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

[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/