This is Sydney the Slow Worm. Last week he appeared from a hole in the stone wall underneath my back door, got caught in the wrought iron door mat and before my eyes shed his tail enabling him to escape and wriggle back into the hole in the stone, leaving his tail behind him. I was beside myself with fear. I knew he wouldn't hurt me but they do slither, wriggle and do look like snakes. I know they are lizards with ears and eyelids but they are big and I don't want one as a lodger. I know they are a protected species.
My carpenter arrived on Saturday to hang a new back door. I warned him about the Slow Worm and as he took the old frame out the Slow Worm leapt out of the hole so the carpenter threw it over a huge hedge into the next door field.
This morning as I went to open my front door there was Sydney the Slow Worm inside the porch. I heroically lifted him out with a stick and threw him onto the front path. It is the same Slow Worm because half of him is in my back garden and this one has the blunt end where his tail used to be. He found his way home across a field, over gardens and pathways and predators.
I'm proud of his determination. I am talking to him and offering him a hole in my stone wall on a permanent basis on the condition that he doesn't come indoors.
Imagine him twice that length?