It's Life!

Noi showed me a short video earlier of a snake loose in Bukit Batok. It was a big fellow - looked like a python. Some rather skilful, and brave, guys were apprehending the snake, finally getting it into a sack. Bit sad, I suppose, but I'm hopeful the creature was released afterward into the wild to resume its snakey existence. (Don't really want to think of other possible 'endings' for this little tale.) As we were chatting about the local wild life Noi was telling me that one of her friends spotted a wild boar the other week.

All this made me feel unaccountably cheerful. Isn't it splendid to be forced to realise the world revolves around more than just our daft species? (Though, again, it's perhaps best to avoid darker thoughts of the miserable manner in which we exercise our custodianship of the planet and the life thereon.)

It put me in mind of something John mentioned when we were chatting on the phone the other evening. He was telling me about his next door neighbour who's not so well now but who used to spend his evening smoking outside the house (one of the reasons for his not-so-well state, I'm afraid) waiting for the foxes around the area to put in an appearance as they came scavenging around the houses. A great way to spend the time, I reckon - the observing of the rascally foxes, that is, not the self-harm.

It occurs to me that I've never seen a fox close up. The loss is mine.

When I was a little lad, living up Haughton Green, around six years old, the neighbours had a shed in their little back garden in which they kept rabbits. Sadly they were in cages, but it didn't seem sad to me at the time, they were such lovely creatures to hold and stroke. There were also a couple of ferrets in the shed, kept in a kind of box. They stunk. I suppose the neighbour used to go ferreting with them (a 'sport' I won't explain, involving as it does Nature red in tooth and claw.) Deeply inhumane, but maybe the ferrets didn't mind it too much? Better than a world in which kids never get to see them at all, except on film.