Snails, Mill Lane, and Other Oddments.

Being another wet and gloomy twilight this evening (although warmer and calmer than earlier in the week) it wasn’t the moths and magic which caught my attention, but the snails. Loads of them, mostly babies but with one notable exception. It was huge, probably the biggest I’ve ever seen, and had a dark aubergine shell with a black body. It was so startlingly unusual that I considered bringing it in as a pet, but decided it would be a bit silly even by my standards. My last sighting of it was at the top of my office window where it was diligently examining the wooden frame. Or maybe it was eating the putty. Who can say?

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I composed a ditty about Mill Lane in my head today when I was out walking. That was because dear Mill Lane has become off limits again. One disastrous association has thrown a musty blanket over the many years of good ones, and I find that ditties help to make sense of the reasons why. It was dreadful, so don’t ask.

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And a song kept impressing itself into my head later. Songs often do, but this one was particularly insistent and I’m not sure why. The lyrics are broadly apposite to my present situation, but I couldn’t decide who was singing which lines to whom. Having the whole song going one way didn’t quite make sense, and yet it was demanding my attention strongly. Maybe it was just the tone that was touching a chord (which is a way of transferring musical terminology into a literary metaphor. I hope you noticed…) You can hear it if you like.

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I have two young squirrels coming into my garden at the moment. They take a bird feeding table each and watch me through the window while they nibble bits of corn and oat flakes. When I go out and say ‘Now look here, buggerlugs, this is supposed to be for the birds, not you,’ they amble away with a happy and mischievous gait. Isn’t that nice?

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I paid £20 into Mel’s bank account so she could afford the train fare to come and have coffee with me. Sounds like one of the sad stories my mother used to tell me when I was a kid. (Readers of long-standing might remember the story of poor old Joe who couldn’t afford the train fare to visit his dying mother in hospital. You can see where I got my lifetime of failure from, can’t you?)