On the Road

As any regular readers will know, I am planning to marry my girlfriend Corinna at some point next year. However, at the moment she lives in Lincolnshire, so - as I am relatively footloose and fancy free at the moment, since Dad's death - I spend a reasonable amount of my time up here with her, rather than living in Bachelordom back at the CFZ with Graham, Mark and Olly (and Richard and John intermittently). It is weird living like this, because I have wanted to come back to Woolsery to live ever since I left in 1981, and now I have inherited the house, I spend large amounts of my time in suburbia at the other end of the country. This, however, is the way that it has to be for the moment, so rather than be apart from the woman I adore for weeks on end, I find myself once more living out of a holdall.

However, ironically I get more work done here than I do when I am back in Woolsery (I don't get distracted by going and talking to the animals all day), and at weekends (and sometimes in the evenings) we do go places and do things. Last weekend I prevailed upon my beloved to take me to one of the more obscure parts of the West Midlands to the British Tarantula Society show. There, I was overjoyed to meet up with an old mate - Graham Smith - who, together with his lovely partner, runs Metamorphosis , a company selling exotic insects.

But Graham is so much more than just a purveyor of creepies and crawlies. He is one of those rare things in today's society: An old fashioned Field Naturalist. Graham and I (as we always do) spent hours talking about things we had done, and places we had been. I told him about my two recent trips to Puerto Rico and about the pair of caecilians that we managed to buy for the CFZ a couple of weeks ago, and he told me how he had narrowly missed buying a pair of Hellbenders , but most of the time we spoke about the smaller inhabitanmts of the universe that continue to surprise and delight us all.

Graham told me about some of the research he has done recently on grass snakes and stag beetles. I am not going to steal his thunder. Although he is a most modest man who hates to see his name in print, I hope that I shall be able to persuade him to do a book with us sometime soon. But the whole episode served to reminded me (as if any reminding was necessary, which it probably wasn't), that the portmanteau discipline of Fortean Zoology (which I basically invented anyhow), is just as concerned with stag beetles as it is with yetis, and that it is the job of the CFZ to remind everyone that discoveries of new and peculiar animal behaviour, morphology, and even new species, can take place in your back garden, as well as they can in the foothills of the Himmalayas.

So I wrote this, and this weekend I shall be pond dipping, not watching reality TV...