Lizard limerick...

Meet Fred my tin lizard. I brought him back from Antigua many years ago and now his sits on the warm orange kitchen wall at my cottage. Some days, especially on freezing cold ones like today, I think how nice it would be to be a lizard basking in the sun. Of course lizards are naturally cold blooded creatures, and I have a lot hot blood running through my veins, sometimes more often than is wise, but is there anything as cool as a lizard lounging?

I think that in many ways the lizard life would suit me. A cold blooded animal doesn’t need to use internally generated energy to regulate its body temperature, so I would need far less energy than I do at the moment. Not that I have that much energy to spare in the first place. Yes, because of my damned human mechanism I need to maintain my body temperature within a certain range, regardless of the temperature around me. This requires lots of energy that I get by gobbling down lots of meals. If I were a lizard I wouldn’t need to eat as often as I do, maybe just a single meal every few weeks. So I wouldn’t be fat and I wouldn’t be sweaty, which might mean I could pull the lady lizards.

As for habitat, cold blooded animals thrive in remote areas like small islands and even deserts where food is too scarce to support warm blooded creatures. An island would suit me just fine. Imagine having an island pretty much to yourself like a lizard Robinson Crusoe. I could be the lizard king; how cool would that be?

Best of all the cold blooded brains of lizards tend to be less complex and use less energy than warm bloods. How great it would be to not have to think about all the crap that I do think about, like food and energy bills and blogging and feeling cold and soap operas.

Of course there are downsides to being a lizard. Women scream if they see you on the ceiling and tell their men to knock you down and stamp you to squish, cats chase you just so they can pull off your tail (mind you it does grow back), and if you are really unlucky you might become a tasty snack for a passing seagull. But what a colourful life it would be. From the tip of my tail to the ends of my sucker toes I’d exude colour like a lizardly rainbow – and that would be good enough for me.

Anyway, here's a limerick about Fred the lizard.

There once was a lizard named Fred,
Who loved to bask on his bed.
His bed was concrete.
Wait! It was the street!
And that’s why Fred is now dead.