Madagascar (Part Three)

The Indri (Indri indri)

Early settlers were – perhaps understandably – uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing the island with primates the size of gorillas, and upheld new-settler tradition by systematically slaughtering them all. As a result of this attrition, the indri is now the largest lemur on Madagascar.

The creature’s name comes from one of those pleasing misunderstandings which show that naturalists can be just as reassuringly dim as the rest of us. In this case it was Frenchman Pierre Sonnerat who failed to spot that, in the native Malagasy language, ‘indri’ just means ‘there it is’. You’d have thought M. Sonnerat might have overheard the phrase before in other incidents involving shouting and pointing, but perhaps he had other things on his mind.

The correct local name for the indri is babakoto, which translates as ‘ancestor’. Indri have traditionally been protected by taboos, or fady, because of their perceived resemblance to the sacred forebears of the Malagasy.

It’s the indri’s human-like behaviour, including a predilection for early-morning sunbathing – eyes closed, legs crossed, plams of the hands offered to the sunshine – and a complex system of communication calls involving roars and wails with a range of up to two kilometres, that backs up this resemblance.

It may sound as if the indri has a pretty easy time of it compared with some of its compatriots, but of course it’s not as simple as that. There’s not much consistency across the island when it comes to belief systems, and the fady which supposedly protect the indri vary widely from one area to another. In one location it may be taboo to eat an indri, but not to catch one and sell it to someone whose beliefs allow them to put in the pot.

In almost every case Madagascar’s endangered species are victims of agricultural policy. The slash-and-burn techniques, which give temporary viability to poor soil, reduce natural habitat by destroying forests and expose the soil to erosion, damaging hillsides and silting up lakes.

With its natural habitat in decline, Madagascar’s wildlife is increasingly forced into unwelcome contact with humans. As in most other parts of the world, this is almost entirely disastrous for the animals.

Imagine the scene. A Malagasy peasant – possibly the same one who shot the jumping rat earlier, possibly not – is trudging home after a long day, tired, hungry and starting to become a little unnerved by the forest’s lengthening shadows. There might be evil spirits in these parts, or so his granddad used to say.

And then he sees it, clinging to a tree in front of him, picked out by the beam of his torch. It’s a creature so weird and unnatural that he lets out a scream of terror. Then he feels silly. He looks again. The animal is regarding him with malice and a hint of mischief from enormous eves. Then, as he stands transfixed, the creature raises a long middle finger and flips him the bird.

Coming next - the Aye-Aye

Madagascar (Part Two)

Thanks to gentle nudging from a man in Iowa, here's the fossa...

The Fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox)


Despite looking like a cross between a dog and a puma, fossa are actually members of the viverrid family – a group which includes the mongoose. They’re efficient predators, and aren’t at all fussy about their diet. Fossa will happily dine on insects, reptiles and rodents, and are agile enough to take to the trees to go after lemurs.

Near villages, fossa will also prey on chickens and other domestic animals, and as a result are hunted as vermin. In Malagasy folklore it is often claimed that fossa will attack cattle or even humans, but this seems unlikely. They do, however, have a reputation for unpredictability – there are stories of fossa wandering fearlessly into field camps, ransacking unoccupied tents, chewing boots and eating the soap.

It seems likely, however, that the real reason the animals are unpopular with the Malagasy is that fossa have great sex and people are just jealous. Firstly, the unrepentantly shameless females will sometimes mate with up to eight males a day, and both males and females are pretty enthusiastic.

Naturalist Nick Garbutt writes: “Copulation is noisy, with both sexes purring, snorting and shrieking, and, if uninterrupted by other males, can last several hours.” More often than not they do it in the branches of a tree, which is really just showing off. Fossa cubs stay with their mothers for around twelve months, meaning that females mate only every other year, which explains their joyous promiscuity when they finally get the chance.

Madagascar has a long history of interference from the outside world – the Arabs established trading posts as far back as the 7th century, the first European contact came in the 1500s in the shape of the Portuguese, and the island didn’t gain full independence from France until 1960.

