Few of you may know this but I am a deeply spiritual man, given to an annual retreat to the ritual of the Hot Cross Bun (previous HCB here and here). Today I had the blessed opportunity to (thoroughly) enjoy some of these delights of Christian tradition in the comfort of my own home. Or, care of unseasonally good weather, my garden.
So here are some snaps of me at worship with the fruits of his almighty sacrifice…
However I need to turn to darker matters now… You may recall the terrifying tale of The Headless Duck of my De Beauvoir garden. Well strange as that was, the truth may be even stranger. Back then I guessed it was a fox or some-such but new evidence raises a more horrific possibility!!!!!
Over a slightly indefinite period of at least a year but possibly two I have sighted a pair of toads. I saw them first while on a late night snail hunt. I was surprised that there were toads in my garden. But as I had caught them in flagranto delicto, I expect they were even more surprised but they chose to just stay still, two throats a-bloating. Toads fucking, fucking hell I thought! So that’s how they do it! Good on you toads – make more toadlets and eat more snails please. A nice find for a damp spring night. On I moved, stalking the stalky-eyed munchers of my beloved potatoes. I took at least 50 ‘shells’ that evening.
Some time later, weeks perhaps, while doing a routine weed of another snail-zone I encountered the toads again. Once more ‘at it’. It’s a wonder that rabbits have the reputation toads should have. Or maybe snails are a toadal aphrodisiac. Then my garden is the veritable rhino horn of amphibia! These 2 did however hop off together – one still upon the other.
Many months later, deep into autumn, in the company of the nubile, Miss Sparrow - whose often been subjected to the effects of my garden – I reencountered these frogs – at it yet again. I mention her as an independent verifier of this strange tale (and because I love her and am proud to sneak her into my life). Again the frogs made off into the undergrowth in their tandem fashion.
However, I felt the coincidence of always finding these frogs at it quite suspicious. Perhaps it’s a mother child dependent thing in which the child is lazily clinging on a little longer than it should.
Having stopped biology when I was 14 I’d not had the opportunity to dissect a frog nor learn much more than the egg, tadpole, toad cycle… and given that thought – at what point would a tadpole climb onto a parental-frogs’s back to score a free ride? And these toads have been the same fully-grown size since the first encounter. Peculiar…
So this Spring, but a few days ago… I did my first de-weeding of the ‘bog-out-back’. And low – who turns up? But the two toads… just the same size and one on top of another… I’m fond of these buggers, and used to them of course, so I leave them be and get on with bagging up the soon-to-wake slimy marauders I find.
Yet when I turn to the hosepipe I find the toads pottering around in a puddle right out in the open, at least a yard from cover. Having seen them now so often like this, suddenly I wanted to see them separate. But they don’t, and they don’t do it on camera. So what I have in my garden are Siamese Twin-Toads! How about THAT!!!!!
Could they have been the beast that beheaded the duck? Or did that headless fiend do this to them or is my garden the experimental playground for some Frankenstenian fiend?!?!?
And here is the promised video! Much higher quality available!
* I accept that due to my limited schooling the star(s) of this message may in fact be frogs not hot cross buns or toads.
And on another note – I will be off out of London and the UK in a few weeks until July 2012! Working on a top secret movie which one day you will hopefully all see…For the rest of this year I’ll be in Philadelphia, Phillippines and the Yukon while January to June next year sees me in New York.
Super much love…
