Let there be Light...

Having been away from home for quite a while over the middle of summer, I was fully expecting handwritten notes all over my post when I got home, requesting that I do some urgent pruning if I wanted to keep getting letters delivered; oddly, this hadn't happened - I think we may have a different postman - but a combination of a lot of rain followed by sunshine had resulted in the garden  looking more like a jungle, and the honeysuckle rampaging wildly all over the window.

Inside, it was like the Twilight Zone. The living room was more a living gloom, with nary a ray of sunlight penetrating the foliage. Think 'Sleeping Beauty's castle'....

After a week in the dark - I mean, is it normal to need to put the light on at nine in the morning in summer? - I decided that the time had come to do some chopping back, bees and scented flowers notwithstanding. Of course, as soon as I made the decision, it rained, and the entire thing became a dripping, sodden mass.
Job postponed.

This morning, with the sun shining and having made an early start anyway to take the car in to the garage for much-needed attention, the task of  'hunt the window' could be put off no longer. Secateurs in hand, I made a start, and was soon covered in twiggy bits, leaves and the occasional snail. The more I chopped into the overgrowth, the more snails I found, clinging to the undersides of leaves or swarming up tendrils. When I reached the window at last, I discovered that I had been demolishing a veritable snail hotel, as small reproachful eyestalks peered at me from the corners of the frame. Several of them slithered off into darker corners, in an obvious huff.
Standing in a mound of chopped-off foliage, I figured I'd upset them enough for now, and started to gather it up to put it in the bin. A snail waved at me from the bundle in my hands... so now I had to go through the whole pile and extract the residents.

Now, the bin is full, and there is light in the living room again.
But the snails are not happy with me.

Things go better with Shell

Driving down the road to the garden centre, to buy some sticks to use in making a game about migration (don’t ask, it’d take longer than I have to explain), I had the strangest feeling I wasn’t alone. Glancing to my left, I realised there was something on the passenger-side window. Somewhere in the night, an adventurous snail had dropped out of the fuchsia bush that overhangs my garden wall and had been exploring the car. Not noticing the inquisitive wee soul, I’d set off and was happily bowling along at around 50 mph. My unexpected passenger seemed somewhat alarmed by this – no doubt it was the fastest he’d ever travelled, for although my snails are no slowcoaches (watch them head up the wall to the chimney on disco night) they lack wheels.

With another car behind me, it wasn’t possible to stop and leave the freeloader in a convenient hedgerow, so I willed him to hang on and we’d part company at the garden centre. He seemed to take heart from this, and started to explore the window, riding along with his wee feelers blowing in the breeze. Up to the top, and halfway down, sticking to the glass by sheer force of will and a sticky foot.

I tried to keep an eye on him, but after coming close to the verge a few times decided that his fate was in the lap of whatever small gods snails have, and concentrated on my driving.

We made it to the garden centre, both unscathed, and I contemplated finding a suitable flowerbed and setting him down in safety there… then I thought again. Garden Centres are not known for their friendship with those of a shelly persuasion, and in leaving him there, may well be condemning him to an early demise. After his tenacity, and plucky determination, I felt this was not something I could be party to, and suggested to him that if he was still on board when I came out of the centre, I would drop him off in the leafy haven of the lay-by just north of the village.

When I came out, he had wandered down to the wing mirror, and was making cautious investigations of the spiderwebs. (Of the spider who lives behind the mirror, there was no sign – obviously reluctant to get involved with one with so many fewer legs than herself). Well, hang on and we’ll soon have you sorted, I said, wondering if anyone was listening to me talking to my wing mirror.

There was a lorry in the lay-by, and no room to pull in behind it. Snail had climbed higher, over the door pillar and onto the corner of the windscreen… less likely to be blown off, I thought, and watched him from the corner of my eye as he clung on like some out-of-place hood ornament, feelers still extended in curiosity at the speed.

So I took him to work.

If you’re still there at the end of the day, I’ll try and take you home, I said, as I got out and unlocked the office door. But you’ll have to be patient – I have to do some shopping and I can’t guarantee what may happen in Tesco’s car-park.