Despite this, Madagascar’s indigenous culture has proved fairly robust and over half the Malagasy still practice traditional religious customs – the rest of the population are mainly Christian, with Moslems making up around ten per cent of the total.

Traditional religion in Madagascar emphasises links between the living and the dead. During the ceremony of ‘turning the dead’ - famadihana in the local language – the bodies of deceased relatives are taken out of their tombs, dressed up in nice new shrouds and carried around over the heads of the crowd for a while with much singing and dancing before they’re put back. Of the Christian clergy, the dour and repressed Protestants condemn the practice, while the Catholics, being fond of a good party, will often join in.

The Malagasy believe that their ancestors are deeply concerned with the activities of their decendants. They also, apparently, believe that their ancestors were covered in thick black fur with round, tufted prominent ears, yellow-green eyes and a bemused expression.

Next - the Indri

Madagascar (Part One)

I'd pretty much forgotten about this - I wrote it a while back as a college assignment. (My tutor didn't think much of my sense of humour and gave me a C. Miserable bitch.) It runs to a little over 2500 words, so I'll post bits over the next week or so. I have yet to sell it in anywhere...


The island of Madagascar lies in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. On a map it looks, in the words of writer and naturalist Gerald Durrell, “like a badly presented omelette.” About the size of France, it’s the fourth largest island in the world – Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are the top three – and is home to over 200,000 species, 80 per cent of them unique to Madagascar, and many of them in danger of extinction.

Whether we like to admit it or not, there are some species whose endangered status comes as no surprise. These are the creatures which somehow managed to find a quiet, secluded spot to hide while natural selection went blundering past. Through a combination of a fortunate location and a lack of competition from animals which are just, well, better at being animals, they have managed to survive, and in some cases even to prosper until fairly recently in evolutionary terms.

Until around 160 million years ago, Madagascar was attached to the African mainland – part of the super-continent Gondwanaland, which also contained Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India. As the continent broke up, Madagascar began to move away from Africa. The first lemur-like primates surfaced on the mainland about 60 million years ago and crossed to Madagascar soon after.

By the time monkeys appeared as the bright, confident, competitive new kids on the block, a mere 17–23 million years ago, the island was far enough east to be isolated and its wildlife safe from their attentions.

Madagascar’s diverse and teeming fauna flourished until the arrival of man, thought to be as recently as 2,000 years ago. Early settlers followed the same pattern as everywhere else on the planet by killing everything slow or stupid enough to be caught, big enough to look dangerous, or small enough to fit in a cooking pot. Viewing wildlife as lumps of protein rather than creatures worth preserving is an attitude still prevalent in some parts of the island today.

Although the island has an enlightened approach to animal conservation in theory – it has, for example, been illegal to kill lemurs or keep them as pets since 1964, and there are a number of protected national parks – the authorities continue to struggle with the difficulties of policing such a huge area.

Another problem is that Madagascar is one of the world’s poorest countries. Not long ago the island’s economy was fragile enough to have been sent into a tailspin by Coca Cola changing to a recipe containing less vanilla - a major Madagascan export - only for the economy to recover on the introduction of vanilla-rich Coke Classic.

The average Malagasy has an income of less than $300 per annum, and only 30 per cent of the island’s population of around 19 million lives in cities. The rest are dependent on agriculture, often at subsistence level, and are competing for resources with some of the planet’s most endangered species.

It’s all too easy, then, to imagine a scenario where a Malagasy farmer might be peacefully making his way home through the forest at dusk, his mind elsewhere, when a huge rat erupts from the vegetation of the forest floor like one of the more sophisticated types of landmine and hangs in the air in front of him, defying gravity just long enough for him to raise his shotgun and give it both barrels.



The Malagasy Giant Jumping Rat (Hypogeomys antimena)
The size of a domestic rabbit, the giant jumping rat has developed the ability to leap a metre into the air. While entertaining, this is unconvincing as a survival measure, as all even a dim-witted predator has to do is to stand still and wait for the rat to come down again. The ability to leap into the air and then immediately hurtle a kilometre sideways, or twenty minutes into the future, would obviously be better, although no doubt both those techniques would have their drawbacks.

