Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, and going to rough-arsed comprehensive schools, you were almost guaranteed to come across the humble Berberis Thunbergii (Japanese Berberis) bush at some point in your academic career.
The humble bush, pictured left, may have fallen foul of the modern health and safety steamroller, ensuring our little cotton-wrapped darlings can't hurt themselves (or their schoolmates) any more, but the Japanese Berberis bush is the stuff of legends, and I'm going to tell you why.
Quite apart from the sheer scale of this invasive shrub once it establishes a firm roothold, this thing could become a tactical weapon of mass destruction (or at least mass irritation) to many a young whippersnapper who fell foul of it.
Weedier kids (like myself) quite often found themselves roughly shoved into the thing. Not a problem in the winter because you were likely wearing a parka that could sustain an entire British Antarctic expedition in temperatures of -40 (actually, winters WERE like that when I was a kid, sadly not any more thanks to climate change). Those things were like armour and could easily shrug off a few prickles.
But in summer, the bush became an object of terror. Dumped into it wearing only a thin Tesco / M & S school shirt and even thinner trousers, you could end up in serious agony.
Worse still, the Berberis has an even more nasty side...let's take a closer look at those branches.
Those three-spiked thorns, in combination with a couple of well placed berries speared on the central thorn, became a ranged weapon. In fact most of the bushes at our school were usually stripped every summer of their thorns and berries, turned into spiked projectiles. Flung with just the right flick of the wrist against a schoolmate's thin trousered backside, they were the plant-based equivalent of a wasp sting and hurt like hell (you never, EVER threw these things at the girls, that was just NOT ON and would ensure a sound bashing at the hands of everyone else if you were stupid enough to break this cardinal rule).
Generations of kids through each school year seemed to intuitively inherit the knowledge that putting berry A on thorn B would equal weapon C. I can't actually recall a time when this didn't happen, even when we kids became obsessed with other playground pursuits like marbles, yo-yos or pushing Matchbox / Corgi cars around. (Mobile phones were the stuff of science fiction so we had to actually, y'know, play as kids).
I'm 100% sure that our school wasn't the only place this happened so if you've got a specific vivid memory of growing up with one of these damned things in your school, please do drop a comment or a tweet my way.
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