Bob was a fish. Jeff tells us all fish are called Bob, but we only had one, so we only had one Bob. And he’s dead. Or ‘passed’ as people will horribly irritatingly say now.
Bob starred in one of my conflicts with my editor when I was writing Outwitting Squirrels. (Never miss a selling opportunity – still a best seller in Food & Farming Pest Control )
That book was actually one big battle with the editor and I could possibly write a book entitled Outwitting Your Editor. (My best trick was having his boss on my side)
Bad editor was always messing with my idiosyncratic prose, turning it back into the nice grammatical banalities he imagined everyone prefers. So here is my version of Bob:
I now have only one nitrogen producing fish left in the pond, a big fat monstrous thing which, when a baby, managed to avoid my emptying of the pond and disposal of all the other fish. I decided they were eating tadpoles and other aquatic creatures I’d rather keep, as well as polluting the water with their excrement. Not even the herons seem interested enough to come and eat this fish for us. So think twice before adding fish to your pond. They start off fascinating and sweet and end up big and ugly – and irremovable. Hence why one stayed, and now lurks fatly around under the water lily leaves.
You can guess which word Bad Editor tried to remove. Some of you will sympathise. Please don’t edit my next book.
Anyway, Bob was with us for something like 28 years, so it is really a sad day. However ugly and tadpole eating he was.
So we buried him.
And it’s just occurred to me that unless I go and put a big heavy object over his grave he will find himself being dug up again by the fox.
Xxxx
Aww RIP Bob. Yes do put something on top of him, we buried a baby hedgehog that died, or ‘passed’.. and put some logs on top until we got round to bringing a big rock up the hill, and by the afternoon he’d already been dug up and had disappeared. We blamed the fox family too.
I’m sorry to hear that! I put a heavy wheelbarrow over the site, and it’s still there, so fingers crossed…(wonder how long I have to leave it?!
at least you were kinder to Bob than when a heron pulled a carp out of Dad’s pond and left it for dead when chased away.
I asked him how the carp was.
‘Not very tasty….. ok fried in butter and garlic.’
You asked your Dad – not the heron?
‘Lurks fatly’ is wonderfully evocative
You refer to your book, Outwitting Squirrels. It seems very much like a book a neighbor here in Washington, DC, wrote. In fact, they are just about exactly, word for word, the same. Even the same cover. Wondering which came first.
His came first.Then my publisher bought the title and asked me to write a book to the title. I thought it was a mad idea but I agreed and wrote a book – about all garden pests I’ve encountered, not just squirrels. Amazingly it’s a continuing best seller, in spite of its rather odd origin.