Spot the phoney

It’s not difficult to become disillusioned at the unrelenting ugliness of our built environment. We could be anywhere in the (western) world circa 2006 I guess, it's like a cruel god has taken a cloning stamp along the main road and repeated the same combination of tilt slab supastores/billboards over and over. But every now and then you find a speck of gold that makes it all okay. One to look out for when driving north out of Brisbane is a certain palm tree of significance. Passing though Windsor, Lutwyche, Kedron, if somehow you manage not to run your car into the nearest power pole out of despair, look to your right. Next to the abandoned 1970s Pizza Hut you will see an amazing sight. One of these palm trees is an imposter.

The genius of nature is at work behind this wonderful disguise for a mobile phone tower. Being a neo-luddite I eschew the mobile telephone, but if I had one, I would immediately plant it in my back yard and watch it grow into one of these beautiful trees. For surely they have learned to replicate themselves. The fruiting body of this example has been fertilised by millions of messages from mobile phones all over the world ensuring the diversity of the gene pool. In a bizarre twist, the phones have used the humans as agents for their sexual reproduction – you've heard of 'phone sex'.

Ripe and ready, the phonelings drop to the ground to be collected by hungry humans always demanding the freshest, fanciest phones. Sadly, they get smaller every year, suggesting that the population is under threat. Or is natural selection playing its part here? From Palm to palm the cunning phone is then dispersed far and wide waiting for the day when it is discarded or lost and returned to the soil to begin all over again.

I hope they put a Vegetation Protection Order on it.