OPINION

Whenever I start my chainsaw I think the same thought. I have no control over it.

In goes the noise of the chainsaw revving and out pops the thought. It concerns a friend called
Pete who went on a one-day chainsaw safety course. The morning session, he said, consisted of a slide show of chainsaw accidents. The afternoon session was poorly attended.

I have a similar slot-machine response to starting my lawn mower. As I haul on the rope I unfailingly remember Jack Bodell. He was a British heavyweight boxer from the time of my childhood, who retired from the ring after losing two toes to his mower. And then I think of Fred Titmus, a cricketer who went swimming in the Caribbean and allowed his foot to brush against the boat’s propeller. He returned to the cricket field a year later on wooden toes.

These reflex thoughts demonstrate the capacity of the human mind to foresee danger. In this they are both curse and blessing. Blessing because they may save us from injury or death. Curse because they induce fear and fear makes cowards of us all.

I have been having my chainsaw thought a lot of late, because I am turning some big old pines into firewood. The pines were felled last summer and have lain on the hillside since. They remain sound but the slow agents of decay are already at work. Prime among these are the subjects of today’s column: slaters.

I was brought up to call them woodlice but whatever you call them you have to admire them. According to detailed scientific research I conducted on Wikipedia five minutes ago, they’ve been around for more than a hundred million years. They saw the dinosaurs come and go. Indeed they dined on them. For woodlice are detritivores, the eaters of remnants, who make no distinction between vegetable matter and flesh. They turn it all to soil.

There are thought to be at least 5000 species of woodlouse, several thousand of which remain unnamed by science, and there are few places on earth they haven’t colonised. They are not insects, but crustaceans. They are distantly related to prawns and lobsters and they still have gills, which is why you find them only in damp dark places and why they scuttle when exposed to the sun. If their gills dry out they die of asphyxiation.

On my pines they have burrowed between the bark and the timber proper. There whole colonies feed and breed and die and eat their dead and go on going on. But then I arrive with a chainsaw.

I dig the chainsaw’s blade into the top of a log. Sawdust flies, a piece of bark breaks off and suddenly, just inches from the lethal churning blade, are a hundred woodlice, their world blown open. They have no concept of what’s happened. They know only that they must escape the hated light. They dash for cover. And some of them run towards the saw.

‘No, you fools,’ I bellow, ‘are you blind or something?’ But of course they are.

The kind thing would be to stop sawing. But I know from experience that if I do they will take refuge in the cut I’ve already made, so then I’ll have to choose between starting again and genocide, and genocide always wins. Besides, some sense of adjacent violence, wind and noise makes most of them turn away from disaster at the last moment and within a few seconds they are gone to some dark place where they can collapse with nervous exhaustion and say ‘I nearly died’ and hug each other and… but no. That’s us with our big brains and consequent timidity.

The woodlice have no notion of the extent of the threat to their wellbeing. If they survive they learn no lessons. They just go back to calmly doing what they did before, eating detritus, reproducing and breathing steadily though their gills. No future, no past, no thoughts, no plans. Just going on going on.

And if I, for all my foresight and my caution, were to slip while chainsawing, inadvertently amputate a limb and bleed to death there on my barren paddock beside my fallen pines, the woodlice, quite without malice, would find me within hours, burrow out of the light underneath me and begin the long and useful process of returning every part of me, including that thrumming slot machine I think of as my mind, to soil. Just as they’ve been doing these hundred million years. It’s thought for food.