Meet the Insects - Assassin Bug

Stenolemus bituberus dhobern Flickr. from Physics.org

It's unlikely many of my readers will meet this one - unless my readership is much more international than I realise - as it's an Australian species. You can see some British species of assassin bugs here 

But it's this one that caught my attention after a piece of research was posted on the BBC website detailing the way it lured it's play. One of the researchers Dr Anne Wignall explains. 

"However, reliance on vibratory cues and predictable responses leaves web-building spiders vulnerable to predators that aggressively mimic prey stimuli to gain control over their behaviour," they wrote.

"If you imagine an insect such as a fly when first hits the web, it'll generate a huge intial vibration, and then it will begin struggling violently, buzzing its wings," explained Dr Wignall.

"During these first vibrations, the risk of the prey escaping from the web is largest, and so spiders will tend to move in quickly on prey producing these sorts of vibrations in the web.

"But, as time goes on, an insect may get more tired, and the vibrations it produces will be much smaller. The spider can take more time approaching these insects as it's less likely to escape from the web," she told BBC News.

"These are the sorts of vibrations assassin bugs are mimicking, and it makes sense as a spider is very dangerous prey for a bug. If the spider approaches too fast, the risk to the assassin bug is much higher." 

I can't add much to that - although if you're not too squeamish (and I've noticed that not many people's squeamishness extends to creatures without warm blood, fur and feathers), you can watch Stenolemus bituberus in action here. 

Meet the Insects - Emperor Dragonfly

Anax Imperator
Emperor Dragonfly

Anax Imperator. Photo svdmolen wikicommons

This is the first in a series of blogs giving background information on some of the insects featured in Entomology. As it happens this particular insect was also featured in Bug Music - a series of insect poems for children I wrote 15 years ago (you can see this condition of mine has been active for some years...)

When I talk about the dragonfly to school children I usually ask if any of their teachers claim to see out of the back of their head. Look at the picture and you can see that dragonflies really can - though what they see we really can't imagine.

This insect also has a set of big scary jaws which crunch up midges and mosquitoes and uses four independently moving wings to fly perform aerial acrobatics that allow it to hunt on the wing. It's a perfectly designed predator. Remember when TV aliens always tended to look like insects? A giant dragonfly would be terrifying.

But dragonflies also have fascinating life cycles. All insects have fascinating life cycles. It might be a while since you stopped to think what actually happens to a caterpillar! Dragonflies don't have quite such a profound metamorphosis and they do it bit by bit. The egg hatches into a larvae, which we call a nymph (entomologists are a romantic lot) which sheds its hard skin 3 times as it grows and changes into a fully grown dragonfly. Some nice young biologists from Sri Lanka have posted some great pictures here.

Poetry after Pain

Anish Kapoor: The Healing of St Thomas

Mollusc was a work of solace, Entomology of curiosity. Mollusc was 10 years worth of the poems that had to write, poems that poured out of me because no-one was listening, because I was existing in a claustrophobic marriage with a man who though occasionally well-intentioned was only vaguely aware of me as a separate human being. Those poems were easy to write. They were the valve on the pressure cooker. Those were the poems that I needed to write at a time I needed to be a poet because it seemed the only point in a life that had rarely been other than lonely and unhappy.

Mollusc starts with my marriage, Entomology with the divorce, though in actuality the first poems were written several years later, as I was learning to be happy. There were years in between when the mental chaos was too great even for poetry, and years when poetry took a back seat because, frankly, life was better than poetry.

I had that choice offered to me very bluntly in the end. Part way through the writing of Entomology I was suddenly struck with chronic pain, most likely due to damage to the pudendal nerve of some unknown cause. The medication which would stop my pain, and which would have to be titrated up overmany months, would most likely affect my mental acuity. I considered the possibility that it would impact on my ability to write, and then decided I didn't care that much. Life was more important than poetry.

