Finally, after literally years of waiting, it’s the summer holidays again. As usual we’re spending it at our house in the north, where the weather has thus far been an uncomfortable 29 degrees, which means that two sweaty days working in the garden has made me a beacon for the midges, mosquitos and horse-flies (aka gadflies) to take their sumptuous morsels of Jon.

And so, with much greenery of different varities and obscure Latin names drowning my field of vision, I’ve been thinking a bit about grass.

I have always thought that grass is a weed. I have yet to check this out, as I do not have a computer nearby (this entry has been written using the traditional method of pen and paper, to be transfered at a later date), so in order not to have wasted this hitherto titilating insight into my life I shall just presume it to be so.

Anyway, in Swedish the word grass is”gräs”; the word for weed is “ogräs”, using the prefix “o”, which basically means “un”; thus ogräs means ungrass.

What struck me about this Orwellian building of words was that if you take gräs, and plant it purposefully in a well-kept border of exotic plants and flowers, does it become ogräs? Or is it still gräs? Or is it both gräs and ogräs?

I wonder, then, if there are tempestuous debates in the forums of Swedish horticultural sites, where ogräs supporters vehemently brandish the followers of Gräs as simple-minded, asinine sheep-shaggers, whilst the gräs clan mock their nemeses as self-involved, ostentatious fools.

I wonder, also, if I should be spending less time in the sun.

N.B. According to Wikipedia, a weed is an unwanted plant, which means that my theory about grass is wrong; however, on the same page, Cannabis is stated as a possible weed, so I’m not sure I should believe anything from this particular wiki entry.