Once again we’ve reached the time of year when I go into the meadow along the lane, fold myself double like a bent playing card, and start pleading with crickets and grasshoppers to be my friend. Most of them treat me the way I treat cold callers, and I don’t even get to finish my prepared spiel before they ping away into the distance, but I’ve learned that the ones who are brave enough to sit tight while you approach them can sometimes be talked into climbing aboard a grass stalk, especially if you gently tickle their chests with the end of it. Being able to lift them clear of the distracting tangle of foliage they usually inhabit lets me photograph them against a clean background, but I’m always careful to work fast and get them back safely to ground level as quickly as I can. Oddly though, some of them seem to get a taste for human company (or maybe for being carried around), and have to be gently encouraged to leave the stalk at the end of their photo shoot.
The conversations I find myself having with passers-by during these performances often run along the following lines:
“Errr… are you OK there? Anything I can do?”
“Oh, hi! Yes thanks – I’m fine. Just having a chat with this grasshopper.”
“Right. Good. I just wondered… Nice day for it, anyway!”
Even after several decades of practice I still haven’t fully got the hang of being a member of the English middle class, but there are some aspects I appreciate, and I regularly find myself offering up silent thanks for the fact that most people would rather let you carry on behaving in a way they clearly find utterly bizarre, than create an embarrassing situation by telling you so. I do wish a few of them would extend the noble aim of avoiding awkward conversations to not explaining that they knew it was me there, insect-bothering again, because they recognised my backside from right down the end of the lane… but I suppose you can’t have everything.
R: C3, D19.
