People are odd

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I know I must have said this many times before… Just a couple of hundred yards down our road there is a sweet chestnut tree by the entrance to one house, and every year chestnuts fall into the road. For the first few years there were only a few (it’s a young tree), and the last couple of years they were mainly too small to be worth the trouble, but this year there seems to be a bumper crop! They are raining down into the road and the nuts are a really good size. Little One (a born hunter-gatherer, it seems) discovered that the best way to get the nuts out of their spiky shells without injury is simply to roll them under your shoe, whereupon they readily pop out. Last night as we walked home we collected a big bag full! This morning when I walked that way a whole lot more had fallen, so of course I stopped to collect those before they all got run over and squashed by passing cars. As I was picking some up, a man drove out of a nearby driveway and slowed down to say ‘Leave some for the squirrels’. I nodded and smiled at him. But seriously – apart from the fact that grey squirrels are an invasive alien species, and the fact that they are already fat from gorging themselves on the hazel nuts (we didn’t get any of those, because they ate the lot before they were ripe), and the fact that there are hundreds of chestnuts and I’m only collecting the big ones – if he’s that bothered about the ‘poor’ squirrels, why doesn’t he sweep the nuts off the road and leave them in his garden or something instead of just driving over them in his car and grinding them to dust?? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2023.