January 2021. In a conservatory in a house in Basingstoke, there lived a small indoor succulent plant. It may have known it belonged to the Plant Kingdom but as for the rest of its classification, it didn’t have a clue and neither did its humans. It was happily living its life. It got watered occasionally and rubbed against by the cat and all was good.
Then one day some strange humans came along and they wrapped all the conservatory furniture up in cardboard and took it away. Its real-plant-friends got carted out to the garage one by one until it was left alone on the cane table with two small things in pots that looked like plants but were not plants. It was the Day of Terror. The miserable and lonely little succulent was scooped up with the insensible pot-plant-pretenders and buried deep inside a cardboard box, covered with swathes of white paper and everything went dark.
Time passed. A long time. The sort of time humans would call a year. The box moved around a lot during this time and there were strange noises from outside interspersed with periods of silence and stillness. Nobody came to water the little plant or talk to it or rub against it and it grew very tired and shrivelled and closed all its thick leaves up in despair. Then there came a day when there was a lot of fiddling and cutting and scraping and all the items above the little succulent’s head were removed. Unbelievably, the humans from the Basingstoke house appeared and they peered closely at the plant and made talk that sounded like oooh and ohmygod and bloodyhellthemiddleofit’sstillgreen.
One of them carefully pulled off dessicated leaves and delicious water slid down into the pot around the succulent’s roots.
This is truly what you call clinging to life……..