You know how it is. You hear stories about animals surviving in the wild after being abandoned. The big cats of Dartmoor, Cornwall and the Cotswolds come to mind, and I happen to know that there are wild wallabies in Wiltshire because I know someone who’s seen them.
So when I heard stories about red-eared terrapins in my local park I took them with a massive pinch of salt, because surely it couldn’t be warm enough? The ones I’d seen at the marvellous Bournemouth Oceanarium are definitely kept in the warm. (That’s where I saw someone get bitten by a leopard shark. It was only nine inches long, but all the same, how cool is it for a small boy like my son was back then to be able to say that he’d seen someone being attacked by a shark? And I used the incident in the book that's coming out at the end of May under my Eleanor Neville pen name, thus proving that writers need to be watched carefully because we're always watching everyone else. It's called To be the best if you're interested... and I hope you will be.)
And then, yesterday morning, I retrieved a lost little girl who, as she put it, wanted to swim with the ducks. Needless to say, her mum didn’t want her strong-willed daughter to do that, so she was grateful and we got talking because I too have a strong-willed daughter and she suddenly said. “Look on the log.” I looked, and then I focused my camera on where she was pointing and there she or he was, snoozing happily in the sunshine!
Wow! Doesn’t begin to describe how I felt, but, along with the moon jellyfish in the salt water lagoon, they really made my day and taught me to watch a little more and not rule out anything happening.
Have you seen anything you wouldn’t have expected to? (Please note, a man putting his dirty socks in the wash basket and his wet towels on the towel rail doesn’t count.) If so, let me know because we live in an amazing world, don’t we?
And here, if you look closely, are my terrapin and a moon jellyfish. Quarter of an hour from home and just waiting for me to notice them!
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