Kentish Express Ashford & District
Lines of beauty save slug artist’s life
Aslug escaped death thanks to its artistic talent. Dubbed ‘Slugsy’ (by us), the creative creature left the giant picture of a dog on a conservatory door last Thursday.
Ann George, from Kennington, said she was just about to pour salt on the unsuspecting creature when she realised it had left a slugsy glass-terpiece.
The trail along the condensation of Mrs George’s conservatory door looks remarkably like a large dog, or maybe a bear.
Mrs George, a multimedia consultant, said: “I spotted it on the conservatory window in the morning and thought it was a bit different.
“The artistic slug nearly had salt poured on it but after I realised what it had created I thought I’d leave it alone!”
What do you think of Slugsy’s work? Write to Kentish Express, 34-36 North Street, Ashford, TN24 8JR or email kentishexpress@ thekmgroup.co.uk
And talking of creating artwork, our story last week about a Spitfire making an emergency landing in a field near Woodchurch prompted regular Nuts and Bolts contributor Ted Prangnell to contact us.
He sent us this sketch that he created of a scene he witnessed during the Second World War, he thinks either in 1941 or 1942.
At the time, Ted was aged about seven or eight and living in Kemsing, near Sevenoaks.
Ted said: “The Spitfire made a forced landing in a field near my home. Although the wings came off, the pilot escaped unhurt.
“As we had no access to film or camera I made the attached sketch to record the incident instead.
“We saw other aircraft crash, not always as safely as that one, or Rob Davies’ landing in Woodchurch.
“I remember the Spitfire being taken away on a ‘QueenMary’ trailer. How it got along the Pilgrim’s Way I can’t imagine.
“The Spitfire crashed at a spot which is just about where the M26 is now, north of Sevenoaks.
“I had seen that smoke was coming from the engine and that it was in trouble.”
On another occasion, Ted witnessed a daylight raid by a solitary German Dornier bomber.
He said: “I saw it fly fairly low overhead and its bomb doors open, and then the bomb was released.
“The bomb landed in Otford, badly damaging a row of houses. Life was quite exciting at times!
“It was a bit of a cheek, really, flying over here on its own, with no escort, in broad daylight. But at that stage of the Second World War they probably thought that they had complete air supremacy.
“We were not sure what they could have been aiming for, but as well as the houses it nearly demolished a pub in the centre of the village.”
Life used to be so uncomplicated in the good old days. All you had to remember was the number of your house and the road it was in (in case you had an accident and the emergency services asked where you lived), your home phone number, and maybe your bank account number and sort code (and in those days only very rich or eccentric people had more than one bank account).
Fast forward and life is all about passwords, user names, security questions (eg, mother’s maiden name, your first pet’s name, your favourite singer, etc, etc).
And that’s without all the spam mail that plagues all our lives… Isn’t it amazing how many Russian girls are looking for some extracurricular activity in Ashford these days or how many ‘friends’ have just been mugged in Barcelona and desperately need cash sent out to pay for a flight home.
We don’t know about you but these days computers dominate our lives so much that remembering all the different passwords required to access bank and savings accounts, Twitter, Facebook and so on has become as difficult as learning a Shakespeare soliloquy.
And then if you ever try and make them all uniform (remembering of course not to include any date or birth or name references) one of your account/work log-ins will give that dreaded warning message: “Your current password will expire in seven days.”
So that means they are now out of sync and you need to spend hours trying to think if you changed the password to WHATEVER1234 or WHATEVER1235 when you next try to log on or log in.
Oh how we yearn for the days when new technology was one of those table-tennis games you used to play on your TV screen.