It seems to me that the best thing about hiking in the British Isles

[conuly]

is that there's no poison ivy. I thought about telling a hapless fic-writer this (or, rather, that they ought to include two lines about how their character was hiking in North America on vacation) but I couldn't figure a way to do it constructively, so instead I didn't do that and my brain spent the entire rest of the day coming up with absurd scenarios for "Help, help, I somehow got trapped as the villain in a fanfic and nobody britpicked this!"

I don't know why I went with villainy, but it helped pass the time when I [redacted for being gross body stuff]. It was even more fun than my usual backup daydream scenario, "I'm the protagonist in the story and I've decided to embrace radical honesty about all the batshittery that goes on around here, so strap in", but that might be the novelty factor.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Excellent premises both. I hope the reason for distraction resolves itself. Also "britpicked" is terrific.

[conuly]

I didn't invent the phrase :)

[gwydion]

We were walking through the woods in, I think Auvergne (mountainy bit of France) on our way to a lake to swim in summer '83. Either my sister or I asked my father's friends if there was poison ivy. (In our defense, lots of poison ivy in the woods at home and we were drilled from old enough to understand words to spot and avoid it and we didn't know better).

Their eyes got big and one of them exclaimed in alarm, "You mean Poison ivy is Real?"

There followed and interesting exchange wherein they discovered poison ivy wasn't a scare the foreigners joke, and we learned they were thinking poison like snake bite, not poison like terrible annoying rash.

[conuly]

They've got that awful hogweed, so they still win. Or "win", I guess.

[oursin]

Giant hogweed is an invasive non=native species: 'It is illegal to plant giant hogweed or cause it to spread, and there are restrictions on growing, cultivating, selling and transporting it'.

[conuly]

Yeah, but you've still got it. Poison ivy would be invasive but I did a quick google before I posted and it looks like nobody's been dumb enough to plant it and it hasn't snuck in some other way.

[greenwoodside]

It's surely just a matter of time though! There's 70 million of us, it just needs one person with a trowel, a plant and a bad idea.

I was trying to walk along an unmaintained public footpath last month, and got my ass kicked by brambles like the ones round Sleeping Beauty's castle. Definitely don't need poison ivy joining in the party!

[conuly]

it just needs one person with a trowel, a plant and a bad idea.

That's how we got starlings.

[full_metal_ox]

“Wouldn’t it be cool if every bird species mentioned in Shakespeare inhabited the United States?”

[conuly]

Even by the standards of wtf it’s so wtf

[full_metal_ox]

They've got that awful hogweed, so they still win. Or "win", I guess.

Except that we in Yankistan now have it, too: https://www.fltimes.com/news/giant-hogweed-and-wild-parsnip-do-not-touch/article_0f4abdf6-da75-5d36-b5e2-686b6c78706a.html

(I can vouch for a ~5-foot specimen that sprouted on the grounds of the Dayton (OH) Mall bus hub, during intermittent bouts of construction groundbreaking punctuated by weather and quarantine.)

[conuly]

Who would plant such an awful thing on purpose? Or did it swim over?

[full_metal_ox]

It’s an old and familiar story. Victorian Englishmen visiting the Caucasus thought that a person-sized Queen Anne’s Lace would be a capital thing to have in the garden; early twentieth-century New Yorkers agreed, and the species radiated out from there.
https://nyis.info/species/giant-hogweed/

[minoanmiss]

Today I learned something!

[conuly]

Always go overseas before hiking.

[thewayne]

A woman I know was burning cut shrub in Virginia, accidentally burned some poison ivy and got a lungful. Messed her up a bit.

I've been fortunate in not having encountered the stuff.

[conuly]

Ooof.

[elisi]

"Help, help, I somehow got trapped as the villain in a fanfic and nobody britpicked this!"
LOL. Ah, the lack of Brit-picking in SO MANY FICS. Although it's fascinating to see the things that... people don't realise are not universal? Just read a story where someone in Edwardian London was talking about wishing people 'happy holidays' and my brain glitched. Almost everything else was fine, more or less. ^_^

[conuly]

My recent peeve, which has shown up in multiple fics over the past few months when I don't think I saw it before, is people from settings (or isolationist cultures with limited knowledge of modern technology) with no space race and also no radio communications jargon using the phrase "Earth to $Name".

Okay, I haven't actually gone ahead and confirmed that this is not something we can expect to hear prior to the Space Race or the fantasy equivalent, but it sure sounds like it to me, so why.

[elisi]

LOL. I have not come across this, but I hear ya. It's the... lack of critical thinking?

[conuly]

(That's not brit-picking, but it still annoys.)

[movingfinger]

The midges and nettles they do have are almost as bad. But IMO poison ivy and poison oak are worse!

[full_metal_ox]

Nettles are at least good to eat if you defuse them by drying or flash-boiling (and are supposed to taste like spinach in high definition; they’re on my culinary bucket list.)

[spiralsheep]

Only the Scots have midges because Hadrian's Wall keeps them out of England. FACT! ;-)

[conuly]

I thought that was Saint Patrick?

[spiralsheep]

No, I'm reasonably sure he banished poison ivy from Ireland, which is why they don't have it. QED.

[conuly]

I thought that was Batman.

[spiralsheep]

Hmm, isn't Batman the one who terrorises people at night in Point Pleasant, West Virginia?

[conuly]

I thought that was you!