Some six hours later, I emerged to find that he’d settled down for a snooze at the edge of the windscreen, where there’s a bit of a lip that offered some security. Wise lad, I thought. Hang on, here we go again. A seasoned traveller by now, he didn’t even stir as we set off, and remained tucked down and shell-bound all the way.
I guessed he’d had enough of the travelling life when I found him still in the same place after I’d done the shopping. I guess people don’t look closely at the cars when they’re parked – nobody seems to have noticed my car was customised.

So we came home, and after unloading, I carefully lifted him from the windscreen and placed him back in the fuchsia bush. I think he was still snoring. I wondered what he’d think when he woke up – do snails dream of speed, like humans do of flying? And would I know him again, if I saw him sprinting up the wall one rainy night, on his way to the chimney pot?

Life’s Little Mysteries (3)

The weather, never settled for long, has changed again. After baking heat - always welcome when venturing into the city to shop (aye, right!) - Saturday night brought heavy rain. Driving home late, I became aware that things were moving in the headlights’ beam. Frogs. Lots of frogs. They’ve spent the hot spell hidden under the dry stone walls or in deep undergrowth, until the rain came. Then it’s way-hay! Look chaps - puddles! Which made driving the back roads rather more akin to a slalom course, avoiding frogicide.

Arriving home, we unpacked the car; another slalom session as we avoided the snails sliding happily across the path. With rain dripping down my neck from the tailgate of the car, I turned and noticed around fifteen on the end wall of the house, all heading upwards. One slid purposefully up the edge of the gable; all seemed bent on reaching the roof, or even the chimneystack. Those on the path made their slow and stately way to the wall, and proceeded upwards. I couldn’t see anything up there that might attract their attention, no algae, no moss, no tempting plants at all.
Were they trying to tell me that flood were expected? Is there a snail nightclub somewhere on my roof? Do they gather up there in the first rain after the last full moon in July for some esoteric snail ritual? Baffled, I took the last of the shopping indoors and went to dry off.
In the morning there were no snails to be seen. And none that night on the window pane. I began to wonder if some silent interstellar space-shell had descended in the damp night and taken them away, to report on their observations of Earth life.

Wherever they went, it was a short trip - five were back last night. Of course, it was ‘Mastermind’ and ‘University Challenge’ on the TV. How else can interstellar snails learn?

Life in Slow Motion

The snails live on the walls of my garden, hiding under the shrubs, or clustered together in the evenings on the living room window, where they gather under the edge of the sash frame. Are they watching the TV? On wet nights they can be found idly perambulating across the path, and in the morning as I go to work I see their silvery trails across the doormat, or on a plant pot or two. I don’t begrudge them the small amount of damage they do; for some reason I find snails quite appealing. Slugs, on the other hand, have little to recommend them; they lurk under the rims of the plant pots, lumps of slime and gristle that surprise your fingers when you go to move the pot. I find it odd that I regard them so differently. What difference does a shell make? The snails, I will admit, are great performers when, on occasion, I take them to schools. Set on the back of my hand, they soon come out of their shells and extend their long eyestalks, peering myopically at the children as if to say ‘What’s this? Who are you?’ The children, for their part, seem equally fascinated by their small alien visitors, and talk back to them.

Snails in this part of the world are usually found at the seaside. Most of the underlying native rock is granite, which doesn’t provide sufficient calcium for them to grow their shells; by the sea, they take advantage of the crushed shell in the sandy soil, taken up by the plants that they eat, and they grow to the size of golf balls. It must be a precarious existence in some ways, being close to the sea. After all, how many of us have gone out with the salt pot at night to put an end to crawling lettuce lovers?

The warm, damp weather has spiced up the lives of the snails on the walls. Yesterday Mum caught several of them flagrantly mating, moistly entwined amid the foliage. Snails love-lives are complex; they are hermaphrodite, so each fertilises the other. In courtship - for snails do choose their partners - they fire small ‘arrows’ at each other, reeling each other in on thin white thread until their bodies are pressed together. D-I-Y Cupid? Or have they been watching old westerns on the TV, in the evenings? Whichever, I wait for the eggs to appear, and a new generation of snails to make their slow way to the window pane.