Monday 30 July 2012

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?

4 comments:

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  2. [Bet you thought you had 2 comments waiting for you, didn't you? Sorry, it's just me and I blew the first one.]

    You had me at "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." (<--cLiCkY-cLiCkY, watch, then gag. LOL!)

    Seriously, Puck, nerves a smitch on edge??? Because whoa!

    Honestly, that sentence of yours that I just referred to is as far as I got before I had to ransack the house in search of the smelling salts, that of which I inhaled the entire bottle of in order to snap out of the root-canal-without-novacaine-feelingsy place your "vivid" imagery took me! Yikes! Wait, I gotta say that again: YIKES!! One more time with an "r" in it: YIKERS!!! If oversensitive-y, ol' me reads on, will I find Alice in Wonderland circling the drain for me forever? Croquet, too? Mallets in general??? Are we-- Are-are we being w-watched?! *runs like a lunatic away from flamigo eyeball image*

    (See you next blog entry? Next blog entry it is!)

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  3. How it lifted my spirits to see two people so taken in so easily - gag indeed.

    I have no idea where that sentence came from, all I know is when I look at a flamingo's beak that is what I see. Flamingos - they ain't all they are cracked up to be.

    Laters - as they say in this neck of the woods...you should hear what I think about when I see a hornbill.

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