:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 ::

I got home from work last night and found, as expected, that the dust bin and the recycling box had both been emptied. It was pissing down with rain, so I hurriedly wheeled the bin back it to its special bin sized bin cupboard that the rental agency call a shed. To be fair we have managed to fit a broom in it as well, but that’s all. I then picked up the recycling box, which had been helpfully left the correct way up with the lid dropped inside after emptying thus allowing it to fill with rain water. Admittedly, there are drainage holes in the bottom but it is amazing how ineffectual these are. So I emptied the water out onto what the rental agency call the front garden (approximately two square meters of grass with no wall or fence to divide it from the pavement or from either neighbour), and took it back into the house. I decided that it was still too wet to go back to the corner of the kitchen where it normally dwells, so I left it on its side on the mat just inside the front door. In the mean time checked my email, read my post and glanced through the copy of Bizarre that had arrived that morning (worth buying for the camel brothel article alone), and then had a shower. When I wandered back downstairs I had a cursory glace over the box and decided it was adequately dry to return to the kitchen. I put it down in the kitchen, almost instantly changed my mind about it being dry enough to return to its normal position, and so moved it again to the mat near the back door and lent it up on end. When I walked back out of the kitchen I slipped, bare footed, and then quickly regained my composure, glad that there was no-one else around to have seen it, and carried about my business think to myself, “good job I moved that, I only put it down there for a second and that was a pretty dangerous damp patch it left”. On returning to the kitchen again I went to the damp patch with a piece of kitchen roll to dry the watery smear of death only to see some small black twig or stick or hunk of mud or something that must have been left by the dirty, filthy, whore of a recycling box during its brief but near fatal visit to the area. When I got close enough to the offending detritus to pick it up, I saw that it was not the black twig, stick or hunk of mud I thought it to be. No, it was in fact the barely still alive front half of a slug, the rear half of which had been flattened when I slipped on it with my bare, and freshly cleaned, feet a few minutes earlier! Now, I’m not really squeamish, but this slug got squashed in a piece of kitchen roll and dropped in the bin pretty swiftly, and was spared the slow and agonising death by salt my mother always practices. The lesson: check recycling receptacles left outside in all weathers for molluscs as well as stagnant rain water before returning to the house. Probably also worth checking for small mammals, ferrets, drunken ferrets, badgers etc., while your at it.

:: Dan 20.5.03 [Arc]    ::
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