Only in England?

Yesterday the kids and I were about to start cooking breakfast when Katherine suddenly said, “A slug!”  I followed her pointing finger to a little brown slug stuck right to the front of my oven, in the middle of my kitchen.  Spiders, moths, flies, all those I understand in a country that doesn’t appear to believe in using screens on its windows.  But slugs???  I didn’t leave the door to the garden open overnight, so I am curious to know how he got in.  Slugs are everywhere here, as plentiful as the earthworms I’m used to seeing from home.  And snails.  And mole hills (for awhile we wondered if it was some sort of peculiar “English” landscaping method).  And even the occasional hedgehog.  I now understand why these “strange” creatures are so plentiful in the Beatrix Potter stories I read as a kid, and that I’m now reading to Katherine and Nathaniel.  And, after watching our neighbors’ herbs be consumed by slugs, I have no desire to try gardening here. 

Erin