My Dad, who being a keen gardener hated slugs, taught me that the best way to kill them was by pouring salt on them. Naturally, I passed this information on to my classmates, and the resultant carnage was worse than the daddy-long-legs genocide which had occurred a few months previously.

Dad, however, quickly tired of wasting good salt on mere molluscs, and was keenly researching new ways of making slugs die. One morning he proudly showed me how far he had managed to shoot a slug's innards after stamping on one end of it. They’d gone at least a foot.

That day at school, there wasn’t an unstamped slug in sight.