Many

Apart from the leeches, which I was too busy removing to remember to photograph, there are other things on the farm that are many.

For starters there were the bees. I was sorry when they were removed them from the wall of my house. They weren’t bad neighbours really. I got stung about three times in six months, always through my own carelessness – brushing at something walking on my arm without looking first, stepping on a dead one with bare feet. I used to walk through the buzzing swarm with impunity.

One day, I saw them doing this:

Eventually a friend worked it out: in damp weather the workers pack themselves tightly around the hive entrance (in this case, the wall of my house) to keep out the wet.

Then there were the spiders that hatched out of a cocoon on my potted fig tree – a whole cloud of them, smaller than pinheads. I let them disperse, I’ve lived with spiders all my life and only once got a nasty bite. Besides, look at them! Oooo’s an itty bitty little spider then?

I’ve a respect for spider webs, the art of them, the engineering, and I love the way my porch is strung with crystal threads of dew-wet web every morning.

More likely to appeal to everyone’s taste: the many birds. This afternoon, there were two wild geese, three goslings, a grebe, a cormorant, a kingfisher and a flock of dipping, diving swallows at the dam.

I must say, it’s better than my last lodgings where the only thing that one saw in numbers were flies. I cannot like flies. I doubt anyone does – but I did like shooting them with rubber bands – much more fun than insecticide. Afterwards, I’d sweep the corpses into a little pile and see what my score was. Many. Perhaps it’ll catch on as a bloodsport someday.