This is the Friends of History Debating Society.

I'm John Batchelor in southern New England, where it is warm and has been thunderstorming for 24 hours,

going to continue for another 24 hours.

We've had a very wet spring, quite beautiful.

The tulips are gone, the daffodils are gone.

My lupins are here.

I have a tsunami of lupins across my big garden. There are other plants coming in. The lilies are about three and a half, four feet tall. They've got another month to mature. The tulip tree is doing well. Thank you very much. So is the white ash. I've just planted a half

tree, a half bush, wonderful, and my sumacs are doing well. That's springtime in southern New

England. What is not true is we don't have the reptiles that Australia has all year wrong. I did, Jeremy, today,

going out to the garden, see a garter snake, wiggle across the grass. I hadn't seen in a snake

for a long time going into the garden. I think it's because it's so wet, it's enjoying itself, moving very quickly, and I thought,

if this was Australia, I've got my shotgun out, I'm blasting away, because that would not be a

gardener snake. Nonetheless, it may be sympathetic to gardening and snakes. So when I went in, I checked

around, I was digging, I was putting in

plants bushes that I got last Sunday after church. And then I thought about snakes again. I

went looking for the gardener snake. Because they're about, oh, I'd say a foot and a half long maybe a little longer maybe 80 maybe

two feet long and they move very quickly and they're skinny nothing like what you've got jeremy

especially when what what you've got is in a pillowcase please tell the story well john this is another

horrible snake story from Australia.

In fact, this is now in Gympie Queensland.

So Gimpy's a smaller town to the north of Brisbane.

When I say smaller, still got maybe 50, 60,000 people.

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