Field Study's Man in E11 is an anarcho-syndicalist Frankenstein miscreant - so there!

The disappearance of Field Study's Man in E11 is probably only of concern to me. There is little evidence of anyone else searching for him and I have struggled to find or invent reasons as to why anyone should, even remotely, give a damn, however there is always no-one nowhere. I had an idea, whilst writhing in a morass of tadpoles at the margins of 'allotmental' pond life; I should reassert his status as a public menace. The field student's beginnings were derived from a Situationist tactic that whenever he was asked for directions (which he frequently was) he would point people in the wrong direction. I fear he has lost himself in his own misdirections; damned to be going the wrong way forever - 'meta-psycho-dis-orienteering' ad infinitum. Don't, whatever you do, put that term in a search engine! I shall keep the bad faith that the pestiferous field student can be found and will be found.

I re-emerged from the pond and started looking for something to blame on the field student. It did not take long before there were signs of a potentially malign presence I could attribute to the connivance of the errant explorer. Be warned, 'he' is out there perverting the course of nature.

One of the first signs of his perversions (on the allotment) was to be found at a broad bean bed. After such a mild and moist winter I am expecting many pests and diseases to manifest themselves vigorously and destructively this growing season. In some more gloomy and pessimistic moments I have doubted we will succeed in 'growing' much at all this year. If there is one thing we really don't need this year, it is some aberrant figment of my imagination stirring up dis-ease and pestiferous-nous in the nooks, crannies and niches of the allotment. As I slipped about the muddy paths between the raised beds I noticed something not quite right about the beans. Something or things had assiduously nibbled at the edges of every leaf of every bean plant in the bed. A few slips and slides on the rain soaked paths to the other bean beds confirmed they were similarly afflicted. What had done this and done it with such philatelic edgy precision?

Protective netting still intact suggested the beans had not been pecked at by pigeons. I did not find any mini- beasties in the act of nibbling nor any lurking in the recesses of the newly forming leaves. I dug a little into the soil beneath some of the plants; no grubs or larvae to be found there.Other plants close to the bean bed were similarly afflicted by a nibbled leaf edge condition. Soon it seemed that every plant on site had it's leaves nibbled. Were the leaves being nibbled before my very eyes? Was the pest responsible for this invisible - even under the most powerful of microscopes? I was gripped by a nibbling fever. Every plant was going to disappear from the outside edges in. This had to be the dastardly work of the field student. 

I did my best to follow the procedure set out by Field Study International for the investigation of a 'scene' and a 'bean-scene' at that. The sky groaned and rained harder, as if to punish me for the pun and it continued to rain heavily all the way home - every drop being a sign of disapproval at the conception of this 'bean scene' report. I got home drenched and racked by 'nibble fever'. As I dried out, the fever waned and I gathered my faculties sufficiently well enough to be able to do some research into the broad bean scene I encountered at the allotment. 

The field student is a shapeshifter. I considered the possibility that he had, in full grown (all 72Kg of him) male human guise, gone about on his hands and knees nibbling at the beans but there would have been other signs and damage associated with the nibbled leaf edges. It was more likely, in my mind at least, that he had adopted the form of another more delicate creature better evolved to be able to inflict the damage. 

My gardening books did not turn up any pests and/or diseases that specifically afflicts the edges of leaves in such a nibbled form. I reluctantly began an online search by typing 'nibbled edges of leaves'into the search engine and arrived at two probabilities - leaf cutter bees and/or bean weevils. I decided to get carried away by the possibility of leaf cutter bees, or rather, thee leaf cutter bee, for this entity offered more challenges to my perceptions about the natural order and how it might be subverted.

LEAF CUTTER BEE - Megachile centuncularis and Megachile willughbiella are the two most common species in the UK. Both species are solitary and it is this characteristic which lead me to a conjecture that Field Study's Man in E11 had perverted their natural characteristics by galvanizing them into collective action. This explained the widespread and consistent affliction of the leaves. The field student had, I imagined, orchestrated an abominable insurrection by simultaneously bending the little minds of the solitary bees, resulting in an anarcho-syndicalist  onslaught on the broad bean patch. Was this anarchy exacted upon us just for the sake of upsetting our assumed authority over the allotment plots? If the field student had developed leaf cutter bee thought/impulse control (to such drastic effect) what else was he capable of?

The pages of my investigators notebook were torn between researching further into the life of the leaf cutter bee or the historical lineage of anarchist thought which leads (conformists as myself) to William Goodwin, the father of Mary Shelley. Goodwin wrote, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) which expresses a communitarian vision of a decentralized society in which the human denizens are definitively perfectible. The field student had possibly (or rather, impossibly) taken on the developments of  Proudhon, Stirner and Bakunin and numerous other extreme individualists, including Kropotkin. Leaf cutter bees don't necessarily do much harm to the plants they nibble for pieces of leaves to make nests. No, no, no! That's a rational distraction. Mary Shelley and the historically dismembered and exhumed parts of a load of old anarchists; there's got to be a story there! Leaf cutter bees, according to the US Agricultural Research Service are twenty times more efficient at pollination than honeybees. I gave up trying make sense of the mystery. I was exhausted. I fell asleep.

I was visited in the dreamy night by a reconstructed vision of anarchism in the form of a 'Frankenstein' monster. I was compelled, despite the hour and darkness, to make haste back to the plot and grab me a pitchfork with which I would seek out the abominable field student and do for him once and for all. That was the intention. I was sure I was close. When I arrived at the allotment I realised I had cycled stark naked all the way from Leytonstone (to Chingford). I was enraged at the humiliation un-heaped upon me by the field student.I grabbed a pitchfork and screeched a blood curdling screech like a feral fox. 

Then he was there! A spectral assemblage of every Frankenstein movie character I'd ever seen. 

'Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.'

'Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master - obey!' *

I thrust the pitchfork into him but he was immaterial, just a projection, a trick of the moonlight. Primal Dawn and her pink light fingers began to tickle at my naked parts and I tried to undress the scarecrow to dress myself but it was too late - too early - and there was nothing for it but for me to dig myself into a hole in the ground and wait for the next night. I felt the field student's leaden footsteps on and above me. I'd lost him, again. Even in this chthonic state the tickling continued but the tickles were not those of Primal Dawn but a community of pea and bean weevils - Sitonia lineatus (Linnaeus, 1758) - mistakenly nibbling bits from my edges. 

* Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. (1818)