Quiver, Mortals, for I am the Hero of Edinburgh Zoo

100_3490We took our son to the zoo as a birthday treat last week. As I was holding him in my arms above the red river hog enclosure (African piggy things that look like the warthog from The Lion King), his Captain America cap tumbled from his head and fell twenty feet to the ground below. One of the pigs was snouting and snuffling its way across the enclosure, on a direct course to intercept the cap with its hungry jaws. It had already half-devoured a large paper packet that contained the remnants of its latest meal, and we had no reason to doubt, as it drew closer and closer to my son’s favoured headwear, that we’d be saying bye bye to the Cap cap once and for all. The pig nudged and drooled at the cap with its wet snout, before pushing it aside like a hockey puck and continuing on its slobbery way. We breathed a sigh of relief. There was still hope.

I took the wee guy down the steps at the side of the enclosure, handed him to his momma and strolled down the hill, a strong sense of purpose propelling my limbs. I stood with the palms of my hands pressed against the top of the first of the two fences that marked the perimeter of the pigs’ domain. What sort of a father would leave his son’s favourite cap – a superhero cap, no less – to rot in a piggy prison when it was within his power to put things right? What sort of a father would leave an injustice-shaped hole in the fabric of his son’s burgeoning universe, and turn a blind eye to the hot tears of frustration coursing down his cherubic little cheeks? Not on my watch, universe. Not for this pot-bellied father!

“Jamie, it’s okay, he doesn’t really care. Look, he’s happy, let’s just go see the flamingos, he’s perfectly fine.”

But I could tell that he was dying inside, the poor little bastard. We all knew what was about to happen…

“Don’t you even think about it,” she said, as my fingers started twitching, and my arms started flexing. “Don’t you bloody embarrass me, Jamie.”

Huh! And I guess Iron Man was embarrassing, was he? When he was SAVING THE WORLD? Oooh, don’t save the world, Iron Man, you’ll give me a red neck. I’ll never be able to show my face at the lunch club for ladies, let’s just forget this silly baddy fighting malarkey and go out for some tapas?!

“Honestly, we’ll find a zoo keeper and they can fetch the hat later. It’s okay: you don’t need to do this.”

Huh! And come back to the remnants of a half-devoured hero’s hat, and see the sickening smiles of satisfaction under the snouts of those wicked beasts? Tell you what, why don’t we just throw our son over the fence and be done with it. No, that hat is coming back to us, by God, or I’ll be gored to death trying. AVENGER ASSEMBLE!!

hogWith all of my might, I hurtled myself over the imposing three-foot fence, bounded forward two feet and then mustered all of my remaining reserves of strength – both physical and mental – to clear the hellish bulk of the second three-foot fence barring my way. I may even have beat my chest like a gorilla, I can’t honestly recall, the adrenaline was running too high.

I trailed a gaggle of pigs behind me like the Pied Piper of Ham-lin (I just high-fived myself) as I strode across the enclosure. I bent down and heroically scooped up the cap and held it aloft in my fingers of justice. Snuffle, snuffle, gobble, ruffle, snort. The pigs advanced on me like a rash of hairy asthmatic tumours, their tusks trained on me like spears. I could almost hear the Indiana Jones music playing in my ears as I vaulted the two fences to the safety of the main thoroughfare.

“Well,” I said with a Ferris Buellerian smirk as I handed the cap back to my adoring son. “What do you think about that?”

“Oh, Jamie,” my partner said, as she struggled not to faint with relief and admiration. “I really, really, really want to check our boy into a crèche and have you sex the fuck out of me right here against the very fence that was the site of your greatest act of raw, almost over-powering machismo. Give me that noble, selfless penis, give me it right here and now, you bloody warrior.”

Well, perhaps I’m paraphrasing ever-so-slightly. What she actually said was:

“You fucking idiot.”

292457_421261067939971_1651654860_nI just smiled. Because that’s when you know you’re a real hero. When you’re not hero-ing for the praise. You’re just hero-ing because… well, because you don’t know how to be anything God damned else. It was at that precise moment I realised that Nickelback had probably penned their song with me in mind.

“Now let’s go,” I said, puffing out my chest, “before a zoo keeper comes along and gives me a telling off.”

We hot-footed it out of there.

Just as Captain America himself would have done.

My good lady was still shaking her head. “You do realise those pigs are about as dangerous as the ones at Muiravonside Country park?”

I scoffed. “That’s the sort of talk that got Steve Irwin killed.”

Hero status: intact.

PS: If he’d dropped his hat in the chimp or tiger enclosure, I’d’ve taken the £8 hit.