In actual fact the medication affected my capacity to live every bit as much as my capacity to write and it took a couple more years before I found a medication that worked without the terrible side effects. But in the mean time I learnt something about my priorities and I learned something about living with pain.

Pain, for me, was only bearable if I could live in the moment. Behind me stretched a 'before' an unattainable state of normality. Before stretched more pain. The moment was only a moment's work of pain. And the moment contained the whole universe. To exist within myself was for pain to be everything. To be connected to a universe in which my pain was only a part was joyful. That introversion no longer worked, that focussed wallowing which is the generation of so much poetry no longer worked.

These days I'm only in occasional pain, more often discomfort - but then find me a middle-aged person that isn't! I'm not lonely. I'm not unhappy. I don't need poetry. I don't need to be a poet. I'm perfectly content with knowing I am a good poet rather than a great one, though I've a good few years to work at being a very good one.

Entomology, for all it focusses on these tiny creatures is a pamphlet about being in the world, about human relationships, imperfect and wonderful. It's about figuring that out, it's about learning to be alive.

I don't need to write poems any more. But I think I'd like to. I don't particularly want to write poems about pain. They'll come of course, because life will continue to bring pain. I'll lose people I love. I'll be hurt, disappointed, frightened sick. But not all the time. I can live a different kind of life and I want to write a different kind of poem. I want to write poems that say "Look! It's fucking amazing!" I think they might be the hardest poems of all.

Why I've not been blogging

I've just realised it's been over a year since I made that last post - and it's been a year in which poetry has taken a back seat.

Last week I was approved to foster young people. Because of a debacle with Barnardos (far too sordid to mention on here - but if you see me, do ask) it's taken over two years. During that time, apart from the hours of interviews leading to hundreds of pages worth of reports, I've stripped painted, polyfilled, carpetted, knocked down shelves, stripped, polyfilled and painted some more, upholstered, curtained and become the queen of the flat pack. I've learned to do all those things I've always assumed one needs a man for, and I've got triceps and biceps and whatever you call that muscle in the lower arm that look so sexy when it's well developed on a man.

Today I'm taking a break from knocking layers of cement, whitewash and lime off the outhouse that has been and will be an outside loo. Tomorrow I'm learning to point. But I'm getting a man in for the plumbing.

Then I'm painting it pink and orange, hanging mexican curtains and Frida Kahlo prints (that's right I'm having a Kahloo). Then I'm done.

Soon, there will be children staying here. Just at weekends and holidays at first. And in between I shall readdress myself to poetry.

It has become a strange thing to build things from words, to wrestle with things that don't hurt my shoulders, to wield a metaphorical chisel. There's a simplicity and reward to physical work that is rarely mirrored in poetry. It's so much easier to see what is made, because what is made surrounds you and is lived in, it exists in a place other than the mind of another.

And a job ends in a way a poem never does - at least it does if you are able to apply the principle of 'good enough' to your home, and I am.

In a few days I shall down my tools and pick up my pen. It does not fit snugly. I'd rather dig.

Small Stones

Over January I've been doing the Mindful Writing Challenge organised by Writing Our Way Home. Each day I've been writing a Small Stone - a short piece of writing capturing a moment. The challenge has been to notice, as much as it has been too communicate. It has really been a challenge, to keep noticing at a time when I've been dealing with some difficult things, but it has allowed me to be 'in the moment' which has been just what I needed. Many thanks to Satyavani Fiona Robyn.

Here they are - just 30 of them, sadly!

Small Stones

Woodfiller turns from ochre to fired clay as I sand. Grit in eyes. Smooth under fingertips.

Rain slides down my dirty velux, pits on the grease, prisms the rooftops.

Light at Four O’clock. We rush to the kitchen window to watch the sunset. Realise it faces East.

Rabbit shit under my fingernails. Creature flicks an ear, tugs a blade of fresh hay with his teeth and snips it into little pieces.

