Skip to main content

I hate nettles

I'm sorry. I can't be politically correct about this. I hate nettles. They are evil. And to show I mean business, here's a sack of them I ripped up yesterday.

I'm sure someone reading this is thinking 'But nettles are wonderful plants. You can make lovely soup out of them, and nettle wine and nettle tea. They're eco-marvellous.' Well, I'm sorry, it's rubbish.

Just imagine I was talking about local youths: 'They take over my garden uninvited, and they hurt me. Hours after our encounter I was still in pain.' In fact, the local youths are mostly pretty nice, but that applies absolutely to nettles. If humans did what they did, they'd be arrested and sent down.

Death to all nettles.

Comments

  1. Now, Brian, find yourself a dock leaf and rub it on your nettle sting. Then stamp on your bag of nettles and immerse them in a pail of water for a few weeks and they will turn into a great liquid manure.
    Nettles are a sign your soil is fertile, so their presence should cheer you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the manure idea - it seems an excellent revenge, thanks Sandra.

    A dock leaf would be good too, but they aren't so good at infilitrating my garden. Next time I'll have to go out on the verge and find one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm shocked you've turned out to be a nettlist.

    Some of my best friends are nettles, I'll have you know.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nettles as a sign of soil fertility. That makes sense - ever since we've had chickens running around our garden the nettles are springing up all over the place.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm sure a couple of hundred years ago they would have deduced that nettles are spontaneously generated from chickens...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nettles have cured cancer and chronic pain of all kinds and are just getting the recognition they deserve in homeopathic health circles, including products such as the Netical Patch. Once the FDA learns that nettle cures cancer in some cases they're going to plop bricks.... and then try to assassinate everyone involved.... lovely country we live in here in the old U.S.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Nettles are vicious little shits, aren't they. Plus every single time I've been stung I can never seem to find a dock leaf when I need it! ugh...I don't garden myself, but have seen friends of mine on local allotments toiling trying to pull them out of the ground, and like you, managing bags and bags of them. I will say this for them, they make excellent nettle cheese in Northumberland.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...