MORE ZOO-RELATED TOMFOOLERY IN MY NEXT PIECE ON PANDAS AND POKEMON

Additional animal mayhem from the archives

The time I killed a snake in Turkey…

2012 trip to the safari park: Part 1

2012 trip to the safari park: Part 2

Dealing with grief:the death of three rats and a dog

Why I’d love to live under a dictatorship

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I sometimes watch the news and find myself unable to process and interpret the dizzying, conflicting array of agendas, voices, wants, desires, schemes, half-truths, un-truths, exaggerations and lies. How I long for a simpler existence. Unless you’re in the 1 per cent – or one of those lizard people that David Icke’s always banging on about – nothing you say, think or do matters anyway. Free thought and moral relativism are exhausting. So I’ve been dreaming about a different world. A better world… Imagine it with me.

Instead of humming and hawing, and deliberating, and debating, and compensating, and weighing consequences, and wondering who’s telling the truth, and trying to work out whose image is being manipulated by which media outlet and why, and reading articles, and journals, and manifestos, and pamphlets by the library-load in a vain, ever-futile attempt to work out why you should care, what you should do, how you should think, who you should trust, and why, why, why, a thousand times why… wouldn’t it be refreshing just to wake up in a world where a man went on television, stood on a flag-draped podium and shouted, ‘DO WHAT I SAY OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU.’

Yes, of course it would be horrible. But wouldn’t it also be, you know, awesome?

dic2

The more I think about it, the more I’m certain that I would have thrived under a dictatorship. School would’ve been an absolute doddle. When you live in a totalitarian state you usually find that the most important book in the school syllabus is a book of poetry that the dictator has written to commemorate Squiggles, his dead guinea pig. I would’ve been an A+ student.

“When our dear leader wrote that he ‘loved ickle wittle Squiggles little face’, and then went on to say that ‘he missed that fuwwy, fwuffy, cuddwee wittle face’ I cried for six days. And rhyming ‘face’ with ‘face’? Such a strikingly bold choice, but then our dear leader is nothing if not strikingly bold, may he reign for another ten million years, and may his enemies drown in hot gallons of their own blood. PS: On that note, Little Jimmy Graham in class 2B said that guinea pigs are vermin and eat their own poo, so I wonder if perhaps he needs a spell of ‘mandatory re-education’ in the Airdrie gulag? PPS: I wonder if he’ll be needing his new Nike Airs in the gulag. I’d be more than happy to look after them.”

And there’s another awesome aspect of living life under the iron fist: the ability to have your rivals – or even just people who happen to blow their nose in a rather irritating way – carted off to prison or the afterlife with the minimum of effort.

“Dear State Bureau of Citizen Improvement for the Glory of Our Mighty Leader,

Last night, just after my Dad confiscated the Xbox controllers from me for giving him cheek, he went into his bedroom and said to my mum, ‘Dictator? Dick…taker more like!’ He also quite clearly and audibly insinuated that he had a bigger penis than our great leader.

PS: any chance you could ask him where he’s stashed the controllers as you lead him crying and screaming from the house? ”

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REPORT CARD SUMMARY – Jamie Andrew

School: The Merciful and Munificent Leader’s Institution for the Inculcation and Responsibilisation of Our Great Republic’s Pre-Citizens Junior High

MATHS – A+

  1. 2 + 2 = whatever our Dear Leader tells me it equals.
  2. If x + y(2) – c(a) / 245.76 X yy2(cos24), is it the fault of the Jews? = Yes.
  3. Describe Pythagoras’ theorem = No. Pythagoras was a reactionary intellectual separatist whose belief in angles is a threat to the mighty secular perfection of the Great republic. Also, almost definitely a black Jewish homosexual.

ENGLISH – A+

“Animal Farm, by the treacherous bastard Eric Blair, is a piece of pernicious capitalist propaganda that says more about the author’s barely concealed sexual attraction to pigs than it does about life in our glorious republic. All copies of this book should be burned, and its author’s bones disinterred and pooed upon. Besides, if it’s a good book about pigs you’re after, you can’t beat ‘Without Rhyme or Reason: The Tragic Death of Squiggles.’”

MUSIC – A+

Essay: “Our Dear Leader’s fingers do not stretch over the fret of a guitar, therefore guitars are flawed, and possibly a plot by our enemies to humiliate our Dear Leader, which is why I spent a semester confiscating 7000 guitars from the local community, recording the noise of me smashing each of them to pieces with a hammer, and releasing the finished edit as the number 1 hit single, ‘Guitar Ownership is a Capital Offence by Decree of our Benevolent and Magnificent Leader, May All his Wanks be Uninterrupted and Unhurried.’”

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With school finished – and aced – I’d be straight on to a long, successful career in the Ministry of Propaganda where I’d be writing school text books, newspaper reports and government missives. Like:

“Americans: do they really bathe their young in Coca Cola, and have sex with hawks? Yes. Yes they do.”

“The French speak of freedom and revolution. They also use cheese as a deodarant and play with their uncles’ dicks. Don’t listen to them.”

“Why the Spanish are almost certainly a nation of transsexuals who enjoy sex with dead whales that they dress up like giant flamenco dancers.”

