles. They don’t go away. Ted Hughes’ poem about thistles is a dozen lines long but it didn’t need to be. He could have stopped after the first word. That word is against. The essence of thistle is againstness.

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistle spike the summer air.

Thistles are armed. They are born armed and they die armed, and by those arms shall ye know them. Thistles don’t pretend to be pretty or peaceful. You know where you stand with thistles – on land that they mean to take from you.

Hughes compared thistles to Vikings. Bang right. If in the eighth century, you saw Viking ships drawing up on the beach you didn’t waste time wondering whether they’d come in peace. Vikings wore helmets and they carried axes. They didn’t do peace. Nor did they do ambiguity.

I used to have goats rather than thistles. Only two goats, and by goat standards they were small and delicate, but they still had goatish eating habits. As omnivores, goats rival camels. They eat thorn-bushes, sacks, shoes. Thistles to a goat are a sweetmeat. I never saw a thistle.

But my goats are gone now, and I see thistles all the time. They are reclaiming the paddock they never relinquished.

I don’t know what variety they are. They don’t either. They’re just thistles.

They grow up through the tall grass unnoticed. I remark on them when they begin to flower and I force myself to get up there and deal to them before they seed. But it is hard work, thistling, and futile unless you’re a goat.

I don clumsy leather gauntlets – two thick pairs of gardening gloves – but I know it’s no good. The gloves haven’t been made that thistles can’t find their way into.

It’s only at close quarters that you realise the numbers of the enemy, the size of the task. While some thistles are flowering, replacement troops are already springing up at their feet. And lying about them in the underbrush are the withered remains of the thistles that rose and fell in last year’s war, brown and shrivelled now, but their prickles still prick. Even in death thistles are thistles.

To uproot a thistle you have to seize it near the base and heave. The stem is fleshy. Sometimes it snaps. That thistle will regrow in days.

After an hour’s thistling all exposed skin is reddened and itching from a thousand brushings and pricklings. And invisible prickles detached from the dead have burrowed into your gloved thumb, your gloved palm. And you’ve not got them all. And you know you won’t get them all. And they will keep coming on. It’s what they do. Thistles win, or die trying.

It’s not until a month or two later that their victory becomes clear. It’s autumn. There’s a breeze. And lilting on that breeze is the lightest thing on earth, a thing that a baby’s breath can shift, a single seed of thistledown. You catch it in your hand. It is of infinite complexity and delicacy. You look up from your palm and look across and through the air. It is as warm with thistledown, adrift with it, a silent seeded blizzard.

It is like that day in May of 1941 when villagers on the island of Crete looked up into the blue of the Mediterranean sky and saw battalions of German paratroopers floating down in eerie silence to wrest their land from them.

Thistles.