Perhaps the rat relies on the predator feeling so embarrassed at missing its prey that it just keeps going, blushing and hoping none of its friends have seen it. Or, just maybe, the rat has heard that its major nemesis, the puma-like fossa, is also endangered, and thinks that it may be able to stay in the air long enough for the fossa to become extinct. It’s a bit unlikely, but who knows what a rat thinks?

Although the rats’ spring-loaded hindquarters are an interesting development, a better evolutionary tack would have been the ability to produce more offspring. Jumping rats are commendably but fatally restrained in their sexual practices – they are monogamous – and a litter usually consists of only one or two young, many of whom are lost to predators, both the indigenous fossa and introduced species like cats and dogs.

In fact the rat is at risk not from being used as target practice by nervous Malagasy peasants, but, inevitably, from the loss of its habitat to farming – the slash and burn approach to agriculture is still rife in Madagascar and impacts almost all the fauna on the island, herbivore and carnivore alike.

Coming next - the fossa.

Sounds like...

Even though I left Belfast in 1973, I still have quite a strong Northern Irish accent. I didn’t realise how strong until a few months back. I was in a pizza restaurant in London with a bunch of Soo’s pals and their partners. (In a rare attack of culture we’d been to The Globe Theatre to see The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was reasonably funny by Shakespearian standards. Which is not that funny, actually.)

Anyway, as all of us are middle-aged or worse, it didn’t take long for the conversation to come around to health, good and bad. Someone asked me about the medication I take to control my blood pressure. “Atenolol,” I said, “and amlodipine.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” they said, “Do you take anything for it?”

“Yes,” I said, “Atenolol and amlodipine.”

“But do you take anything for it?”

“For what?”

“For the pain.”

“What pain?”

“You said you were in a lot of pain.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

And so on. For about five minutes. Eventually one of us (I can’t remember which one) realised what the rest of you probably figured out a while back – in a noisy pizza place my accent makes the word “amlodipine” sound as if I’m complaining about searing agony.

How we laughed. And how empty our lives must be, to find hilarity in such meagre things.

God Bless Us, Every One

Five months since putting anything on here – it’s a damned disgrace. And when I do decide to come back it’s inspired by another TV programme…

Disappointingly, Eoghan Quigg’s failure to win the final of The X-Factor this weekend didn’t result in civil disorder in his native Northern Ireland. Based on the carefully orchestrated teen hysteria which met the Quiglet when he went home for a visit last week, his relegation to third place in the competition should at least have resulted in a burning car or two.

After all, apart from drinking, urban violence is what the Northern Irish do best, and it’s a shame to let something like that just fade into the background, especially when you’ve got what is, compared with some of the previous reasons for burning down the neighbourhood, a perfectly serviceable excuse.

Let’s hope the recession will result in enough unemployment, poverty and subsequent boredom and bad temper to get Ulster’s disaffected youth back out on the streets where it belongs. I bet there are literally dozens of policemen in Derry these days who’ve never had even a piece of paving stone thrown at them, never mind a petrol bomb. Bunch of pansies.

The most interesting thing about The X-Factor is, of course, the procession of self-deluding lunatics we’re invited to laugh at in the first few episodes, as the programme consistently produces finalists who are merely third-rate versions of Mariah Carey or Westlife. This year’s winner was kicked off the show three years ago for not being good enough, and guess what? She still isn’t.

Quigg was, inexplicably, tagged as “cute” throughout the show, despite looking like the result of a hideous but fruitful sexual encounter between Dickens's Tiny Tim and a ventriloquist’s dummy. The programme supplied him with a vocal coach, but not, tragically, with someone who could teach him to smile like a real boy. Never mind, despite the bronze medal, Quigg has probably got a bright enough future, as long as he’s happy with his name coming just in front of the words “now appearing in Puss In Boots at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester.”

Bonekickers

This may be the wrong place to recommend a TV programme, and I have to confess that I've only watched one out of the first three episodes, but I have to mention this piece of truly awful dross for (at least) two reasons.

