Signs and symbols - time passing!

Walking into the village the other day with my son and his wife, via the back lane that goes past the old mill pond, we suddenly that the lane was full of tiny frogs. They were all about half a centimetre in size, minute little black creatures, still tadpole-coloured rather than frog-coloured. All were crossing the road in the same direction, with the exception of the odd confused little beastie who decided to carry on down the lane instead. Presumably they had all reached the stage of development when the instinctively know it's time to leave the water and go wherever small frogs are programmed to go. Whatever the cause of this mass movement, it made it very difficult to walk normally along the lane as we all balked at the idea of treading them underfoot. 

I was reminded of a holiday in Lochgilphead, Scotland, years ago when our children were still young teenagers. We had rented a cottage outside the village. Driving back to the cottage one evening, we found the lane full of full grown frogs, presumably also doing a mass migration somewhere. Unfortunately, on that occasion I had to drive on as there was no avoiding them. Quite disgusting really. The rest of the holiday was fine; it was quiet and peaceful, the weather was mostly good (if it wasn't, the teenagers could play table tennis in the barn) and looking out of the window in the early morning you could see the field behind the cottage full of deer. 

Back to the frogs, I haven't seen such tiny frogs since the summer when my siblings and I had an old kitchen sink full of tadpoles in the back garden. As they turned into little frogs, they climbed up the sides of the sink and escaped ... to my mother's horror! She couldn't hang washing on the line without treading on small frogs in the grass. Isn't nature strange? 

Strange too is the fact that, although it's only July, I am already seeing signs of the approach of autumn. Here is a picture of what I collected while out and about first thing this morning. Granted, the horse chestnuts are very tiny but even so, this is one of the first signs.

Time is passing! There had better be some summer left when we head out to Galicia in a couple of days' time. 

Time is passing! The other day I read an obituary for the Irish writer Dermot Healey in which the writer felt the need to explain that The Bachelors were a 1960s pop group. Apparently the writer was thrown out of college at age 15 for going to see The Bachelors when he should have been studying. Such rebellion! And such severe punishment! 

Time is passing! George Monbiot was writing in today's Guardian about the science of life-extension which is suddenly producing amazing results and may make it possible for people to live for much longer provided, points out Mr. Monbiot, they can afford to pay for the treatment. A champion of life-extension science, Aubrey de Grey, reckons that there are people alive now who could live to be a thousand years old, assuming they don't get too bored. George Monbiot, always looking on the bright side, reminds us that there will be problems of paying pensions to these eternal OAPs, sociological problems as the old outnumber the young in ever greater fashion, crowding the young out of affordable housing, jobs and just about every aspect of life. As he wrote: "The inequality and the potential for exploitation that would emerge if people lived twice, not to mention 10 times, as long can only be boggled at." 

As for me, I'm not going to worry about it. After all, tomorrow is another day!