BEACHCOMBER

100 YEARS OLD AND STILL TALKING TO GASTROPODS...

THE PLOT so far: Beachcomber has read some research suggesting that snails can take complex decisions using only two brain cells. He started talking to a snail about it yesterday but the snail had to rush off to eat some lettuce. Now read on:

The following morning I popped into the garden to see if the snail was busy and was delighted to see it already on the lawn waiting for me. “Are you free?” I asked. “I’d be delighted if we could continue our chat.”

“By all means,” said the snail. “Normally I’m a bit shy talking to people, especially gardeners, but I’m happy to come out of my shell for someone as distinguished as you.”

“You were telling me that you found the language a bit difficult in places in the paper in Nature about you using only two brain cells to take decisions,” I reminded him.

“Well for a start, they refer to ‘adaptive goal-directed decisionmaking’ in the title of the paper,” he said. “What do they think we are? Footballers taking penalties? Their research was about us finding food and eating it. They refer to ‘encoding motivational state acting as a gain controller for adaptive behaviour in the absence of food’. What’s that about? We’re hungry, so we find food and eat it. There’s no need for long words.”

“That’s more or less what I wrote yesterday,” I said, “but you’re being too modest about your skills. Humans get in an awful tizzy about choosing what to eat and where to eat it.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve read your column about tortellini and smoked eel and elderflower and Elwy Valley lamb and duck foie gras and pickled girolles, cherries and pine nuts and turbot. Frankly, I’d rather have a leaf of lettuce without any dressing, thank you very much. It makes decision-taking so much easier. I hate to think how many brain cells you must be wasting.”

I paused and pondered what the snail had said then looked him straight in the eyes and said, accusingly: “You’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”

“Too right I am,” he said, his eyes popping out at me as though on the end of stalks. “And you, I would suggest, have spent too much time eating at places such as Frenchie’s in Covent Garden.”

I was astonished. “You actually recognised the items I mentioned as having come from the menu at Frenchie?” I asked.

“So I was right,” he said, oozing slime with an air of self-satisfaction. “Being of a French inclination, I strongly suspect they’re the sort of people who eat snails and encourage others to do the same. And you, I imagine, are also of that opinion.”

I blushed with embarrassment and was rather flustered for something to say. Unconvincingly, I eventually came out with, “Oh, not nice chatty English garden snails. I only eat French snails, cooked in garlic butter, or perhaps some piquant sauce.”

“I knew it,” he said. “My brain cells don’t just ask ‘is that food?’ and ‘am I hungry?’. They also ask ‘does he eat snails?’ and ‘should I hightail it out of here?’” And with that, he slurped off.