The whole sorry enterprise is about a quartet of unconventional, wisecracking, maverick archaeologists who shout a lot and have adventures, and if your instinctive response to that is to make sure the safety's off and there's a round in the chamber, then you're pretty much on the right track. It's the same gut reaction as that early encounter with the sado-masochistic albino assassin monk in the Dan Brown thing. You expect the worst, and that's precisely what you get.

Anyway, here's why you should still watch it. Firstly, Bonekickers is, quite possibly, the most laughably dreadful "drama series" the BBC has ever commissioned, and should be required viewing for anyone contemplating writing a screenplay, in terms of "under no circumstances do it ANYTHING like this unless you want to be laughed at".

We're talking serious bad here; plot lines, dialogue, characterisation, casting, lighting, editing, special effects, background music - all completely atrocious. If Bonekickers isn't in the "Dire Warning" section of every film studies course in the country within a couple of years, then I'm not a bald, portly Irishman with a bad attitude. And I am.

Secondly, while I'm not often a supporter of the "so bad it's almost good" school, d'you know, it almost is. After flinching and rubbing my eyes in disbelief a few times during the first five minutes I started to snort and giggle quietly to myself, a response I maintained for the rest of the show. I shall be watching the rest of the series, because, having found a programme that can make me laugh out loud after spending all day writing press releases about plasterboard I'm not going to turn my back on it.

On a scale of one to ten, Bonekickers is off the scale. In both directions.

The Hill District

We’re off for a week’s holiday in the Lake District. For the benefit of my one regular American visitor (and here I’m using “regular” in the sense of “reasonably frequent” rather than “average”, because Bob’s from Iowa, and who the hell knows what’s average for Iowa?) I should explain that the Lake District is a district in England where there are a lot of lakes.

And hills. It could quite justifiably be called the Hill District. But it isn’t, so let’s not waste any more time on that one. What most people do when on holiday in the Lake District is climb the hills and look down at the lakes, unless they can’t be bothered, in which case they sit by the lakes and look up at the hills.

Of course, if you actually live and work in the Lake District it’s likely that you ignore the hills and lakes and just complain that it rains all the time, which it does. Hence the lakes. And the clever name.

Anyway, it’s a place I love. If you can handle slightly demanding hill walking (the kind of walking where you might have to use your hands occasionally – the guidebooks call it a “scramble”) it’s quiet and still, and the air tastes like spring water, and there’s nowhere on the planet I’d rather be.

Back In The Swamp

It seems that the only time I post anything on here these days is to apologise for not posting anything on here, and now I’m doing it again. But today’s a little different.

It’s exactly a year ago today that I gave up my job as a corporate lickspittle and decided to wander the earth having adventures. Like Caine from Kung Fu, but a bit chubbier and a lot less Chinese. To date I'm still in Surrey, which is perhaps not that impressive, although Redhill is certainly the sort of place where you can have adventures. Just not the kind you'd want.

It’s been an oddly fragmented twelve months, and I’m still not making a living out of writing or music as I’d hoped, but I’ve been back to college and gained a formal journalism qualification. I’ve had news stories, reviews and feature articles published in several papers and magazines. I’ve interviewed music journalists, trauma victims, comedians, and the Climate Change Director of Greenpeace in Europe, which is pretty grown-up by my standards.

I’ve discovered that, to my surprise, I’m better at writing news than features, and better at both of those things than subbing, which, as a natural pedant, I thought I’d be good at. I also procrastinate like crazy unless faced with a deadline.

My mother died in December, which is something I’m still getting used to. I’m shamelessly trying to figure out how to get an article out of the event. She’d be proud of me for that. I’m also, as a result, an Irish landlord – like most Irish landlords, of course, I live in England.

Even though I’m determined to make a living out of creative stuff, at the back of my mind I’ve always thought, if the worst came to the worst, I could go back into a finance role. Last week I offered to help someone with an Excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were my life for fifteen years, up until I left Nortel Networks last year, and I consider myself an expert. I tried to explain how to do this advanced thing. I couldn’t remember.

So that’s it. Once your gills have gone you can never go back in the swamp.

