Joe Bennett: The plot thickened the more I thought about it

It was a mystery how and why the stick insect came to be there. Photo / Getty Images

Now is the season of mysteries. Christmas morning and there was a stick insect on the kettle.

I mistook it for a sprig of vegetation, which is of course how stick insects get by in this world, but when I went to flick it away I saw that the sprig had legs. The beast was an inch and a half long and bright green.

Its provenance was clear. There was a pot plant on the bench and I had left the kettle alongside it overnight and the stick insect must have migrated from one to the other. What wasn't clear was why. Why would a stick insect forsake vegetation it could both eat and hide on, for a surface of steel and plastic on which it could do neither?

We tend to think that we human beings have got the world sussed. Even if we personally don't know all the answers we believe there's someone out there who does.
Well, it seems that nobody knows how stick insects make decisions. All I could find on the internet was an academic paper on the consciousness of insects in general, which suggested that insects have egos - hardly surprising given that about 60 per cent of their DNA is identical to ours. But on insect decision-making, nothing.

A further mystery was how the stick insect got to the pot plant in the first place. Stick insects can't fly and anyway the kitchen window has an insect screen.
I presume, therefore, that it walked in. But if so, did it wait by the door until the opportunity arose?
And did it then dash over the threshold at its top speed of approximately 0.1km/h, trek across the vast expanse of the kitchen floor, scale the north face of the drawers and take refuge in the only available vegetation on the bench, all without being spotted or trodden on? It seems improbable. And if it hitched a ride on clothing, say, or a visiting dog, how did it transfer from host to pot plant without meeting death or serious injury? Mystery piled on mystery.

Alternatively was it possible that the insect came with the pot plant when I bought it and that it had been living with me unseen for months? According to Wikipedia, stick insects live plenty long enough.
Furthermore - and this seemed apt for Christmas - they can reproduce by parthenogenesis, otherwise known as virgin birth. So perhaps the stick insect could raise a family on my pot plant. Perhaps it already had.

While I was musing thus the stick insect remained on the kettle. I admired its equanimity. If it was upset to find itself exposed on an inhospitable and inedible substrate, it didn't show it. What Whitman said of larger animals seemed to hold true of stick insects:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

I don't know if stick insects believe in God. If they do I wonder what this one made of my two giant hands suddenly darkening its world and folding around it and lifting it off the kettle and returning it to the pot plant.

If the equivalent happened to me I'd be like those rural types from Kansas who are beamed aboard spacecraft to be interrogated by aliens with probes: I'd want to tell the tale.

But not the stick insect. It accepted divine intervention as equably as it accepted its absence. It just settled back into the welcoming foliage of the pot plant with no evidence of either grief or pleasure. I left it there to get on with life while I got on with Christmas.

A friend came round shortly afterwards to help me celebrate the birthday of the son of God.
En route to the drinks cabinet I led him - the friend, that is, not the son of God - to the pot plant to show off the stick insect.
I looked. Dave looked. I rummaged in the foliage. Dave rummaged in the foliage. Ladies and gentlemen, the stick insect had gone.
And though Dave denied it, it was clear that he did not believe the stick insect had ever been there at all. It is the season of mysteries.