More Memories

Yesterday’s blog about International Women’s Day sparked more memories.

 

As an entomologist, specifically a carabidologist/coleopterist specialising in ground and water beetles, Fester always carried a sieve, some lidded tubes and a shampoo bottle full of alcohol on his foreign travels. 

 

To be fair he did find a beetle new to science in a wheel-rut near Agrigento in Sicily.   

There was a time when he used to carry an electron-microscope photograph of its genitalia in his pocket and opened conversations with the chat up line:

“Would you like to see my beetle’s prick; it’s the shape of an old fashioned tin opener?”   

Fortunately, for him, I’d known him for some years before he discovered it.

 

Our trip into the Italian Alps ended in a village where I sat by a rushing mountain stream, enjoying the view, while he teetered at the edge of it.

 

Most visitors to Florence walk across the Ponte Vecchio, window shopping, and queue to go into the Uffizi museum to see Michelangelo’s David.

Not us.

We took a flight of steps down to the edge of the River Arno where Fester swept the water with his sieve, then stood peering into and poking the contents with a finger.*

Bemused Italians looked over the parapets and one elderly gentleman enquired “Pesca?”

“No” I replied “water beetles” (my O’level French and Latin were no use in this situation).

He appeared to be no better informed and probably went away convinced that the English are mad.

 

* When I read this blog out to himself he informed me “I got Noterus clavicornis in the Arno”, which is not a painful disease but a beetle.