In Bermuda, every time it rains, it rains ..... toads from heaven. That "good tank rain'', as any road user will tell you, results in a biblical plague of frogs sitting plumb in the middle of the lane you happen to be driving in.

At first, I bought into the notion that the poor little critters were mesmerised by the headlights, but it doesn't hold up. It is toad propaganda, toadying behaviour. Nor can it be that they were all once princes now so bored by being toads that suicide is the only way out.

The fact is, they're just too stupid to know any better. This is a species whose idea of a great meal is a pile of dead flies, for Heaven's sake.

Mother Nature has a role for all her creatures, and the toad's is to live a short but undemanding life hopping around rock pools tonguing insects to death. Then, when the stars are aligned and the rain begins to fall, a million-year appointment with destiny drives them straight on to Middle Road, where they sit until your car ka-donks over them.

The front wheel does the damage, the rear one compacts and elongates the remains. Subsequent vehicles aid the compression process. In the fullness of the toady cycle, they will end up as flat as the veritable pancake, and go on to be worn as the sole on Mexican beach shoes, better known as chihuahuas.

The very worst Bermuda toad story I can muster is about frogs and took place in Ontario, but I'll lay it on you anyway.

The odd toad as you turn into your driveway can be swerved around, or may pass harmlessly between the wheels. Even if you are the maker it is waiting to meet, it's a quick ker-schplunk and a moment's queasiness. You are quite quickly, as the makers of Crunchy Frog chocolates in Monty Python put it, bound to think it was some kind of mock frog.

A female person of my acquaintance and I were driving a beat-up Volkswagen camper to the tip of Georgian Bay, a couple of hundred miles north of Toronto.

We were linking up with Bermudian friends newly returned from Africa, who had weekend use of a cottage up by the Bay. Quite why we had agreed to drive so far is one of those details that time has expunged, but what happened next is etched in hydrochloric acid and frog guts on my frontal lobes: it started to rain.

This was August. A full-blown storm unleashed itself. Summer lake rain, hard and heavy. Driving, particularly with the windshield dripping into my lap, became ever more difficult and dangerous. Visibility did not extend to the end of the VW's weak headlight beams. We were, however, horribly late in finding a bed for the night, and so pushed on grimly.

Then the frogs came out of the bushes.

One minute, the road was merely wet. Then it was wet and covered in frogs, kerb to kerb frogs. Frogs to the left lane, frogs to the right lane. Frogs on frogs. "Just like Paris, this road,'' said my companion. Her central European ancestors had fought a battle with France in the 13th century, and she had never forgiven them.

But it is of frogs that I sing. Medium-sized frogs, maybe three inches long, and me in a two-ton van stuffed to the gills with junk and people, flattening thousands of the little froggy fellows at 40 miles an hour. The mayhem went on for a very long time, three quarters of an hour maybe. Georgian Bay is reached by driving west-northwest up a lengthy and narrow peninsula with frogs all about it.

Roughly in this order, I went through the following thought process, to the accompaniment of the sound of a million vertebrae snapping into tiny shards: I'll have to stop; This might be the most disgusting thing that's ever happened to me; Nahh, not by a long chalk; I really, really ought to stop; It's 11:15; Oh well, I wonder what we'll do tomorrow? After that, I don't recall noticing the rain stop, or the froggy carpet run out, but I do know this: What's one more toad flattened by the Botanical Gardens at 3 o'clock in the morning, when you've single-handedly eradicated an entire generation of its cousins in some foreign field? NOVEMBER 1993 RG MAGAZINE