Country diary: Meeting a frog at close quarters | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: It has been a strange road to spring this year, and full of omensThere's a frog in the watering can. Like a genie in a lamp or a spectre banished to a vessel, the surprise at seeing the frog makes them feel more real than the object that encloses them; they're ominous.Maybe the frog hopped into the watering can by accident and can't get out, but now they have appeared there is a connection between us. Like the 19th-century idea of abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of living organisms from non-living matter - it feels more like the workings of a seance than biology. Continue reading...