Life and other misadventures
Time to go on record and say that, however much I usually love natural history programmes - especially if they are narrated by David Attenborough, I do not really like watching reptiles very much. Or spiders.
Monday’s edition of Life, BBC 1’s ambitious 10-part series which took three years to film and is indeed narrated by Attenborough, contained a scene with both a spider and a toad (an amphibian, not a reptile - I know). There was a scene from a horror movie: the tarantula stalking the toad silently, creeping up one side of a sheer face of rock in one of the most inhospitable looking parts of the planet, with the toad guilelessly waddling up the other side. Then - miracle of miracles - the “pebble” toad (you’ll see why in a minute) went completely rigid and threw itself off the rock to tumble presumably hundreds of feet to a watery safe haven below. Thus escaping the spider. Like a pebble falling off a cliff, do you see?
So all very interesting. As were the Komodo dragons, the largest venmous animal on the planet and surely one of the most gruesome-looking. We’ve only just visited these pre-historic beasts courtesy of Stephen Fry and last chance to see. I really didn’t want another encounter, even though the tireless film crew managed to film the dragons slaying a buffalo several times their size by biting and poisoning it and then waiting several weeks (WEEKS!) for the venom to work.
No, even with Attenborough as my guide, I do not like to watch reptiles on TV. As for the morass of red garter snakes waking from a winter slumber to mate with scarce females, it was a Raiders of the Lost Ark nightmare.
Next week: fluffy bunnies (mammals).
Post-post: The irony of posting something about reptiles the day after Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, appeared on Question Time is not lost on me.
