A couple of days ago I was in the park, walking down to the fountain to wash my face after a run, when a green insect fell out of a tall tree and landed at my feet. At first I thought it was a cicada, but its head was the wrong shape, so, being no kind of entomologist, I’ll just have to call it a beetle. Bullet shaped, a couple of inches long, iridescent emerald green, a posh-looking creature indeed — and dying, apparently. Its legs twitched and folded across its abdomen, and then it lay still. Thinking the impact had killed it, I scooped it onto a leaf and took it back to the walled area where I had left my water and sword bag. I spent some time looking at it. The plates of its carapace were like a perfect, minute suit of armour, the green shading to copper on each one. Daubs of orange, looking for all the world as if they were applied with a brush, decorated the join between its belly and wing case.

I did my tai chi, going back to admire my insect between routines. Gorgeous though it was, and much as I was looking forward to photographing it at home, I still felt a bit leery of it. I’m not very good with insects as a rule. Their automatism gives me the shivers. Oddly, marine invertebrates don’t upset me at all, perhaps because like most people the first of their kind that I met were prawns in stir fry, and it’s hard to be scared of your food. But land insects are another matter. The squashy ones nauseate me — I can’t cope with grubs and caterpillars at all — but nearly all insects can make me feel uncomfortable. As to beetles, they’re the insects with which I get along best — I’m even enthusiastic about them, when they’re alive — but when they’re dead and lying upside down they start to look unpleasantly totemic. Just as their life was a somewhat ambiguous thing, their dead state is also ambiguous. Insects are capable of remarkable transitions between states of life, death and dormancy. There’s something of the undead about them. With its legs folded, my green beetle looked like a six-limbed knight on a tombstone, or a metallic mummy — the sort of corpse that might very well get up and walk in the night.

So that when my little green knight started waving his little green legs and frantically excreting little bright green pellets from his pointed rear end, I wasn’t entirely surprised. He dislodged himself from the leaf, fell off the wall and landed on my bag, where he did some more green poo. Now right way up, he — as a knight, the beetle was now “he” in my mind — stood still for a little while, displaying a wing case the shape of a long pointed shield, with one orange daub on either shoulder. Then he did a little tap dance with his four front legs, as if he were a Monty Python knight getting ready for a chorus scene, and after this preparation launched himself, blurringly fast, into the air. He settled in another tree. Hopefully he hung on a bit more carefully this time.

I wonder sometimes how much inspiration early humans took from animals. Did we acquire the idea of armour from beetles, weaving from birds, trap-making (and lace making) from spiders? Would we have thought of suction cups if octopuses didn’t have them? Would we have thought of tap dancing if beetles didn’t…?

Going by what I was able to find online, I think it was this beetle from the buprestidae family, known as jewel beetles or metallic woodboring beetles.