Woodlice.
This is a woodlouse. They always remind me a little of things that should be extinct, armoured and slow moving: they live under rotting trees and plantpots, trundling purposely from parliament to dandelion. Sociable creatures, the size of a fingernail.
I live in a small Victorian tenement flat. Like all flats, I have had mice, but now I have screaming plug-in mouse repellers, which work. It's only now that I realise the mice must have been eating the woodlice, because four months on, daily, a woodlouse meanders over the top of my sofa and down towards the netbook balanced on my knees. The sofa is white, the woodlouse dark grey. So every evening, I pick one up and take it down three flights of stairs to the garden.
Tonight, it suddenly struck me that there must be a whole woodlouse mythology around the sofa. A venture into the unknown: a place from which heroes never return: an Asgard, a Firmament, a Grey Haven. A casting of dice at fate. I wonder if the woodlouse is selected by lot, or choses, breath bated, to venture up the vertical white walls of this monstrous, mountainous unknown kingdom. I wonder if I have left sisters weeping and lovers mourned: if the green spaces and soft earth of our garden are indeed a new world or a barren wilderness.