Sleepless nights walking on the wild side

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

Greenfingered?

A few years ago I almost ended up buying this awesome cottage style terraced house. The front was white washed and the window sills and reveals were a lovely sky blue. Inside it was tasteful and modern, the attic turned into another bedroom, the edges lined with sunken electric tea lights. With the lights off it could have been a subterrean cave grotto.

That would have been my room.

The crowning glory of that house was the garden. Perhaps it was fifty feet long, all lawn, Rising steeply above the house, bordered on both sides by towering Leylandii that came almost right up to the walls. A totally private space with a flat area for a barbecue and a table.

It was gorgeous.

Then the survey came back. Problems with damp (it was), problems with the damp proof course (it didn't), problems with attic conversion (it sucked), problems with the kitchen extension (one good sneeze away from collapse).

So I pulled out. Eventually I bought my current house. It's got a tiny garden. Half of it is paved over. Half of the remaining half is a shed. There is grass, but a guy with no arms could stand in the middle and touch all the edges.

And right now it's a complete mess. This year, so far, I have gone out and done gardening a grand total of one time.
And by gardening I mean I've gone out with some secateurs and hacked back the hedges till they bloody well respected me. Spent at least an hour out there.

I've done some other things out there - though I don't think idly pulling up bindweed from the lawn while on the phone to your mate counts as gardening. It made the lawn look on brown as well.

It's a shame I didn't buy that quaint cottage style mid terrace after all. We might have discovered a lost Celtic tribe in there by now.