Come and see the toad, said seven-year-old Charlie. I humoured him by walking down the steps into our Pimlico road. There, sure enough, was a large toad. A real one. (It s a sad reflection on the times that our eldest son, William, thought it was a toad-shaped security device installed by the tenant in our basement flat.) How on earth did it get there? The nearest toad-supporting habitat is St George s Square but only a very lucky toad could have hopped across two London roads without being flattened.
William s unfortunate penchant for dropping defunct computers from our balcony to see what will happen has broken the cover to the rainwater drain; but a toad could hardly have made the foot-high vertical leap from the water surface. Besides, do toads live in sewers? Surely not.
A bird must have dropped it, proposes one friend. Or perhaps it was discarded by a child, who got tired of it, suggests another. Next day, the toad had gone, as mysteriously as it appeared. Toads are meant to be witches familiars. I think Prof McGonagall has been having fun with me.
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17 outstanding homes for sale across Britain, from under £250k to £6.5 million, as seen in Country LifeSomething for every budget in this week's round up of homes across the country that have come to market via Country Life.
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'We started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop': Aston's new bike has everything you could ever dream of — except a price tagThe new Aston Martin .1R bicycle, a collaboration with manufacturer J.Laverack, leaves Paul Henderson stirred rather than shaken.
