Recently I was telling a friend that, although I am in my forties, I don’t use a regular moisturiser, just rosehip oil.
Kit interjected, somewhat indignantly, “Yes you do!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“What about that Dynamic Lifter stuff in that bottle you keep in the bathroom? It sounds like a sort of facelift in a bottle to me,” he reasoned.
“Not unless you’re a plant,” I replied, laughing, “It’s for Spike Milligan” (my cactus).
Kit gave me a long hard look and said, “Plants don’t have faces,” in a tone generally reserved for toddlers and the criminally insane (and I have it on good authority that the only difference between those two categories of people is age).
“It’s actually plant food,” I explained.
“Then why are you rubbing it into your face?!” he exclaimed, adding, “It smells like shit!”
“That’s because it has manure in it,” I admitted, “That’s why I keep it in the bathroom. And I don’t rub it on my face. Whatever made you think that?”
“It’s in the bathroom, where you do all that secret women’s business! But more to the point, now you’re telling me that despite not having faces, let alone mouths, plants actually eat. And what they actually eat is shit? How exactly do they do that?”
“Well, yes, they seem to like manure, among other things. Compost is good too. They eat by sucking the nutrients out of the dirt through tubes in their stems or trunks called xylem. Like sucking a milkshake up through a straw.”
“The food must be pretty runny to go up a straw,” Kit speculated, “And if it’s mostly shit (even worse than your termite patties haha!) that basically means that they eat by sucking diarrhoea up through a big straw.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“The world’s gone mad,” he muttered and, without a hint of irony, informed us that he was off to investigate the culinary potential of the local invertebrate population.