Friday 6 August 2010

Not just peas in this pod



A brief break from the glories of Paxos today, to tell you about our pea drama. I am inordinately proud of managing to grow enough peas this year - see above - to actually accompany several meals, rather than the token helping served with a mighty fanfare in years gone by. Our younger son has been visiting, however, and was naturally suspicious of anything homegrown by us. His fears were justified. We've also had two Australian friends staying and one of them, Helen Versey, who is the privacy commissioner for the state of Victoria (roughly equivalent to heading our data protection agency), was very stern about investigating the hidden interior world of the more wizened-looking pods.



Here is what she found, above, wonderfully photo-ed by her husband David Brown whose digital camera is a machine to behold in awe. I was all for adding it to the pea pile; as David said, it must essentially be a pea in different form since it had nothing else to eat in its secret world. But others demurred. We did have the rest of the crop, however, with pasta and prawns. I enclose proof, right. Incidentally, we called the little creature a maggot, but maybe it is something more distinguished. There is a moth which I have always wanted to trap, called the Cream-bordered Green Pea, but it eats osiers, sallows and willow and is anyway very rare. There is no need to be scared of maggots btw. I recall fishermen in Whitby keeping them in the pouches of their cheeks, and also writing about a maggot farm at Thornton, near Bradford, where people with respiratory diseases used to be taken in the belief that the stench somehow did them good.

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