The snowball bush at its peak of beauty
Jean perfecting his barbequing skills
Not long ago, I was chatting with an English couple who moved to France a year or so ago, and who have set up home very happily in a relatively remote village.
"The only thing I really miss is a local pub" he said, and having spent a couple of years enjoying the cameraderie of a small English pub as a teenager before leaving for Africa, I knew just what he meant.
Today I opened up a pub right here in the garden. I call it "The Snail Inn" but I am hoping that by tomorrow it will be re-named "The Fall In".
We awoke this morning to find the early morning sun filtering in through the curtains. The importance of this was the fact that we had not felt it necessary to close the wooden shutters by 8pm last night. The temperature has gone up, the rain seems to have finally abated, and there is a softness and warmth to the air.
Pulling on a tee shirt and a pair of track pants, I turned my back on the thermal vest, the thick socks and the boots, and went out into the courtyard to see if it was all in my imagination. It was real - I could cast my clouts and declare that winter really was over.
The first job of the day is always to take a tour of the garden and see how things are getting on, and it was while visiting the new vegetable section that I realised that things were getting totally out of hand. Not one snail but forty snails were ambling about, tasting a courgette leaf here, chewing on a pepper leaf there and generally rootling about looking for things to destroy.
Enough is enough and I opened up the BBC Gardening site and typed in "Kill Snails".
It is so easy, and apart from chucking them over the fence into the neighbouring field, from where they are quite likely to return, I decided to give the BBC suggestion a try.
"Place a bowl into the ground and fill it with beer. Wait for the morning and see how many customers you get".
It was 10am by the time I got my bowl and my beer into the ground, and within minutes there was a queue forming. Snails climbed over each other, pushed each other in, leaned over and sipped heartily, reeled about in ecstasy and then toppled happily into the foamy liquid.
It's better than non-organic snail and slug bait and better than storing them up in a bucket to turn into a nasty smelly mush. I know we are supposed to be setting a good example to the youth of today with regards to binge drinking, but I really do hope that the kids have a great night on the town.
If it was good enough for George Plantagenet the First Duke of Clarence who drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine, then it's good enough for my snails.
