Slightly exaggerated, this describes one of my problems with field trips: what you do with what you bring back.
I am Gordon’s garden. It’s high time I had my say:
I have a nervous breakdown when he goes out for a day.
I’m usually not religious, but at times like this I pray
That, if he brings back fossils, he won’t chuck them all away.
I’m fed up being just a blooming fossil mausoleum;
He throws away enough old rocks to build a coliseum.
Why doesn’t he display them where his friends can come and see ’em,
Arrange them all in cabinets, or lend to a museum?
My slugs and snails and worms and moles are puzzled by the sight
Of ammonites in Hastings Beds – they know that can’t be right.
There’s brachiopods and bivalves, bits of strange evaporite,
And igneous rocks, and limestones. Oh, and one large coprolite!
It’s not myself I’m thinking of, it’s people who’ll come later:
They’ll fork me over, break me up with spade or cultivator,
And dig up crazy fossil finds, not just the odd potater –
Enough to start a heart attack or blow their dura mater.
How can I stop him doing this? He seems a hopeless case.
Perhaps, if global warming rates begin to gather pace,
The Arun and its feeder streams will flood me and displace
His mixed-up reject fossils to some far more distant place?
Then I could get a life, let my ambitions rip:
Grow cabbages and beans, stop looking like a tip,
Forget this phase he’s going through – maybe it’s just a blip?
I’d be a happy garden then – until his next field trip. . .
(For subsequent developments, see Gordon’s garden, again.)