SLUGGED!

I cannot kill a slug. Once by accident, I rode over a particularly fat and juicy one that squelched out into a revolting gooey mess all over the front tyre of my bike and for the life of me and I don’t know why, I felt like a cold blooded killer! Cold and green, like the slug’s remains.

I know it is probably downright loony to feel guilty about committing slugicide - but I can’t help it. Just moments before that particular slug ended up on my tyre, it had been a slug someone. A slug of substance, with an evolutionary line dating back to primeval crud. A slug with family and connections all over the world. In fact at my last 'gound floor flat with garden out back', most of its relations seemed to live there, in the garden - demolishing plants and wolfing the cats’ food and leaving slimey trails – but if you are a slug, it’s what you do. It’s your job.

So, to atone for my earlier crime, I became a slug crusader. You have probably noticed that touching a slug will cause it to draw in its little antlers and curl up into a sticky, gungy lump and so every time I found one, I would pick it up with newspaper, to prevent ten minutes of yukky finger dee-slime-ing…! Then, after pottering around the garden and collecting a plant pot full of slugs, I would re-house them to the long grass by the canal at the end of the road. A harmless pastime that amused the local kids, causing them to trail after me chanting:
‘Slugs! Slugs! Eeouw, slugs!’
Yes indeed, I was and on occasion still am - ‘Slug Woman’!!
I even wrote a poem about slugs once:

Having no perception of up and down,
Of space and distance and light,
When the rock was moved,
The slug rolled out
And promptly died of fright!

Unless of course they get ‘slugged’ by a bike first, then they get put on a blog…. ‘A blogged slug, a slogged blug’ – say that fast! Oops. Now there’s spit all over the computer screen. Ah but that’s pretty! Lots of rainbow lights shining through the droplets…wonderful! Go on, try it…
Uhhhhh - I must get a life…