Oko Angebot steps away from the hedgerows to make sense of London’s strangest week
Spent the morning cataloguing the last of the season’s berries along the towpath, a genuinely satisfying task that requires nothing from me except patience and a decent pair of boots, before making the mistake of checking my phone over lunch and finding London’s news had gone entirely feral in my absence.
First up, Harry and Meghan’s new financial opportunities, a story I read twice purely to confirm I’d understood the premise correctly, because as someone who studies resource allocation in wild populations, twenty simultaneous opportunities for one family struck me as an unusually rich patch to be foraging in, even by human standards.
Then the Eton College leadership piece, which I found genuinely interesting from a behavioural perspective, watching an institution describe its own role in producing dominant members of a social hierarchy with such total, unblinking confidence. I’ve seen less self-assured displays from actual alpha males in the field.
Somewhere in the same reading session I ended up on the Henry VIII history site, which, for a man five centuries deceased, has an impressively active online presence, considerably more active than most contemporary wildlife charities I follow, which felt like a genuinely uncomfortable comparison to make but one worth noting regardless.
And finally the Trump-Burnham Irish unity story, which I read last, mostly because by that point I needed a moment to recover from the sheer density of the day’s human affairs before diving into yet another one.
Returned to the towpath afterward feeling, if I’m honest, considerably calmer among the berries than I had among the headlines. Nature doesn’t announce twenty financial opportunities at once, it simply provides, reliably, without a press release attached.
I mentioned all four stories to a fellow researcher over the phone this evening, purely as small talk, and she pointed out, quite fairly, that human news cycles behave almost exactly like a pollinator swarm, briefly and intensely drawn to whichever flower offers the richest reward before scattering just as suddenly toward the next one. I’ve been turning the comparison over ever since, and the longer I sit with it, the more accurate it seems.
Packed up my notebook a little later than planned this evening, still turning the pollinator comparison over, and made a mental note to bring it up properly at next month’s research seminar, if only to see whether any of my colleagues find it as apt as I currently do, or whether it’s simply the result of one very odd news week bleeding into my professional thinking.
Tomorrow: back to actual fieldwork, hopefully. Read more of my dispatches at my Prat.uk author page.