August already? Greeted this morning by a far-from-speedy chum, Mr G has decided to take this month at, well, a gastropod's gait.
Shakespeare mentioned snails some eleven times.
Most famously describing the schoolboy 'creeping like snail unwillingly to school'.
Tart-tongued Rosalind tells Orlando she'd rather be wooed by a snail than by him.
Why?
Because the snail comes complete with both his own house - and his destiny - horns, that dreaded, heavily freighted Shakespearean funny word.
But also very charmingly, in Venus and Adonis:
Or, as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again....
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