Early summer rain and hodmandods.

Raining today but really warm. Sitting at football in a T-shirt but trying to sketch an armadillo skeleton for my book plans whilst avoiding heavy raindrops. The badger set still is still enticing me, in the woods on the walk along the lane, but I have yet to see the badgers that my son saw a couple of weeks ago and I plan to stake out the set one evening next week to try to get some photographs. The wet warm weather has bought out the snails, there are gangs of them (* collective noun for snails - a 'slime' 'shell' ?) in the gardens on School hill, writhing groups all enjoying the security of the wet leaves, cloudy sky and humid air - still evolutionarily linked to the water of the distant sea from where these now earthbound molluscs once crawled. They are actually very beautiful and, even in large groups, surprisingly invisible with their mottled shells and careful considered movements. As a boy I used to collect them, no surprise there, and the smell of damp leaves or lettuce still reminds me of my buckets of snails in the shed. They frequently escaped, as did my cockroaches, and I recall the trouble caused at my father's work in hospital when they got out in his office having been bought in for me by his secretary.

Though not a cow I have horns;
Though not an ass I carry a pack-saddle;
And wherever I go I leave silver behind me.

The answer, in a curious little southern English dialect word, sadly long since defunct, is hodmandod