Did you study science?

I have it, seems always been an arty farty with a maths rising, which means that the arts have always been my passion even though I have studied more than my share of mathematics and until I turned 40, when I decided out loud that I would never do maths again,  I was pretty good at it. Yeh I will put up half a finger and admit that still if needs must and all that, I can usually find the right answer, I just routinely choose not to bother.

But science is another kettle of fish altogether. I got to the ripe old age of 15 and celebrated that my last ever science class was well and truly behind me. I rejoiced that never again would I be faced with a rat pegged out on a board or a bunch of chemical shit that could potential blow up the desk, and the only reason I would ever have to look up into the night sky was to wonder if the moonlight was too bright to hide the making out going on at the back of the garden.

Yeh I hated science. Or maybe for full disclosure, I was not keen on the fella teaching it, perhaps because he was having something of a sordid affair with my best friend, but that's a whole other story.

In a sideways, sort of sly sneaky chinese water drip torture way, some science snuck in while I was looking at geomorphology and weather and climate and vegetation, but I pretended that that really didn't count, and when I was teaching all that stuff it was not easy to generate a great deal of enthusiasm for it. I was much more entertaining discussing the human geography issues than the environmental ones.

But I have recently been lamenting my lack of biology studies.

My fish, my girls, live in a fab pond, and they have grown to be bigguns over the years. No not big enough to sling on the BBQ wrapped in foil and stuffed with leeks and butter, but they are pretty big. The trouble is they do shit like mad and all this stink is supposed to be absorbed by the plants I have growing in the pond, except that I am not a gardener and the bloody things keep dying, so the shit builds up. Sometimes it is a bit on the nose.

So my mate at the fish shop said to put in some blue chocolate things every now and then and that maybe some snails would be good cos they eat up all the poo. Snails are cheap and you don't get too attached to 'em. The life cycle of mine seems to be, live in the pond, eat fish shit, get bigger, and then die and then I think the girls might have a go cos I find the empty shells and fling 'em onto the garden cos the calcium might be good for the plants...is that right?

But recently there have been these bunches of white splodge on the pond edge and on some of the plant leaves. Now my first thought was that they were the eggs of some awful insect and I was about to squash the shit out of those suckers, when I wondered if they might not be from the snails. Onto google and because I am a scientific idiot, I have found it hard to find out what the hell's going on. The closest I have been able to find today is that land snails are hermaphrodites, but fresh water ones need nookey to make eggs and that these eggs take about 4 weeks to turn into little snails which by the sounds of it, won't survive the girls, cos they are born with no shells. I guess my excitement about never having to buy snails again was premature.

I guess the real point is that even though I have not studied science per-say, just day to day living with occasionally removing your head from your arse, some science sort of tumbles in there.

Is there anything that you stubbornly refused to know about but now wish you hadn't?