I had a serious confrontation with a gang of gastropods this morning.
This is not the first time that we have run into problems. First off, I don’t like ’em. I don’t like snails or any of their numerous cousins and assorted kinfolk. That said, I realise they have a right to exist in their own appalling little world as I have in my own, and I’m prepared to look the other way, merely wrinkling my nose with fastidiousness, when they ooze across my path.
But they can keep their ugly stomach-feet out of my herbs!
I’ve done my best. I have made a safe spot for them, a refuge, a haven hidden behind a particularly ugly clump of agapanthus, with a couple of old beer cans hidden under the leaves, some mossy overhung mini-boulders and a fat wad of newspaper. Gastropod heaven. If they would just stay there we could co-exist peacefully.
This morning I found a half dozen of the slimy things in the last of my tomatoes. Ingrates. Perhaps the heat of the last few days addled my brain, because I lashed out at the whole lot of them in fury. I shrieked at them. “I told you never to come in here. Don’t you know who I am? I am the Master Gardener, the Great Mother, I am She. I am God!”.
I picked them all up, threw them in a shoe box and carried them around to the back lane where I deposited them in the middle of the cobblestones. They are evicted. They are expelled. I wash my hands of them.
Sitting down with a small glass of sherry to calm myself, still shaking from the trauma, I started thinking.
Was God was a Gardener?