God Only Knows

I’ve spent some time in the company of Christians recently, and, although they’re pretty annoying they’re probably less likely to try to murder you than the other annoying people in Redhill who aren’t Christians.

By and large they seem to be nice people, as long as you ignore the fact that they’re all a bit nuts.

Now, I’m an agnostic. That’s not me being wishy-washy, it’s just an admission that there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. If I contemplate the mysteries of the Universe I just don’t understand how stuff works.

The Christians I’ve met seem to understand how stuff works, at least to their own satisfaction. Up to a point.

Then I ask why God fucks us around so much. “Ah, say the Christians. You wouldn’t understand.”

So that’s why I’ve decided to just not understand on my own and cut out the not understanding bit that involves God.

Blowing Goats

It’s just been announced that the Royal Navy has stopped using goats in decompression experiments, which will come as a surprise to those who didn’t know they’d been doing it in the first place. Which was pretty much everybody, I should think.

In a press release which encourages the response “WHAT??!!”, or, indeed, “NO!!”, it’s claimed that goats were chosen because “their skulls are a similar shape to those of humans”. Now those are goats I don’t want to see. In fact, I don’t even want to think about them. My dreams are weird enough already.

It wasn’t all bad news for the animals. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too," a defence official said yesterday, in a badly misjudged attempt at sounding reassuring.

Apparently the hapless creatures suffered brain damage, amongst other unpleasant effects. Presumably the difficulty in assessing whether a British sailor had suffered brain damage or not was the major barrier to using humans in the experiments.

For some reason they’ve stopped selling chipmunks in the pet shop across the road from where I live. I have a strange fixation with chipmunks – they’re quite cute, but they have an odd reptilian slitheriness which I find repellent but oddly hypnotic.

They're like squirrels. But worse. I used to go and stare at them until I began to feel worried and then go home, which was interesting. I miss them.

But there’s a lot more weird stuff out there to capture my imagination. “It is the first new species of giant elephant shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years" says Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences, referring to his latest discovery, and I, for one, will not be taking the time to argue with him.

It’s in Tanzania, which means I’m unlike to get a look at a real one, but at least the BBC have photographs.

Watch Them Burn...

Our family carbon footprint is probably that of an overfed yeti with Himalayan toe-bloat and we don’t yet run one of those hybrid cars which are made out of wattle and run on lentils or something, but Sooz and I do our best when it comes to recycling.

The local council pick up garden refuse, paper and cans every week. I’m constantly embarrassed by the number of beer cans. “Good party?” ask our neighbours. “Uhh, yes. Yes, party, right. Ahem.” I mutter, looking shifty.

I’ve taken to holding back the empty dog food tins so that I can put them in a layer on top of the Budweiser empties, but as the neighbourhood knows that we have only a terrier small enough to use a cat flap, it’s pretty obvious that I’m hiding something.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, while the council collect the cans, we have to take glass and plastic bottles to the recycling centre ourselves.

Glass is okay. I don’t have a problem with glass, apart from the tiny broken shards that sometimes creep into the box and lacerate my best bass-playing finger when I’m not paying attention.

Wine bottles are great. They’re a reminder of gentle, drunken evenings with friends. Their very greenness is pleasing to the eye, particularly when the sun’s shining through them. And when you force them through the rubber grommetty things there’s a gorgeous suspended moment and then a satisfying crash. "I love the sound of breaking glass", as Nick Lowe once put it. And who doesn’t?



It’s the plastic bottles I can’t abide. There’s something fat and smug and insolent and yet insubstantial about them. They bounce out of the crate because they’ve been stacked too high, and anyway you should know better than to try to stack them because they don’t weigh anything.

They make an irritating flubbery bonking sound as they hit the floor, and you want to kill them by stamping but you don’t because it will do no good and that makes you insane with rage.

One day I’m going to follow them all the way to the place where they recycle them in the hope that I can watch them burn.

Multiple

According to The Daily Mail, Britney Spears may have multiple personalities. Which comes a surprise to those of us who thought she didn't even have one.

