After teaching this morning I took a turn round the little lake where I tried in vain to persuade some ducklings to model for me. They were reluctant as was the flock of grazing pigeons that departed rapidly as I approached them flat on my front doing my finest commando style crawl.

I stood up, the better to remove the physical evidence of their being by picking detritus from the yarn of my second best woolly when I spied in the grass what appeared to be the disembodied head of a pachyderm. Since discovering the front half of a goat in an apple box at the end of our lane on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr last year nothing surprises me any more.

The little lake is an offshoot of the large Banyoles lake and was probably formed years ago as an ox bow, although as it never dries out in summer it is probably fed by the underground springs that I have mentioned before. It is a breeding ground for mosquitos and those vicious little black flies that measure their lifespan in hours rather than days and fasten their crocodilian jaws on naked flesh with a fervour like a cannibal at an abattoir. So covered in doo do, bitten to shreds I was contemplating the elephants head when an unmarked van drew up and two men in white coats and carrying a net bore me off to a quiet place where they fed me purple drinks in a plastic cup and gave me coloured sweeties that made me very very happyI realised that what I was looking at was a grey stump and tree root.