Last night my mum came round to help me release the ladybirds. We’d been messaging abstractly for some time about our parallel plant issues – I’d noticed small clusters of what looked like cottonwool or bath foam, collecting at the base of the leaves on my favourite plant. This is not just any plant, I should explain, this is a plant that’s more of a fairytale, more of a fable. Its leaves are large and sprawling and, after teasing for some time with finger-length pink buds, it will flower at dusk, each bud opening like a huge water-lily and emitting a deep, sweet smell like expensive vanilla. By morning the flowers are dead, rubbery and obscene, dangling limply from the stalk. The problem, my mum told me, was mealybugs, attacking my plant – and there was only one real way to get rid of them.
The mealybugs arrived at a moment in my life when I was trying to push back time. I’d never wanted to before. Don’t roll your eyes friends, yes I wear old-fashioned clothes, but swishing around in a 70s dress doesn’t mean I also want to return to lechery and power cuts. No, my focus today is on gently pressing technology away, just for a little while. You see, my daughter has just started in Year 6, the final year of primary school, and last week came home vibrating with a particular kind of agony at the realisation that “everybody else” had a mobile phone. I was not prepared for this conversation – I’d assumed this was a bridge we would cross (drag ourselves across, bleeding, “Save yourself!”) when she moved to secondary school, but I gave it a good go, I think.
I maintain the belief that many of the problems that arise when young people have phones, like bullying, poor mental health and quotidian acts of surveillance, have their roots in real life and should be managed there, seriously, rather than focusing exclusively on banning phones, or putting pressure on parents to fight it out at home. Until we have fixed the structures (including failing mental health services), the politics (like tech’s financial incentive to keep children on social media) and our own unhealthy relationships with our phones, I think the problems are likely to mutate rather than disappear. The issue is not just the phone, it’s the world it reflects. But until that world shifts, my personal preference is to keep my kids off phones as long as possible.
I came to that decision a while ago, when watching a little girl on public transport scroll blankly through a long WhatsApp thread, when I had the sense of time falling stone by stone from a cliff. I asked the school for a bit of guidance. We had a lovely chat, punctuated by the teacher’s hooting laughter when I mildly suggested I wished I’d been in touch with the parents of her classmates over the summer, so we could have all decided to stand firm against phones for a bit together. Would never have worked, the teacher said, because all families are different and, also, it’s too hard not to give in.
I told my daughter none of this, of course. Instead, I gave her the headlines (excluding the recent one, that only 3% of UK 12-year-olds are without a smartphone), and talked about peer pressure, and kicked the expensive can a little further down the road.
So the ladybirds, an ancient solution to a primordial problem, came at the perfect time. We had shopped around, eventually purchasing online a sachet of pupae and another of live bugs. They were not cheap, and I briefly bemoaned the fact I didn’t collect a handful when I had the chance. Earlier this year, staying in Somerset with my family, we were greeted by a “loveliness” of ladybirds writhing around on the windowpane. At the time I wrote about how I was suspicious of that collective noun because it sounded as if they had named themselves and also about the visceral horror of too many adorable things. My mum cut open the first packet, the live bugs, and we both stifled our screams. Poor bastards, trafficked to the suburbs in a metallic bag, bought solely to eat, then die, La Grande Bouffe.
They were babies, they looked like microscopic alligators – one scurried itchily across my hand, another up my mother’s sleeve. We tried not to scream as we directed them on to the leaves, in the direction of the cottonwool-like bugs. Then we opened the bag of larvae – the eggs were hidden, snuggled perhaps, in a handful of sawdust – and hung it on the plant. We were lightly hysterical, a little livid – I had expected some drama, I think, the ladybirds zooming towards the mealybugs as if pigeons, released. Instead, as is correct I suppose, for olden days acts, it occurred with a whimper, slowly.
This morning I went to check on the guys with a sense of guilt and trepidation, but I couldn’t see a single one and the mealybugs were just as foamy as before. How long does it take, to rewind, and get everything right? I felt like the old lady who swallowed a spider to catch the fly she’d digested in an earlier verse. She swallowed a spider to catch the fly to eat the mealybugs, to pretend things were just this simple. That’s why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she’ll die?
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
