More adventures in Italy! Once again, I completely fail to talk about anything cultural and just get excited about wildlife.

I've spotted surprisingly few mammals in Italy other than, you know, humans; I haven't even seen livestock grazing in the fields. But there are bats flitting about in the evenings, and at one point I saw a red squirrel! I didn't know there were red squirrels in Italy! I've never seen one before.

Or possibly even a black squirrel? I recognised the profile and tufted ears as a red squirrel, but it looked black to me; I thought it was just the lighting, but apparently Italy does have black squirrels with a similar shape. Not sure they have them in Umbria, though.

And then a hare ran straight past me! I was sitting on a stone wall above a boules court, I heard the thump-thump of its feet, and as I looked up the hare tore straight across the court and vanished down a slope.

Saw a deep fountain that not only had fish swimming around in it; it had a little black turtle!

My brother Joseph and I saw what appeared to be a grasshopper but was far larger than any grasshopper I'd ever seen, and then it flew away, which was also rather ungrasshoppery behaviour. No idea what that was. Maybe a locust?

Got prickled by a prickly caterpillar that had made its way onto my sleeve without my noticing. Cute, but mildly concerning. I waited in excited suspense to see whether it resulted in any skin irritation, but I think I got away with it.

I saw a hoopoe! I caught a glimpse of a bird with a weird crest on its head and went '??? is that some sort of... wild Italian cockatoo?'; turns out it was a hoopoe! Very cool bird.

Discussing my inability to drive with my brother and sister-in-law:

Riona: I just don't trust myself to operate anything that could kill someone.
Eleanor: Joe, do you think we should return Riona's birthday present?
Joseph: What, the Stabber 3000?
Eleanor: Which I always thought was a strange name for a gun.
Joseph: Well, not a gun that shoots knives.

Joseph and I stood in the garden at dusk, watching the flashes of a distant thunderstorm light up the clouds in the darkening sky, while fireflies nearby were 'having a fucking disco', in Joseph's words. At one point a bat flew past my head, surprisingly close.

There was one patch of soil from which I kept hearing noises suggesting a living creature moving around, but I couldn't actually see anything there. At night, though, I heard the noises again and shone my phone torch on the soil, and I saw little beady eyes gleaming back at me from a well-camouflaged body; it was a toad!

I asked Joseph if he wanted to see it, and he said Eleanor would want to as well. Eleanor was reading in bed, but I went to ask her.

'Eleanor, do you want to see a great big toad behind the poolhouse?' I asked.

'Yes,' Eleanor said, almost before I'd finished speaking, scrambling out of bed.

I took Joseph and Eleanor to see the toad, and Eleanor cooed enthusiastically and lovingly over it. As I headed off for bed, I looked up at the sky and saw a shooting star, which I assume was the universe expressing how glad it was that I was able to show Eleanor the toad of her dreams.