Twelfth Night. I tug at the red ribbon to the Disco Ball. It falls on my head. I push back two mirror tiles onto the dimpled polystyrene sphere. There's silver dust on the mahogany piano. On my fingers. On the yellow cloth.

My friend's two daughters. One has curled around herself like a sea urchin. The other star-jumps.

A sound like tearing paper. A smell of old cabbage. Bunny fart!

A racket of birds hidden by bramble and bracken.

A skewed heart on a dirty white car, part erased by finger streaks.

Planing the gate, gorged with rain, buds on the overhanging tree brush my face.

Grey sky. Black tree skeletons. Ginger tom purring. A quartet plays late Mozart.

Flirting has done what chocolate could not do. What yoga could not do. What Bach could not do. I may sleep tonight.

Service station. Late. I’m the only person in Costa. Cellophane rustles and squeaks as shelves are stacked. Cardboard is torn. Cups clatter.

Air has formed contours within a frozen puddle. The man walking behind me breaks his step, swings out a leg and smashes it with his trainer.

Snow on the fields. The lake, black and white, moving and still. Aching thighs. Coffee. Christmas Cake in January.

A black cat slips through the bars in my gate, rolls onto his back, presses his weight into the concrete, stretches and twists, pawing at the air, then rights himself, runs to the soil and begins to dig….

Ice has striped the grass, clinging to the edges and the spine of each blade.

The kitchen floor is scattered with pink tulip petals and stamens - their two long pockets fat with pollen. I’ll sweep them later.

Snow on my black fur shoulder. Rain on the tarmac.

The shadow of each terrace is thrown onto the red brick end of the opposite terrace: the precise slope of the roof; two, four, three chimney pots, an aerial.

There are autumn leaves left - those on the pavement dry and torn, those in the gutter turning to mulch.

The pink jasmine, months from flowering, has a crop of bright green leaves. The winter jasmine, dark green waxy stems almost leafless, pushes out bright yellow flowers.

There’s a half full toilet roll stuffed in the pocket of my passenger door. Mum was here.

Raindrop glisten in the crook by the buds of the cherry tree, in the curls of the wrought iron gate, in the knot holes in the fence.

When it comes to getting your own way in crowded car parks, your Landrover Discovery is very big, very powerful and has bull bars, but my car is cheap. Really cheap.

A burger bun has been wrapped round the driver’s door handle of my neighbours silver Astra. The sesame seeds are pale, perfect and distributed uniformly.

A man walks down the street, shirt and jumper, no coat. Crocus leaves spear through damp soil.

She’s had the day off school, is wearing a pale blue onesie, with belly fleece of a paler blue and lilac cuffs. It’s Stitch, she tells me flipping down a cartoon hood, smiling through sapling brown hair and zigzag felt teeth, a smile that is not quite the smile of a child.

Thirty years later I meet Aspergillus fumigatus in the Hacienda apartment of an Arabian scientist. A blue grey fungus with a taste for lung flesh. An old friend. 

Every Goal Counts, Every Child Matters

As I've been driving to projects over in Middleton I find myself passing a number of billboard adverts for Sky, bearing the words "Every Goal Matters".

In the old days, just over two years ago, those of us who worked in or around education had the phrase "Every Child Matters" drummed into us. It represented our duty to make sure the children we worked with were healthy and safe, enjoyed and achieved, made a positive contribution and achieved economic wellbeing.

At the time it seems glib - it had too much of the sound bite about it - and too much a statement of the absolutely bleeding obvious. It felt overly bureaucratic too - partly because some of the quangos around education dealt with it in clumsy way - I know because I was one of the people ticking the boxes.

Now, with everything that's happened over the past two years it seems strangely noble. And with education stripped to the bare bones, with families shattering under the burden of poverty and with disabled people under attack from all quarters, the idea that every goal matters seems offensive.

Every child matters. Every goal really doesn't.

Video: Reading at Manchester Book Fair

I hate watching myself... I haven't dared yet. But please do take a look at this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRV9isDbAZ0