Polytunnel toad

I do like a toad. Even when they come hopping into the house to watch the ten o'clock news, as they do. These summer evenings the doors are left open and as the toads emerge from behind the damp greenness left lazily and deliberately unweeded from round the doorway, they hop into the boot room or venture more daringly across the kitchen, drawn by the BBC news headlines.
The polytunnel is home to another batch of toads. They hunt beneath the crush of courgettes, the thicket of tomatoes, the panoply of peas, relishing the damp soil, the flies, slugs and other edibles.
This is a photo of the polytunnel-toad; not as large as the news-at-ten-toad, but a charmer, all the same.



The polytunnel is looking very green, apart from the sweet peas, that produce a big bunch of pink, lilac, purple and red for the table every evening. But I want it to look even more colourful, full of flowers, and that's just starting to happen. The courgette blooms are there but you have to dig deep under the huge raspy leaves to see them; the tomato flowers are also shy, and their fruits are completely green for now. The spherical yellow courgettes are only just starting to fruit and bulge.
There is one baby aubergine, already purple, and the mass of peas are, to be fair, dotted with white flowers. The french beans are thinking about flowering. Another week and I'll be rewarded.

Old Testament toad

The rivers are not running with blood, but they are bursting their banks and cruelly taking life. The news is grim and Gordon Brown will be taking over a country not so much cleansed as deluged. As for the personal being political, the largest toad I have ever seen in this country took refuge from the watery onslaught in the dog's room last night and as it is still dark I have yet to check outside whether this is a single visitation or a veritable plague, and if I should therefore be checking for lice (might be a tick or two on the sheep), flies (check), dying cattle (my heart starts to sink), boils (so far, so smooth), hail of devastating effect (not yet...but the grass intended for hay has nonetheless been flattened by the downpours), locusts (just butterflies at the moment), and far worse.
The toad was the size of my fist - I do not have large hands, but even so, that is a big Bufo bufo. It was carried carefully into some lush green undergrowth out of dog harm.
There is something hugely appealing about a toad. They live a quiet life, rarely intruding on your thoughts or vision, and then they appear apparently out of nowhere to remind you of their existence and helpful destruction of veg patch pests. Digging up spuds a few years ago, a knot of toads emerged blinking from the soil and incredible care had to be taken as more of them were revealed at each now tentative forkful of earth.
But the biggest toad I have ever seen anywhere was Italian. The Toad of Fontemelaia as it was thereafter named, was the size of a football and I nearly squashed it, driving down the unmade treacherous track after an evening at the local pizzeria. There was this big round lump in the road. Thinking it was a rock that had newly fallen on the path I screeched to a halt. As we went to move the rock, the headlights showed it to be mega toad. We gawped in awe. It hauled itself away from the light never to be seen again. I still wonder if it was a figment of too much chianti, but there were four of us and we still recall that night and the wonderful cherries and fireflies that flourished below the flea-ridden but oh so romantic farmhouse.
If my biblical toad is still around in the morning light I will try and take a photo of the man himself.