Pretty flamingo…

“The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face.”

It is so easy to be taken in by pretty. A pretty smile, a pretty girl, pretty in pink, yes, pretty… pretty pink, the colour so loved by… well, you don’t need a list. As pink as a flamingo, like the flock I photographed on our trip to the zoo.

Such a strange creature, the flamingo - they might be pink but something tells me there’s nothing fluffy about them. Just look at their beaks, they could take an eye out at a single peck and knock it through to the back of your brain before pulling it out again and eating it with a single throw of that long fine neck. And then there’s the smell. They stink worse that a fish-gutting factory, and no matter what the water clarity is like before they arrive, after they’ve gone it’s murky – very, very murky. The sort of murky you wouldn’t want to swim in, the sort of murky that really needs to be treated by a water treatment plant or a reed bed… but it’s the eyes that get me more than anything else.

A flamingo’s eye is the coldest thing on the planet; hardly an eye at all, just a black pit surrounded by sulphurous yellow. A trap to fall into, an all-seeing, all-evil, optical trap. I imagine one fixing some poor unsuspecting fish with its eye and freezing it in the water beneath it, hypnotising it with a yellow-cold stare, then slashing down and breaking the fishes back with its beak. The eye of a reptile, a lizard, the devil, no wonder that fossils of flamingos have been found; that is the eye of one of the oldest creatures on earth, a dinosaur… a pink dinosaur.

Pretty flamingo? Not on my life.

Croquet anyone?