Slug Wars – Be more Dog!
A more healthy outlook on Life
We have just experienced a couple of gloriously dry and bright days here in south east England. The cynical might look at today’s drizzle and mutter, “Well, that’s summer done with.”
But I’m (not yet) so cynical. Instead, I’m inclined to look at the positives I am experiencing. For example, I have been able to don shorts – ‘getting my knees out’ as my dog-walking friends say. Pottering around the garden over the weekend required a T-shirt only. The motor mower started first pull of the cord. The two batteries from my power drill had sufficient charge to strim all the longer grass in the wilder portion of our back yard. And there was sufficient gin left in the bottle to make a refreshing after-work drink. These are all Good Things.
A mobile telephone network in the UK, named O2, developed a neat series of TV ads back in 2013. They filmed people and animals enjoying themselves, being ‘in the moment’ and having a whale of a time. Most of the film clips featured dogs and to start with they always closed the segment with a happy dog. Maybe head out of a speeding car, tongue flapping in the breeze. Their tag line was, ‘Be more Dog’.
In other words, enjoy the moment right now – it won’t come again. Put aside worries about how do I pay rent this month? Will they still have that nice ham at the store tomorrow? How will I finish this piece of work by month end?
The underlying observation is, of course, that dogs are well known to live in the moment. Once they have eaten, they do not worry about eating again until they are hungry. For the time being, they take part in whatever activity is going on right now, right here.
With this refreshing new outlook, I’m going to report to you that I took up my Slug-hunting weapons last night at 10:30pm. I crept slowly up and down beside the flower beds. I turned up leaves of larger plants and shone my headtorch into the cracks and crevices where the largest slugs lurk, slathered in slime. I even patrolled across the shaggier portions of lawn.
And my total haul of pesky critters was six! That’s it. Not thirty something, as has been the case some evenings, but only six. And they were all very juvenile indeed.
The tarragon plant, which had been ripped down to three tiny stumps, is again producing little shoots of life. (I’ve ringed it with copper pennies). The freshly-planted salvias are utterly free from gastropod attack (one night I pulled seven off just a single salvia). My slug traps (buried pillboxes with sugared sourdough bait) were all empty.
It was like driving into one of those ghostly, deserted western towns, where everyone left a few hours ago and you don’t know why.
Once, I might have found it unsettling, but now I reckon I used to think too much. The slugs have almost all gone away. Hooray. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Let’s rejoice for the small happy victory that is plants unsullied by slugs.
I exhort you all to join me in Being More Dog!