Sluggish

Talking of flightless females, as we were, suddenly reminded me of a strange object I photographed in passing in the trap. It was small and shaped like a jelly bean but with more pointed ends. Could it, I wondered, be a female Pale Brindled Beauty which had crawled to the eggboxes to be with its handsome husband.

Alas, no. It was a slug. And if moths suffer from a bad image with some people - all that nonsense about crawling into ears etc - slugs have a truly awful one. They just aren't very appealing; and I regret to tell you that my twin uncles, who both later took Holy Orders, used to put slugs through my Granny's mangle at their home in Roundhay (when they were children).

Poor slugs. This one even looks as though he or she is slouching off in a mope; but that vague 'eye' on its flank to the right isn't an eye at all. The slug's head is the pointy bit with withdrawn 'feelers' on the left. I would be amazed if it converted you to slug love, but if you put 'slug' into Google Image, there are some impressively brightly-coloured ones.

When squashed, they also make incredibly good glue.