Troubled Times

These are troubled times for people of my demographic/socio-economic group/IQ level. The coked-up lunatics responsible – if that’s the word – for commissioning TV shows continue to plumb the depths by encouraging us to gorge on human suffering in all its forms.

Actually “human suffering” is a misnomer, because the hollow-eyed, publicity-starved freaks on reality shows don’t really feel pain like the rest of us. They use the gallons of endorphins they produce at the thought of getting their horrid, gurning faces on the box for five minutes to deaden the sensation of having their genitalia torn off by carnivorous wombats, or whatever piece of humiliation the producers come up with.

Celebrity Rehab is not the worst, or even the latest of these shows, just the last one I’ve heard of. I don’t care about the “people” on this show any more than the rest of them, but, fuck me, how can you make, or watch, a programme about somebody going cold turkey, live on TV?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the “slippery slope” theory, but surely Cancer Kid's Chemo Camp can only be weeks away from hitting our screens. I know I don’t have to watch this stuff, and I don’t, but I know it’s out there. It’s like a colourless, odourless gas seeping out of the TV and rotting my very soul, in the same way that finding my daughter’s copy of Heat magazine under a pile of newspapers in the living-room explains why I’ve had a vague feeling of guilt, shame and nausea for the last few days.

Anyway, I reckon the next reality show will be called Cure My Obese Leprous Baby Or We Blind The Puppy, You Smack-Head Celebrity Plastic Surgeon On An Island.

Or something.

I So Knew It

I told you they were tricky little bastards.

But chipmunks would be worse if they weren't all behind bars.

Wet Ninja

I’m off to my homeland on Monday for a few days, and so I’ve been checking the news sites to see what kind of appalling mayhem the inbred halfwits of Northern Ireland have been dishing out to each other over the last week or so. Nothing much, but...

A team of fire-fighters was attacked by a moron who hadn’t stopped to wonder if a samurai sword was a match for a fully-functional fire hose. It wasn’t, of course, so they just sluiced him into submission. Strangely satisfying, that story.

More later…

The McWord

In a bid to change the public perception of employment prospects with the company, McDonald’s has collected almost 105,000 signatures on a petition, which has now been submitted to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The fast-food giant has long been unhappy with the negative implications of the OED’s definition of “McJob” – the dictionary calls it “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

In an attempt to combat this, and to raise the morale of the nation’s burger-flippers, the company enlisted the support of the broadcaster Sir David Frost, 35 MPs and former Confederation of British Industry chairman Sir Digby - now Lord - Jones, in trying to persuade the OED and other UK dictionary houses “to change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.”

The OED has yet to comment. At the launch of the petition a spokeswoman for the dictionary said “We monitor changes in the language and reflect these in our definitions according to the evidence we find.”

McDonald’s may have a point. Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine dubbed the Golden Arches “the best place to work in hospitality”, and on its website the company has
launched its own retaliatory “McProspects” campaign, with a list of benefits and the slogan “Not bad for a McJob”.

It could be argued that McDonald’s have only themselves to blame – the company first registered the term McJobs as a trademark in 1984 as the name and image for the training of handicapped people as restaurant employees. The trademark lapsed, but the word re-surfaced in The Washington Post in 1986 and entered common usage in the US following a mention as a description of a “low pay, low prestige, low benefit, no future” job in Donald Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X.

McJob first appeared in the UK in the online version of the OED in 2001, but it was its appearance in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary – in 2003 – which seems to have first truly irked McDonalds.

The company considered legal action when the McWord first appeared in the US, but apparently was advised that it didn’t have a case. McDonald’s is notoriously lacking in a sense of humour and has an appetite for litigation when it comes to what it sees as slurs on its business.

Famously, in 1994, it sued two Greenpeace activists, who had distributed a pamphlet criticising the company, in what became the UK’s longest ever libel trial. The case was instantly and inevitably tagged “McLibel”, and went on for two and a half years, becoming the longest trial of any kind in British legal history.

Lasers In The Jungle Somewhere

From Flight magazine:

"Boeing moved closer earlier this month to realizing a seven-year goal to demonstrate a high-powered laser as a weapon aboard a Lockheed Martin C-130H.

