Saturday 15 August 2009

The devils foot soldiers

There are folk who, on learning of my planned escape to the country, expressed concerns for my mental health and general intellectual well-being. To allay such concerns I’m introducing a new feature to the Banceithin Life blog entitled “Top 10 Things I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Before”.

Week 1:

1. A bumblebee is never just a bumblebee. Is it a “true” bombus or a “cuckoo” bombus? Is it white tailed, red tailed or brown? Is it not a bombus at all but actually a hive bee or a hoverfly? So many bees and still only the mice want to live in our bumblebee house.

2. Cats eat butterflies. Very little substance, very little nutrition, so probably just because they can.

3. Trinny and her kind drink red diesel. It’s the same as ordinary diesel but duty free and dyed red so that the diesel police can catch naughty farmers who use it for their cars instead of their tractors.

4. Builders use “caulk” not “cork”. Which explains why I would never have been able to find it in Focus DIY.

5. Chewed up mouse guts have their uses. All these years of discarding Charlie’s “gifts” and it turns out that a scrap of rejected mouse gut makes a handy fly trap for the polytunnel.

6. Always stop the fan and open the flue vent flap before opening the top door or Bertha will spit fire in your eye.

7. Borage flowers look good floating in gin and the leaves taste like cucumber (with hairs).

8. If you want to integrate into Lampeter society only go to the tractor shop if you speak Welsh and have a complicated looking chunk of agricultural equipment you want repaired; looking like a townie, sounding English and confessing that you don’t know what you’re doing is not recommended.

9. Isobel makes the most fabulous chocolate brownies in the world ever.

10. Slugs are the devil’s foot soldiers, riding up from hell on the back of giant cabbage white butterflies, their sole purpose in life being to eat, eat and eat until mankind has no choice but to sell his soul to save his brassicas.

P.S. The lily on the pond flowered today.

IMG_3776

1 comment:

Jayne kelly said...

Brilliant!