Animal Biscuits
If you could be any animal, which animal would you be? Harriet asked me over lunch today…I couldn’t decide so I googled it (first port of call for any difficult question…right?) but all I found was a rubbish website which told me I was a tiger. No reason, no justification, just pop your name in the box and there you go. A tiger. Rubbish.
You would have thought I’d have a good answer for this by now considering I’ve watched Planet Earth about a million times over, but it’s taken me some time to think.
I am fond of Axolotls, I bought one to be part of a sculpture I made last year, and he’s called Neutron. They are commonly known as Mexican Walking Fish; they are AMAZING and look really COOL….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
They are clever because they regenerate bits of their body when they lose a limb or almost any other part and that makes scientists want to do experiments on them, so they are more than just cool, they’re quite important too. In Japan they are sold under the name Wooper Rooper (Ūpā Rūpā?), sounds kinda rude to me. Anyway amazing as they are I am not sure I’d like to be one; likelihood is you’d end up in a laboratory or a tank to be ogled; the first sounds horrible and the latter sounds like Topshop.
I have vox popped friends of The Laundry on the matter:
Harry: I think I would like to be an Elephant (post ban on ivory-trade). They get to stampede with a whole crew of friends and family through the jungle and I think, if I remember correctly, are quite emotional (might be stooping into ‘what I’ve leaned from Disney’ now; Elephant grave yards etc, instead of Amanda’s more factual Planet Earth). And they have their nose right on the end of a trunk, useful for stealing peanuts and squirting unsuspecting passers by with.
Alex: An Eagle; free, prestigious, FLIES and gets to eat lotsa live meat.
Sophie: Does a banshee count as an animal? (No, soph) In that case- a cheetah- fast, predatory and slinky.
What would you be?