‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'‘, George Orwell, published in Tribune, 12 April, 1946.

The ‘he’ here is a male toad who has been spending his time - now it is spring - eating lots of small insects to build up his strength; so that he can swell ‘up to his normal size again and begin the business of mating.

Orwell’s essay on the toad has been my bedtime companion for the last few days. I have enjoyed imagining the toad getting his arm over a female toad, as Orwell puts it, or indeed anything at all he can cling to when he is in his phase of ‘intense sexiness.’ In this phase there is no difference between stick, finger or female toad.

Orwell’s essay has been a relief from thinking about politics. Instead, it has allowed me to imagine small, awkward and absurd things: creatures going about the ungainly business of sex, which is to say spring. Toads, to my mind at least, always clamber, while frogs hop. Toads, Orwell notes, are not appealing creatures, particularly when spawning; and yet he takes delight in their ungainly, injudicious coupling. A male toad will eventually find a female toad and clamber on top of her back. He is smaller than her, and so the whole business - in human terms at least - seems quite undignified. Orwell’s sentences combine practical statement with fondness for his subject:

You can distinguish males from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped around the female’s neck.

There is a lovely combining of fact and sympathetic feeling for the clingy toad who, in the next sentence we are informed, lays out his spawn in ‘long strings which wind themselves in and out of the weeds and soon become invisible.’

And so the business of mating takes on a more discrete and discreet approach; I imagine long necklaces of spawns threaded in and among pond weed. Orwell’s sentence end reflects the nature of a well-tied string of beads in which ‘and soon become invisible’ ties the knot at the end that reassures us these long invisible strings are safe. When I say reassuring I mean he knows how to end a sentence well.

Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then goes through a phase of intense sexiness.

Intense sexiness is a wonderful ending, as is ‘female’s neck’, as is ‘soon becomes invisible.’ The final sentence in this section ends with:

‘crawl out of the water to begin the game anew.’

Across an extended paragraph Orwell delivers these sentence tails. I think of them as tadpoles, the product of two toads mating:

intense sexiness

female toad

distinction of sex

female’s back

female’s neck

soon become invisible

begin the game anew.

What a witty visual summary of the male sexual plot.