Less Far From The Madding Crowd

The happy couple

For a weekend I was plunged into a maelstrom of people. A wedding of a friend drew me from my idyllic hidey-hole, a train shuttling me out east out of peaceful rural mid-Wales to the grime of urban mid-England where a second train picked me up and escorted me south to the over-populated capital of the United Kingdom.  

It had changed a little bit in the sixteen months I'd been away. Two new skyscrapers and a third being built. Lower Marsh, one of my local haunts in Waterloo, had more trendy cafes than you could shake a skinny latte at. The bookshop on the corner of Waterloo Road had vanished, taking the entire building with it. Waterloo Station had smartened up good and proper. There seemed to be more souped-up cars idling past than I remembered. Boris Bikes were now advertising Santander instead of Barclays. Old-style Routemaster buses were on the roads. 

My preferred mode of transport, sporting new gear sprocket and chain and brake blocks

Perhaps I'd changed a bit too. I found myself noticing the trees more. Sirens made me jump - although they were deliberately starting them just as they went past me, the ambulance driver lolling out of his window and jeering "Beardy!" as he roared past. Yes, this is London.  And the people everywhere, all looking slightly younger than last time, thronging around happily in the sunshine as if there was nowhere else on Earth to be. I joined in, met a few old friends, and became for a while a Londoner again.

An old bridge in Dinas Mawddwy

In reality my day-to-day life affords me only occasional interactions with other humans. Mostly I commune with the young plants in my care which seem keen to teach me a lesson in how to make the most of what life throws at us, in their case howling gales, driving rain, acid soil, wildly varying temperatures, and slugs. Some do not make it. Others are hanging in there, the verdict undecided. Yet those that live will, in just a few short months, transform from a single seed to a mighty plant bearing edible gifts for whosoever may choose to pluck. Get your beaks off, birds!

A visiting sibling showing off his new head

 I do also occasionally commune with the beings which move under their own volition. There are a lot more of them around now, fragile flying things that fly into my face at night attracted by the headtorch, birds arriving from their winter holiday in southern Africa and noisily telling the other stay-at-home birds all about it, a frog that I found squatting amongst the asparagus stems that refused to move even after a gentle prod, beetles galore. And slugs. Slugs, slugs, slugs. #FreeFoodAtMatts is trending on whatever passes for Twitter in the slug kingdom.

Ok I don't really commune with them, unless you can stretch the definition a little to include collecting them all in a large yogurt pot and hurling them into the fast-flowing river. This I do every night at the moment, having been galled to find my lettuce, turnip, beans, asparagus, kale and cabbage all badly eaten, with lots of the young lettuce seedlings killed. It can take an hour to search the garden and polytunnel. The slithery menaces only come out when it's dark so I have to stay late on my land. It's more effective than any other slug-prevention techniques I've tried. Don't talk to me about beer traps - the only trap I pour beer into is my own mouth. And believe me, I need to after a few evenings like this.

Scroll down if you're not freaked out by the sight of slugs in a pot