Sting

Nettles growing tall in the sunshine amidst the Fenham Carr woodland.

I was four years old the first and last time I got stung by one of these, on a school trip to Sandwell Valley. I'd got a packed lunch, wellies, a little duffle coat and a head full of advice from my mother on what to do in every imaginable situation from losing my crisps right through to getting caught in a sudden and unexpected nuclear strike. The one thing that she hadn't thought to tell me, on a bright early summer day in a green patch of the West Midlands, was that there were plants out there waiting to inject poison into me if I touched them.

As it turned out, there were quite a lot of them along the route of our school walk, but I only needed the brush of one against the back of my hand to realise that they hurt. A lot. My natural reaction - apart from blubbering a lot - was to rub and scratch at the stung area; which, of course, made it a lot worse. The skin on my hand turned red at first, and then yellow. It throbbed and prickled all the way through our walk, and for the duration of our tour round Sandwell Valley Farm, making me utterly miserable. Even seeing Adam Phillips, the lad I sat next to, nearly getting gored by a longhorn cow failed to cheer me up as it should have done.

When I got home, I explained to my mother as calmly as possible that a plant had tried to kill me. She frowned, and waited while I described to her what the nettle looked like. It didn't elicit the sympathetic response I honestly felt I was entitled to. Instead, she replied, "Well why didn't you rub a dock leaf against the sting?" as if this kind of botanical expertise came intuitively to all four-year-olds, and I was letting the side down. No ice cream for me or my gravely wounded appendage. Instead I was left to ruminate on the experiences of the day, and on this jagged-leafed nemesis that had come from nowhere to forever cast a blight on sunny gardens and hedgerows.

Make no mistake, from that day on me and nettles were the worst of enemies. Other lads in my class received their first stings too, and we all learned to be wary of these devil-plants. But as the years passed, and our bravado as boys grew, it stopped being acceptable to shy away from them. If we were playing footy in the park and the ball flew into a nettle-bed, no-one could show any reluctance to go in and retrieve the ball. Indeed, the situation would usually end with all of us rushing straight into the thick of the plants, arms above our heads, yelling "AAAAARGH!" as if the noise would somehow disorient the nettles, and kicking randomly at the undergrowth until the ball emerged. We looked like an interpretive dance troupe re-enacting the D-Day landings, and more than once we even attracted an audience applauding our daring attempt at open-air theatre.

Even today, I was cautious in taking photographs. Given my natural clumsiness, I knew only too well that I could easily drop my camera right in amongst the nettles, and face a stingey dilemma. I may be a lot older, but I'm no more fond of them. Still, if I ever get stung again, I'll be ready with dock leaves and ice-cream aplenty.