A Bug's Life

The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)

Still very good, with evocative scenes in a London I'm familiar with, not modern shock-horror but I can still almost smell the corpses which litter the streets. The triffids seem to my sci-fi-trained mind like they should be aliens, but they are a manmade problem and for all the vivid plant-with-agency images it is very much a book about human responses.

It shares a lot with some corporate team building activities: scenarios where you have insufficient resources, colleagues with reduced capacity, and a group with diverse and conflicting objectives and ambitions. There is no obvious right path, especially with incomplete information, and every decision is hard. You can't get it right; people will die. And just as you start to attain some stability, the scenario leader throws in an evolved triffid attack, or (LOL) plague.

Wyndham shows us a range of people and their arguments about how best things should work.

Went with beckyc for a yomp over Coe Fen and Sheep's Green and beyond, for a spot of geocaching - a hobby I must not take up for the sake of my sanity, from the compulsion to look for just one more cache, and one more, and ... For the same reason, I must never have a Pokemon. We found a few caches, and missed a couple (whether due to inadequate searching or the cache not being there I don't know), and spent a lot of time getting down and dirty with the insides of trees like I haven't since I was a kid. There are so many colours brown, and textures of wood in different states of decay, damp and soft and hard-looking but which squash spongily or crumble when you touch them, and the smells! Coe Fen is particularly good for trees which have spilt open, revealing interiors or sheets of pale creamy wood, or sheltering portals to otherwhere. They fascinated me as a child, I had a favourite tree on the Heath with a spilt a child could climb inside. Surely such a fissure must lead somewhere special? Narnia, or fairyland, down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, or the strange other place where Totoro hangs out. I hadn't seen Pan's Labyrinth at the time.

It was fun to do a different sort of observation, can I see the cache? Is there a well-trodden path through the bushes or some recently-turned leaves? Does anything look suspicious, other than, um, us? What an awesome bracket fungus. Ooh, big golden bird (probably a grey wagtail). Is this lidless ice cream tub a vandalised geocache, or a random tub? And if so, what is it doing tucked so well under this bush? There had been some tree-felling along one part of the river, and the fresh wood was in plates like flakes of fish. I pulled one off and marvelled at how light it was. Wood that light and fresh seems almost edible, not like the dry dead hard wood.