It’s “Good Friday” in the UK today. We’re off work, and have been working on the garden. W is still out there, digging the far end over.
We have this huge patch at the far end of the garden that was covered in plastic for the last couple of years to kill everything under it - when we moved in 5 years ago we planned to plant vegetables up there, but nothing grew because it’s in shade for too great a part of the day.
The plastic came off this morning, and we uncovered slow-worm city (hence the picture). After an attack of guilt, I put some of the plastic back on the ground behind the shed, and started picking them up. Luckily the cat wasn’t around to start munching on them. For those who have no idea, slow-worms are members of the lizard family, and are often mistaken for snakes. The main ways you can tell them apart are the colour (we only get grass snakes and adders in the UK), and the fact that slow-worms blink. Their tongue is apparently a different shape too, but not having had a really good look at one I couldn’t tell you. Slow-worms are completely harmless, so we just picked them up in our hands and moved them to their new home.
See - you learn fascinating stuff all the time in this blog
While moving some old planks I also discovered frog city. After lifting one particularly big plank of wood, about ten frogs slithered and hopped off in all directions - some of them foolishly towards the pile of rubbish I was moving. Baring in mind that our pond is only about 10 feet from the rubbish I was moving, you would have thought they would have raced towards it - but no. They went in the opposite direction.
While turning the earth over, some of the bigger slow-worms decided to make a break for it, and we found ourselves repeatedly picking them up and taking them back to their new home again.
That reminds me - if you’re W’s best friend and you’re reading this, we don’t really have snake-like things all over our garden - honest. I made it all up. All we have is ants and stuff. You can start breathing again and come down off the ceiling.
After that I was about to go into town to get some groceries when W decided it would be a much better idea if I accompanied her to the garden centre to buy some trees. Guess who’s going to have to dig the holes for them (trees need HUGE holes). We ended up buying so many that they have to be delivered next week - so I’m off the hook now.
Final stop today was the chocolatier in town to buy W an easter egg. We have an old shop called “Bergers” in Marlow, run by a swiss family. They don’t have much selection, but at least you know you’re getting real chocolate, and not some chemical cocktail like Nestl, Mars or Cadbury make. The only downer is that a real chocolate easter egg costs about 8 times more than a normal one (but then it’s probably 8 times thicker, and has 8 times as many things inside it too).
We’re home now, and I just realised (at 5:30pm) that I’ve not had anything to eat today yet. Guess what I’m doing next…