Bugman Jones

It’s been several months since my last blog. I’ve been busy. Mostly I’ve been writing a book about ants. But I’ve also reinvigorated an idea from March last year — A natural history of insects in 100 limericks might be an unlikely title but it’s been picked up and Pelagic Books (Call of nature, 2017) are publishing it later this summer.

I like the quirky irreverence of the limerick, with its silly subject matter and it’s ability to weather some of the the worst storms of poetic licence. All gravitas can be swept aside and there is a certain charm in the sometimes quite frankly challenging rhyme clashes.

To some extent the book is a vehicle for Calvin’s Line drawings, which he did when he was still 13.

No prizes for guessing that this is a bumblebee.

Calvin and I spent several months tinkering and doodling respectively. And in the end some of the hardest decisions were which ones to leave out. After deciding to make the book just insects it was obvious that the arachnids would hit the cutting room floor.

And anyway, maybe the world’s not quite ready for poems about cannibalism.

A wolf spider carried about,
Her young on her back,there’s no doubt.
But when her strength left,
Her babes weren’t bereft,
They ate her until she was nowt.

Watch this space. And please don’t be too unforgiving in your assessments.

Clearing out the parental home and I come across these almost antique collecting boxes. My dad used to make these out of matchboxes, and I did too. Quality father/son bonding time, it was.

First cut a rectangular hole in the top using a naked ‘safety’ razor blade (a Stanley knife might have been available later). Wooden matchboxes, back in the day, were easier to cut than the cardboard ones. Next glue a cover of clear cellophane over the window using that gaggingly smelly animal glue boiled up in a home-made bain-marie on the gas ring. Finally give it a neat paint job, and a number.

For at least my first decade these were our collecting boxes of choice. They were ideal for the sorts of creatures we were finding — hoverflies, greenbottles, weevils, leaf beetles, longhorns, moths, water boatmen, shieldbugs, grasshoppers and caddis flies. Anything too small could often squeeze out of a gap. Sometimes a large solitary wasp would chew a hole in the corner and escape.

I was probably 13 or 14 when I made the change to glass tubes, and although Dad did too, he often also carried a few of these old boxes in case he found a particularly large water beetle or a big fluffy moth. He’d then make an entry in his field notebook, of the painted number on the back, what he’d found, and where.

During the last 10 years of his life he hardly collected any insects, he spent all his fieldwork hours recording plants. But when I’d visit he’d pull out some of the latest things he had found and was struggling with. They were all small fry — the sort of thing you could only put into a small glass tube, not a loosely fitting matchbox. But he still kept these, along with a few similarly painted tobacco tins of uncertain provenance. Just in case.

It’s really important to keep things in perspective. This was brought home to me, forcefully, when I was very young.

It’s not just insects, or wildlife, or even nature that fascinates me. It’s everything about the world — and the universe beyond it. I’m embarrassed to say that it’s dimmed a bit of late, but when I was a boy I was deeply interested in astronomy. I had an Airfix model of a Saturn V rocket, planetary and star charts on the wall, and a map of the moon marked with Apollo and other landings.

I had a few books too — probably something or other by Patrick Moore, a pictorial spotter’s guide to constellations, a pictorial atlas of planets, moons and galaxies, and I remember some sort of history of astronomy.

But it was an astronomy picture book I sent off for, from the back of a Weetabix packet (or it might have been Shreddies) when I was about 10, that caused all the trouble. It haunts me to this day. In it was a diagram showing the life of a typical star, from vague gas cloud to condensed solar orb of the main sequence (like our sun today) to red giant to white dwarf. It was a simple diagram, clear and to the point. It was this that got me all agitated.

Five billion years from now, having used up nearly all of its hydrogen in fusion to create helium, the sun’s mass (currently 2 x 10³⁰ kg) will have reduced to the point where its gravity grows less, the internal pull on its gaseous structure diminishes and it starts to expand in size. As the outer layers glow hotter and redder, it will engulf the orbits of, first Mercury, then Venus, then Earth.

The Earth will be vaporized in five billion years time.

I was beside myself with despair and sat on the bed weeping and wailing my 10-year-old equivalent of “What’s the point of it? We’re all going to die.” It wasn’t so much my own death I was worried about, more the end of civilization as we know it.

My father sat down on the bed to try and console me. He probably tried to explain why it didn’t matter what would happen 5,000,000,000 years from now — further into the future than the Earth is now from its origin. Maybe he made science-fiction predictions about translocating the Earth’s population to extraterrestrial colonies, or perhaps even towing the planet off into deeper space.

I did calm down, and eventually got to sleep that night. But afterwards, each time I surreptitiously glanced at that stellar evolution chart, I had another frisson of anxiety.

So maybe that’s why I spend so much time looking at the tiny things of the world. They take my mind away from some of the larger things.

First proofs for Wasp are in. These are just a few samples to give a taster.

Watch this space.