Hello. Sorry for the delay in replying. I was photographing snails.
read the message.
And it was very accurate too, because I was photographing snails instead of responding to my Whatsapps this morning. Here’s one of the photographs I took.
In this photograph, I’ve made the snail look really small by including a lot of background around it and restricting the actual snail to a minimal part of the image. But that was only partly by choice, because the snail in question actually was really small. The usual way of describing the size of something is to compare it to something that everybody knows the approximate size of. Like a double decker bus.
This snail was much smaller than a double decker bus.
You’d probably guessed that anyway though, given that if it was anywhere near the size of a double decker bus, I would have had to have been an awful long way away to get the shot above and that fact that there was a snail about the size of a double decker bus wandering around the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town probably would have made the news.
And rightfully so. After all, who among us could forget the great Fishhoek lettuce famine of 1958?
Double decker buses weren’t going to help here, so I employed a different standard, thus:
That’s a regular matchstick, and the snail is much smaller than it.
But dynamite comes in small packages (well, unless you buy it in bulk), and this little guy (and/or gal – cos hermaphrodites, innit?) didn’t see the matchstick as an obstacle: more as a wholly surmountable challenge.
I may have found the world’s first (and smallest) showjumping snail.
Now, I need to get back to those Whatsapps.
