Open House for slugs

Glorious sunny autumn day of the kind that Sydney does so well, with everything looking amazingly green against the blue sky, thanks to the huge amounts of rain we had last week.

The really good news is that the slugs that were making slow and steady inroads into the house during the constant deluge seem to have lost the will to occupy the new territory and have now retreated back into the garden to draw silvery graffiti trails all over the paving. I am puzzled why wet and slimey slugs would want to get out of the rain in order to hover by my sofas, but can only presume they were preparing for a slugfest! Personally I would have thought a slug would have a preference for a wet and dripping garden as a home environment, but obviously not.

Having said that our house, like many in Sydney, does suffer dreadfully from damp, so perhaps it feels like home from home for slugs. Now that the sun is out I’ve thrown open all the doors, windows and wardrobe doors in the hope of getting enough air circulating to avoid whiskery shoes and white spotted clothes.

There is also the thought at the back of my mind that perhaps I am the slug attraction rather than the house, as slime trails seem to have been a recurring theme to my home ownership. My first house in London was in Maze Hill near Greenwich, a location that sounds much more picturesque than it actually was, just down the road from the gasworks would be a more accurate description. It had a small kitchen backing onto the garden and I did on a number of early morning occasions stand on a slug in my bare feet, giving a whole new meaning to ‘Bubble and Squeak’ though in my case it was more ‘Bubble and Shriek’ as slug flesh squirmed between my toes.

As an antidote to the slug yuck factor, my red flowering gum is out and I think it is completely stunning. In the breaks between torrential downpours it looked absolutely amazing with droplets quivering from every stamen.