“Forcing the Germans to build a wall to help us keep the Germans out of our country: the importance of sniper turrets.”

Work is often a place of stagnation, a repetitive, soul-sucking dirge that booms in your brain until you shuffle off to the grave with a carriage clock tucked under your oxster. Imagine how much more exciting it would be if your working week was a hot-bed of attempted assassinations and high-stakes mud-slinging, where Friday would quickly inherit the acronym TFISA (Thank fuck I’m still alive). Retirement wouldn’t just be a relief. It would be a real achievement. Like completing Halo on Legendary without getting shot once.

At this point, please feel free to imagine me letting out a wistful sigh. (pause for wistful sigh) Ah, those were… well, not those were the days, I suppose, because they never happened. But those should’ve been the days. Those could still be the days.

Do they advertise dictator vacancies at the Job Centre?

A few words on death

dead1

I think about death. A lot. I was thinking about it today. Thinking about how all of us, no matter our views on nudity, modesty or the sanctity of the body, will inevitably find ourselves lying dead and naked on a slab with some poe-faced mortuary attendant hunched over us with a clip-board. That’s the best case scenario. Worst case, some psychopathic medical student will be playing keepy-uppy with our severed balls or tits. On the bright side, we’ll be dead and we won’t give a shit either way. Regardless, I want them to know, these ghouls. I want them to know that I’ve lived my life accepting the allignment of my destiny with theirs. I want to communicate with them from beyond the grave. I was thinking a stomach tattoo. I’m torn between I KNOW A NECROPHILIAC WHEN I SEE ONE and YOU’RE NEXT. I’m open to suggestions.

That led me to thinking about people who work in funeral parlours. Do undertakers and mortuary assistants have appraisals at work? What form do they take?

Funeral director: probably the most hilarious of all the professions

Funeral director: probably the most hilarious of all the professions

Well, Colin, thank you for attending your annual review today. For starters, can you tell me anything that you think you’ve done well in the mortuary over the last twelve months, anything you’re particularly proud of?”

Hmmmm… well, of all the bodies I’ve tended to this year, less than thirty per cent of them ended up looking like Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.”

A real improvement on last year, Colin. Now, can you think of any way that you could make your processes more efficient?”

We could… put the make-up on people while they’re still alive in the hospice, get them in and out faster on the day?”

“Oh, that’s brilliant, I’ll make a note of that.”

Face-painting?”

I’m not sure I follow…”

Well, I’m always at a loose-end during the funeral itself, but if people brought their kids I could set up in a side-room and do their faces up like cats and wizards and that. Charge five pound a face.”

(nodding vigorously) And then, if any of the adults are particularly upset as they file out of the service, they’ll come out, turn a corner and…”

BAM. Wee guy with a tiger face.”

Wee guy with a tiger face!”

I know a tiger face would cheer me up.”

Oh, me too, Colin, that’s….BRILLIANT! You’d just have to make sure to wash the brushes out before you used them on the kids’ faces.”

I could just use different brushes.”

(claps hands together, frantically scrawls in notepad) This must be how Mr Miagi felt in the Karate Kid! Any other initiatives?”

(ponders) You know, when people think funeral procession, they think sssllllow. But why does it have to be slow? If the drivers absolutely caned it, we could squeeze in a few extra funerals every day, plus the mourners would be too distracted to be depressed.”

Make it more fun!”

Make it more fun. Give the hearses a siren like Ecto-1 from the Ghostbusters. People would go crazy for that shit. Give the guy with the big top hat who traditionally walks in front of the procession a quad bike.”

Jesus Christ, Colin, you’re taking me to funeral director school today, son!”

Maybe this is a little too radical, but how do you feel about group discounts for bonfires?”

hearse

I would hate to be a mortician or an undertaker. Imagine coming home frisky and angling for sex. I imagine there’d be an insistent, unshooshable voice in my partner’s head saying to her: “How the hell can he be horny after looking at dead bodies all day? Unless… oh God, he isn’t horny BECAUSE of the dead bodies, is he? I swear to Christ, if he tells me to stop moving around so much I’ll snip his dick off…”

How could you ever feel horny ever again? I know there are some strange aphrodisiacs in this world, but recently-deceased 87-year-old Gladys McLintoch surely isn’t one of them. Sex and death are inextricably linked, and sometimes proximity to death, and fear of mortality, can trigger the reproductive instinct; that being said, most normal guys wouldn’t gaze down at the face of a dearly departed old granny, allow a lop-sided leer to slip across their lips, and think to themselves: ‘The wife’s going to be walking like John Wayne when I’m done with her tonight.’ 

One final thought: do hearse drivers get to take their work vehicles home and use them recreationally, like taxi drivers do? “Well, it’s an absolute bastard to reverse park the thing, but it’s so good for the weekly shop. I can fit in the bog paper, washing powder, everything.”