There is a blackbird singing in the sunlight in the garden. It is warm for a moment between the iron grey clouds that have drenched everything with spring rain. It is, just for these few minutes, golden outside. It is that time of year again.

Indeed, it has been building for a while and the full horror began yesterday.

The pond at my son’s home attracts frogs. Lots and lots of frogs.

When Nick took the house, there was a small, dingy pond in a grey garden. One of our most successful transformations was making the garden bright and beautiful, filling it with life, fragrance and colour and making it all accessible for him. It entailed huge amounts of work and timber and involved the extending of the pond. From a smallish hole in the ground a huge creation now runs below the deck, with a wide bridge across and a stream feeding a small waterfall. It is not yet at its best, but it is still pretty cool.

But we hadn’t reckoned with the frogs…

That first year of construction we saw a few. The neighbours have a small frog pond, so we simply assumed they were passing through to breed in the place of their own birth.

Now, I like frogs. They are wonderful creatures. The adventure of watching frogspawn evolve into froglets takes me right back to childhood in school… there was always a tank of frogspawn in spring. But of course, the stuff magically appeared in the classroom and we small children were blissfully unaware of the frenzied lengths involved in its production.

For some reason, I remained in this state of blessed ignorance. I had ponds myself… the odd frog or two…never any problems, merely the joy of seeing new life come into being.

Until, that is, last year.

It was bad enough having to check the drive before I pulled onto it. I did not like the idea of squashing frogs, though, so it was a necessary move. It was worse stepping on a dry leaf and having it hop away squelching. But it was fascinating watching the numbers build in the now completed pond. One morning I counted well over forty frogs.

Wonderful!

Till I saw what they were doing to the fish.

It took my younger son, a knight on a 600cc charger, to come and rescue the sturgeon from the blind passion of the frogs. Clamped around the fish’s head, their arms firmly embedded in their gills, they were killing them in their desperate attempts to mate.

Then there was the pond pump. Duly fitted with a grille to stop anything being sucked inside… yet one frog managed it and its poor mangled body had to be retrieved, heartachingly alive, from this whirring horror.

Frogs began to invade everything, including the house, throwing themselves at the glass door. We didn’t learn about this level of desperation in school.

For the past few days the numbers have been steadily building and I have watched in trepidation as the pond burst into life, a cascade of frogs  from every corner at every approaching footstep. Most of the sturgeon are big enough now to fend for themselves, we hope. The goldfish and koi seem fast enough to escape attention and do not swim at the bottom. I was beginning to hope this year would be different.

But yesterday the waterfall ceased to flow. Once again, my younger son had the traumatic experience of removing a frog from the mechanism. Not as badly damaged, thank goodness, but bad enough.

You can see how the conversation turned water-wards today. I am somewhat preoccupied. And Nick was hungry. So the subject, begun with frogs, turned to French delicacies such as frog’s legs and escargot and thence to seafood. Anything with legs is a touchy subject, but he is now learning about the joys of shellfish and things he would never have considered trying.

Of course, he blames me for that. Not because I never tried to get him to eat a varied diet as a child, because I did. It was perhaps the tale of the seafood platter I prepared for his father where half the shellfish escaped across the table and had to be hunted down, retrieved from cruet and salad bowl and brought back for cooking. They sell them live in France.

Oddly enough, I seldom eat shellfish since that particular adventure either… But Nick’s distrust of fish goes deeper.

The conversation reminded me of a song about a mariner that I had first heard back then, by a guy called Renaud.  I quoted a line to my son that had stuck, La mer c’est dégueulasse, Les poissons baisent dedans .

My son commented on the elegance of the language, bemoaning the fact the he is half French himself but cannot speak with that fluent eloquence and poetry.

I translated into the vernacular (cut and paste into a translator, folks).

His jaw dropped in horror.

For some reason, he didn’t fancy the fish pie he had planned for lunch today…. There are many things for which my son places the blame firmly upon the shoulders of his pet hobbit.. I have a feeling that particular image, firmly implanted in his mind, will be one of them.

Motherhood holds such joys.