“Next year, we will fire the laser at ground targets, demonstrating the military utility of this transformational directed energy weapon,” Scott Fancher, VP and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said in a statement."


So that’s just marvellous. As if the US can’t do enough damage with conventional ordnance, by the middle of next year we’ll all be in Bond-villain fantasy-land. Brown people the world over will live in constant terror of the next death-ray strike, while Dubyah slouches around inside his hollowed-out volcano with that dopey coked-up smirk plastered across his little monkey face.

I know that having your family barbecued by a laser isn’t really any worse than having a bunch of high-explosive come down your chimney, but somehow it feels worse. Until the advent of that ultra-low-frequency-sound weapon they’ve been talking about for the past fifty years – the one that makes you poo your pants and then shatters your pelvis, ribcage and skull (in that order, so you get to enjoy it) – then I reckon the super-laser’s about as bad as it gets.

The Southern Marsupial Mole (itjari-itjari)

Ok, it's been a long time, and under those circumstances I always seem to end up obsessing about animals...


Here’s a quote from a website:

“The marsupial mole is found in the central deserts of southern Northern Territory, northern and east-central Western Australia and western South Australia.”

So that’s clear, then.

In terms of their continued survival, man is not a real problem for the mole these days, although apparently there are some issues with “soil compaction caused by stock movement and vehicles”. In other words, they sometimes get trampled on or run over and squashed. It must be disheartening for the moles to realise that they’re going to end up as road kill even if they stay underground.

In the past things were different; there are records of thousands of mole pelts being traded between 1900 and 1920 in deals struck between Aboriginals and European cameleers which, no doubt, followed the traditional pattern of such deals - the Europeans got the moleskins and a few hundred thousand acres of ancestral lands and the Aboriginals in return each got two pairs of cheap calico trousers and smallpox.

As burrowers go, the moles are not particularly hard-core, tunnelling only 10cm below the surface and coming up to have a look around fairly frequently. Well, not a look around, exactly, as their eyes are vestigial and they have no optic nerves. Presumably they have just enough time to sniff the air for a split-second with their small, slit-like nostrils before being torn limb from limb by the foxes, dingos and cats which they don’t hear creeping up on them because of their lack of external ears.

A further dubious evolutionary development is that the marsupial mole’s pouch faces backwards, to prevent it scooping up sand and bringing the animal to a shuddering and undignified halt. Whether or not this rear-facing arrangement also results in the mole leaving a trail of little tiny pink mole babies, jettisoned and squealing, in its wake when at full throttle is anybody’s guess, but it would make perfect sense to me if it did. (It would explain the “endangered” sticker, that’s for sure.)

There are photographs of these things, and, trust me, they aren’t pretty. It’s always reassuring that creatures whose noses are “horny shields” and whose hands have become “scoops equipped with spade-like claws” tend to be on the small side, rather than there being the possibility that some hellish creature the size of a small rhinoceros is going to gouge its way up through the patio and join you in the hot tub.

Mutual Interests

It’s always interesting to return to my homeland, which regular visitors to this site might possibly remember I regard with a mixture of amusement, horror and disbelief. Ninety percent of the population are bad-tempered, slow-witted hicks and the other ten percent are Eastern European immigrants who failed to do their homework properly and are frantically trying to earn the money for a ticket out of the place.

Anyway, on a light-hearted note I thought you'd be interested to know that the Belfast Telegraph has a "lonely hearts" page which is divided into three sections: "Men Seeking Women", "Women Seeking Men", and "Mutual Interests", where gays have to mix it with pot-holers, model railway enthusiasts and socially inept men with beards who work in I.T. and want to get together at weekends to re-enact the Battle of Naseby.

However, as we're talking about Northern Ireland here I suppose we should just be grateful that there isn’t a section labelled "Homos".

On a more encouraging note, on a visit to the village where I grew up I noticed that someone had taken the time to alter the sign for LESSANS ROAD so that it read LESBIANS ROAD, so there might be some hot action going on out in the sticks.