When I was a young child my dad was building an extension on our house. He dug a deep trench for the foundations and one morning I came down to find what my hazy memory suggests were thousands of baby frogs from a nearby lake. I spent some time ferrying buckets of tiny frogs from the trench to the top of our driveway in a bid to save them from their fate.

The following morning on the way to school I passed thousands of flat baby frogs on the road. I believe this early lesson may have inured me to the starkly beautiful viciousness of nature.