We cannot always choose our travelling companions

Obsessed with perfect paths and tucked-away tracks, Will Gore considers a horrific encounter with giant slugs, in the third reflection in this new series

It’s a fair bet that the guidebooks for the Auvergne district don’t mention the slimier breed of natives (Getty)

Slugs; thousands of them. Well, hundreds. Dozens at least. In fact, I actually saw just three – monsters each – but it would have been more had my mother not been walking ahead, covering as many of the slimy beasts as she could with fallen leaves. I didn’t find out about that till much later.

It was our first foreign holiday, a fortnight in the lush Auvergne region of France. We had driven and ferried from Cambridgeshire – in the days before flying became cheap – and arrived at the stone holiday home, with its shuttered windows and flagged floors, under blue skies. My brother and I immediately found a football to kick around the scrubby ground next to the whitewashed gable wall.