Trapped between tadpoles
| April 24, 2011 | Posted by Georgie Tindale under lifestyle, national, satire |
I don’t know about you, but from my childhood, the warm weather always provides the most vivid and exciting memories for me to wonder over. Maybe it’s due to the excess light which the warmer weather never fails to bring; it seems to turn up the colours to maximum setting, and as strange as it seems, the intensity of memories always follows suit.
As a child, like many of my generation, I built dens all around the garden (irritating my parents beyond measure with my tactful purloining of sofa cushions), and through this managed to come up with intricate life stories for my dolls (some of which seem rather worrying in their similarity to the novels of a certain Mrs Jacqueline Wilson), but more importantly I also cultivated my passion for tadpole farming.
In case the life cycle of a tadpole has failed to grip you as it did to the pre-pubescent me, I should mention that up to the first 21 days of its life after being a single cell, the potential tadpole is simply one of a huge mass of frogspawn (which to my childish delight turned out to have the ideal consistency for practical jokes), until eventually it hatches into a tiny, poorly developed creature which is known as a tadpole. Unfortunately for the tadpole, it is all too easily eaten by the huge gold and yellow sharks which frequent the pond, and at this stage of its life it has no chance of survival.
Are we tadpoles? Sometimes our society seems to be a green and black pond, carrying unforeseen trials (lily pads, the neighbouring cat, the deficit and so on), and I can’t help but realise how many tadpoles like myself there are, and the dangers that our own shiny fish politicians can pose if we aren’t always on our guard. Not only that, but is there any way to make someone feel more of a single entity than by giving them an assigned candidate number for exams? It is an exceptionally good way of making us feel without identity, and I’m sure there is something mildly Orwellian to say on the matter.
There are harsh facts which face us pond dwellers; there are almost a million of us unemployed and we never cease to hear toadying around about the “gang cultures” and “youth crime” we have all apparently helped to create. To further the issue, out of the eggs that the mother frog produces, only 5 out of 2000 will survive to adulthood, a sorry fate for the others who will never reach the croaking stage.
As we all know, in our ever-changing pond, things just happen which we cannot possibly predict. A fateful moment is ingrained forever in my mind, when the tub in which I was protecting my bounty (from fish related harm of course) dropped out of my clumsy hands and capsized into the nicely turned over flower bed. As much as they gasped in mud through partly formed gills, and as much as I desperately tried to save a centimetre of slippery skin, there was no hope.
But as troubling as the incident was, when it is separated from our own society, I don’t believe we’re quite fully submerged in the dirt yet. Despite the swathes of soil which are thrown at us on a daily basis (from less amiable pond dwelling creatures), I know that we can fire them straight back again.
As the spring approaches with full gusto I’ve been watching the transformation from spawn to poles with eager anticipation, and I’ve long learnt the lesson that many older creatures have yet to fully set in their minds; that is, if you try to contain the tadpoles for too long then eventually they will hit the dirt.
On a lighter note, perhaps if we’re lucky, one day we’ll finally realise our dream of serving our favourite politician with chips.
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As with your article on mangos, another excellent metaphor for those things in society we should all be concerned about. I also enjoyed the smooth use of the word ‘toadying’
I enjoyed reading that. Although I’ve never had a passion for tadpoles, or any wildlife for that matter, myself, I can see the joy that these creatures bring people. The Orwellian aspect of the candidate number also never occurred to me.
That said, I do feel the links made to our own society were at times a bit tenuous, and there didn’t seem to be any underlying message. Call me short-sighted if I’ve missed one, but I prefer the story about the tadpoles.
I can’t fault the quality of your writing though.
Thank you so much for the useful comments, and I’d just like to respond to your last comment,
I agree about the links being tenuous, to be perfectly frank I just remembered the anecdote and decided I’d like to share it as a story, the links were probably less focused than they should have been!