Well, I HAVE been a bad blogger. It’s been 49 days since my last confession… In fact, while I’m confessing, it has been SUCH a long time that I actually couldn’t remember my password, and had to reset it. Tut!
Life has been very busy, and the relatively rubbish quality of phone photos compared to proper camera photos, due to me leaving my camera USB lead in Belgium, left me feeling a little dejected and not wildly bloggy. But the camera is back, and so am I!
So here we are in mid-April, and, despite the fact that this month is well known for its changeable weather, we are all surprised by the sudden rainfalls. Ah well, we were thoroughly spoilt by March, so it’s only to be expected – and after all, we are British. If were weren’t able to talk about the weather we’d have to talk about something important and probably end up discovering world peace or something.
ANYWAY. Enough babbling – get on with it!
I’m doing this in bite-sized chunks, or I’ll never catch up with myself and this poor blog will linger here on my laptop, ignored and neglected, until it gets fed up and wakes me up at night calling me to get it posted.
So first off, it’s the pondlife.
It’s extremely pleasing to be able to report that 90% of the frogspawn survived the unseasonal snow –
hang on, make that “90% of the unseasonal frogspawn survived the seasonal snow” – must stop having a pop at the weather! This good survival rate is possibly due to my emergency dash up the garden with a handy bit of old cardboard to form an impromptu spawn-shelter:
The lil’ guys right at the top of the gelatinous mounds didn’t make it, folks – a moment’s silence, please.
…
But their siblings, cousins and complete strangers (I suspect they’re all related, actually – the inbreeding which must result from the sheer orgified nature of their begetting would be a nightmare in a human. The mind boggles) – Damn, I’ve lost myself in brackets and sub-clauses already, and I’m only on page one – hang on…. (reading back, reading back…) ah yes! Blah blah blah have been born in their legions, and at one stage, the shallows of the top pond looked as if someone had torpedoed a caviar tanker up there.
They have now spread out a bit, thankfully, and, I suspect, rather eaten one another a bit, but heigh ho – all part of life’s rich tapestry, innit?
They have also done jolly well at surviving the childrens’ ministrations. Especially as M’s topic this term is small creatures (I am sorry – I just can’t bring myself to call them “Mini-beasts” – it’s unutterably twee – please don’t lynch me up the school tree). The tadpoles have therefore had to suffer the ignominy of being hauled manually, on a regular basis, out of their nice cold ice cold pond full of natural colours, leaves, creatures (plankton? No, that would be a marine thing – whatever the microscopic freshwater general background food equivalent is) etc and plopped down in an inch of rapidly warming pond water contained in a bright turquoise bucket.
The proof of their misdemeanours - they actually borrowed my camera to take this picture! They have a lot to learn about getting away with breaking the Mummy Laws!
I can only imagine that the tadpoles' thoughts as they go through this torture are something along the lines of “Arrrgh! My eyes! MY EYEEEES! WTF is going on?! What colour has the world gone? Bloody HELL it’s hot in here! Jim? Is that you? How the hell do we get out of here?”. I can only, further, imagine, that they are mightily relieved when a gigantic, godlike being approaches, booming “If I’ve told you bloody kids once, I’ve told you a thousand times, leave the sodding tadpoles ALONE!”, and they find themselves whooshed back into their homeland – homewater – on a magical waterfall of a journey. Or something else. I’m a dreadful spoilsport, hey? I’m sure it does them no harm to be hefted about in this way… but I’m not quite sure enough. And at least this gives the kids’ disobedience a focus and they’re no longer making potions out of my Jo Malone bath oil….
So, all is well in tadpole world, they’re fattening up nicely and you can’t move for newts (who now seem to be living happily in the bottom pond with the fish – must have got fed up with the children taking the planks out of the bridge so they can lie on it and watch (and no doubt poke) the Newt family when they lived up there in the middle pond). No tadpole legs sighted as yet, but be in no doubt, I will let you know.
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