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them had hauled themselves out on to a rock under their heat lamp to digest their huge meal, and only the head and some of the spine of the axolotl remained – it was clearly not going to be regenerating. I was distraught, and feel awful to this day when I remember the incident.
    In my early teens I acquired two young Argentinian horned toads: fabulously devilish-looking beasts, multicoloured in green, orange and black splodges, with capacious mouths. When fully grown, they can reach nearly thirty centimetres in length and are said to be able to swallow a rat. They thrived for a while, until one swallowed the other. I found the pair of them dead, the aggressor having presumably choked on its meal, with the feet of the victim still protruding from its mouth.
    Undeterred, I tried keeping a White’s tree frog. This was a charming little creature, turquoise-blue with huge, sticky fingertips. Unfortunately I did not appreciate the need to add a calcium supplement to its diet of insects, and it developed rickets; its leg bones became flexible, so that it had difficulty hopping. I quickly purchased some calcium and started sprinkling it on the frog’s food, but its limbs hardened in deformed shapes. Nonetheless the frog survived and managed to get about, albeit somewhat awkwardly. It lived for a while, until one day I must have left the lid to its tank slightly ajar and it somehow squeezed out. I searched high and low for it, but to no avail. It was nearly two years later that I found the hapless creature in the tip of an old pair of trainers, where it had clearly decided to hide. It had presumably died of dehydration (or perhaps the smell), and its body had mummified.
    That was my last attempt to keep amphibians as pets – clearly they were too tricky for someone as incompetent as me to look after. Sadly, as we shall see, this was not the last time I was to accidentally inflict misfortune on these fascinating creatures.
    In the late summer of 2003, a few months after taking over ownership of Chez Nauche, I took a party of twelve students from the University of Southampton down there to blitz the renovations. There was a daunting amount to do on the old place to make it even remotely habitable, and having a small army of volunteers seemed like a good idea. In exchange for two weeks’ labour I offered to pay for their travel costs and provide them with as much food and cheap red wine as they could consume (rather a lot, as it turned out). It was an ill-thought-out plan, for only one of them had any building experience; and I had not anticipated the difficulties in coordinating and overseeing the activities of a gang of novices armed with power tools when I myself had little idea what I was doing. It is a small wonder there was anything at all left of the old place by the time we had finished, and even more surprising there were no major injuries.
    On the first day I divided the students up into work parties. One gang demolished a section of old leaky roof, hurling down the broken clay tiles while perched like monkeys on the old, rotting roof timbers. A second group knocked out the rotten windows and door frames, so that there was soon broken glass all over the floor, while a third party set to demolishing some internal walls. I ran around like a headless chicken trying to give advice and avoid catastrophes. The old building echoed to the sound of crashing tiles, the thump of sledgehammers and the ear-splitting whine of the angle-grinder. To my considerable dismay, in all the chaos a lovely old ceramic sink and some ancient wooden-framed classroom slates that I had found in the loft were smashed. If there is a French equivalent of English Heritage, they would have been horrified to see what was going on. On the other hand, progress was pretty rapid, and great piles of broken tiles, old bricks and rotten window frames began to accumulate along the front of the house. It was hot work, and the rust-red dust stuck to