My house consists of three storeys on the side of a steep hill. Taking the road as ground level this puts my kitchen diner at the level of a cellar, and to use an old estate agents trick, it's deliciously moist. Which in turn of course means that the slugs bloody love it.
By day, all is calm. By evening, all is calm. But at night, late at night, that's when the action starts to happen. Now imagine that you can't sleep. It's two in the morning and you're tossing away, so you get up and go down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen and walk across the cold tiles in your bare feet. Imagine too the feel of that seaweed, the kind with fronds and big bubbles of air to make it float, popping beneath your feet.
Got that? Good. Because that's what a slug feels like when you step on it. Only instead of a pleasant dive into a rock pool you're left with a nasty yellow splodge all over the tiles and caking the underside of your foot, little slug carcass writhing in it's death throes.
I started to think they had some kind of plan - move in there slow and turf me out of my own house. Have to admit to not being overly worried - for a species whose only tactic was to move slowly and from time to insert themselves between a bare foot and the floor I don't rate their chances much. Unless that first wave was like those Zulu warriors launched against Rourke's Drift so the chieftains could count the guns...
And then they moved on to phase 2.
Psyhcological warfare.
Can you imagine the horror when an attractive female companion calls you into your newly sparkling downstairs bathroom to point out a slug skating on the toilet seat?
I could perhaps have survived that only it turns out she had a problem with callous cruelty to slugs. Though I don't see what her problem is - I cover myself with Radox Foaming Shower Wash every day of the week and it's never done me any harm
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You know wilderness skills AND you have an attractive female companion trapped in your basement? Oh dear...
ReplyDeleteGosh. Way to put a bad spin on it.
ReplyDeleteIt's a kitchen, not a basement.
Just like Buffalo Bill's squalid, damp hole in his basement was in actual fact a Sensory Depravation Chamber to cleanse mind, body and soul
I was chatting with a friend once about slugs and snails.
ReplyDelete"Oh I don't like them" she said... "but I couldn't kill them. I throw them over into next doors pond. They like water don't they?"
I just didn't have the heart to tell her that only water snails actually live in water... and she was in fact... DROWNING all of hers!!