Kate Connolly

My name's Kate Connolly and I am the Berlin correspondent for the Guardian newspaper.

Which is a serious job.

Yeah, and you want me to talk about slugs on doorbells.

It's true.

It was the tail end of the summer, what they call here the cucumber season.

Some people in a block of flats in the town of Schwabach had been woken late at night by persistent ringing on their doorbell.

And they had thought that it might have been kids from over the road doing a so-called bell prank, what the Germans would call a Klingelstreich.

And then the police came to discover that there was a slug, or you might be happy to learn the German word for this is a Nachtschnecker, which is a naked snail.

Yeah.

Code red.

And this naked snail was traversing the door entry panel where the bells were and leaving a lovely slime trail as it crawled over the sensors.

So the police had a field day with this and reported in their very serious statement to the local media that they had apprehended the animal.

They had brought it down to size and placed it on a nearby stretch of grass.

And after that, I'm afraid the trail goes cold.

We don't know what happened to the slug.

That's more or less as much as I can tell you.