The Matter of the Late Toad.

I’m at a loose end again. Nothing to do until the DVD of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia arrives from eBay, and still over two hours until my restricted bandwidth permits the nightly YouTube session. Maybe the story of the dead toad will suffice in the absence of anything more notable (with apologies to the toad, of course.)

When I went for a walk this morning I saw a dead toad on the road. (The rhyme was not lost upon me and a ditty did begin to form in my head, but ‘I saw a toad upon the road’ was all I could get, so I stopped bothering.)

It was dead, you see, but showed no sign of injury whatsoever. It was fully plump, all body parts were precisely where they should be, and there was no sign of blood. I thought this a little odd because when toads get run over by vehicles they generally become flattened facsimiles of toads and are sometimes hardly recognisable as toads at all. So what had been the cause of this poor amphibian’s demise?

I could only speculate that maybe one unusual feature of the toad is its habit of suddenly giving up the ghost for no apparent reason. Or maybe toads have heart attacks as we do. Maybe it had choked on a beetle it was trying to eat. I became even more speculative and thought it might have been a witch’s familiar and heard a farmer say ‘Better run the mower over the paddock before it rains.’ (You might need to read Macbeth to get that one.) In any event I wished it well.

And tonight I had a complimentary response to one of my YouTube comments, just for saying that violas make twilight music. (I knew I’d manage to get twilight in somehow.)