I NEVER thought I would hear my wife say the sentence “So Joan has 20 frogs.” It hung in the evening air, peculiar and somehow rather exotic, waiting for us to examine it further.
“That’s quite a lot of frogs for one small pond,” she continued as we walked through the village.
“Sounds like a serious collection to me; how does Joan know there are 20?”
“I think she frogmarches them all out every morning for a head-count,” I said matter-of-factly.
My wife was duly impressed, but remained slightly concerned because she has never been what you might call a huge fan of frogs, particularly the type I had just described. In fact, when I said they were as big as my hands and a slimy camouflage green, she shuddered and fell strangely quiet.
“With eyes like black glass beads,” I added for effect, “that stared right back at you, almost questioningly, I thought.”
My wife considered this scene for a moment.
“So how many did you actually see staring right back at you, questioningly?” she asked hesitantly, her moonlit face showing a temporary wince.
I said I had seen maybe a dozen, although it was hard to tell since the pond water was quite murky and full of floating plants.
“But at one point you would have thought the whole pond was just one giant frog,” I added enthusiastically. “They were all jumping over one another and slipping off and sliding around.”
There was a lot more of that kind of thing, but I was speaking to myself. My wife had been triggered into flight and I had been left walking alone down a delightfully-spooky, moonlit road that shimmered before me like a huge reptile.
In reality, my frog encounter had actually been slightly charming. I had heard them when I was standing at the door of Joan’s gallery, the hard-to-pronounce Tolquhon, near Tarves.
For a moment, I thought it might be my stomach grumbling for its lunch because it’s not often you hear a chorus of frogs in this country, particularly in someone’s garden.
“That’s our frogs you’re hearing,” said Joan, much to my relief.
“I didn’t realise you kept frogs,” I replied, all fired up at the thought.
“We don’t keep them as such,” corrected Joan. “They keep themselves in our pond.”
“Low maintenance, then; sounds like my kind of pets,” I mused as we walked down to the pond.
There was nothing to see at first, just a rather nice, larger-than-average-sized garden pond full of floating plants. The gallery sits on the crest of a hill, so I imagined the frogs must get a lovely view from this position.
Then one of them popped up, then another and before long at least a dozen of these large dark-green frogs were staring up at us, like spellbound princes waiting for the charm-breaking kiss to release them from their watery limbo.
If this was a fairytale fantasy film, all these frogs would have been visitors to the gallery that had fallen under Joan’s wicked spell and I was probably her next victim.
This was probably how she lured you in, a nice little trip down to the bottom of the garden to meet the frogs and then, bam, you are in the water and there is an amphibian slithering all over you.
Word had obviously got out because more frogs now turned up to meet us. Some sprawled out, long-legged and lazy, while others huddled in dopey-looking groups. Others just bobbed between the waterweed, trying to look coy and cute and, dare I say it, actually succeeding.
“They are strangely cute,” I said, and Joan agreed.
Then, as if we weren’t impressed enough, they spoiled it and started cavorting in what can best be described as a procreative fashion. Obviously, frogs have very high embarrassment thresholds, so we left them to it.
But they had obviously made quite an impression on me, to the extent that I reckon I must have been frog-tuned because, suddenly in the moonlit road in front of me, I saw one. Normally, I would have missed it and yet now in the half-dark it seemed quite obvious.
I called on my wife, who had the torch, and told her about my discovery, but she didn’t believe me.
“Honestly,” I shouted back. “It’s a huge frog; it must be the season for them.”
I reckoned it was probably between ponds and had been frightened by the torchlight.
“I’ll have to move it off the road,” I shouted to my wife.
“Well you can move it on your own,” she called back. “I’m not a paid-up member of frog rescue.”
I decided there was nothing for it but to run down and get the torch then bolt back before any traffic turned up and try to cajole the frog on to the safety of the verge. If necessary, I was prepared to pick it up, wearing one of my wife’s gloves, of course.
But just as I reached my wife, a car came over the hill, drove straight over the spot where I had left the frog and sped past us. My wife let out a small scream and then we stood in silence staring back up the road, where apparently I had thoughtlessly left an innocent frog to fend for itself against a big evil car.
“Well that’s probably the end of Freddie,” announced my wife emotionally.
“Freddie?” I said. “Who the heck’s Freddie?”
“Hopefully he didn’t feel a thing,” continued my wife.
A hundred yards on, my wife decided I had to go back and check on Freddie, so I did and took the torch with me. There was no sign of him, just a small mound of freshly flattened mud where I had left him. Apparently, my frog-spotting expertise owed a lot to my imagination.
“Looks like he made it,” I told my wife.
“Not one of Joan’s, then?” she asked.
“Hard to tell,” I said. “You know how it is: you’ve seen one frog you’ve seen 20.”