Yes, yet another attempt to cheer us all up in these bird-barren-lockdown times....... this is a re-run from post 18, written when I was only about 68 years old ..... but I was dead pleased with it, being also a right bighead ..... off we go .. Leg-gel, Lionoil and other Palindromic Cures I don't suppose that many of you out there will be old enough to remember the Great Wren Collapse in 1972. Back then , before running water, before sanitation and electricity, we had to do what we could to survive. And so did the birds. In 1972 nature-lovers began to notice that wrens were staggering around their gardens in obvious distress, and began to die out in droves when they couldn't catch their usual prey, which in those days was mainly rats. What was to be done ? Well, luckily, researchers at the Palindromic Advanced Research Project (PARP) had been looking into old manuscripts, mainly written by witches, sages, necromancers and downright charlatans when they came across a strange thing .... back in those days ( around 1957) they believed that remedies which were palindromes worked far better than the others. Their first big discovery was Lionoil .... lions, as you know, are always roaring for some reason, and their throats get very sore. What they needed was a medicine which was the same backwards as forwards .... like " Lionoil." Readers, it worked. One teaspoonful of Lionoil twice a day got the lions back to full health, but it did more than that ... it got those boffins thinking up other possibilities. Maybe there were other palindromic medicines they could invent. All children know that when they are ill , pop is the best thing to get them through it. It's palindromic ! And of course mum and dad are the best people to look after them ... they're palindromic too. Grown men, of course, prefer a madam every time. I would too, if I had the stamina. Anyway, when these experts heard about the wrens which were having trouble with their little legs so they couldn't catch any rats, they set to work on the problem and soon came up with Leg-gel .... applied hourly to each leg every day and night for a week, it worked a treat and was so effective that rats got a bit scarce too. But that's another story.... and here it is.... it's enough to say that RatstaR made the remaining few rats famous overnight and they were able to live in swanky hotels, wear inappropriate clothes and generally swan about simply being famous. And more importantly, they were well away from their major predator, the wren. There's that thing about gnats losing their lovely tangy taste in the Falklands a few years ago...this caused a mass starvation amongst Swifts and Hirundines who wouldn't eat them any more. Bird-lovers all over the islands were panic-stricken until the boffins at PARP did a bit of chemistry and invented Gnatang .... it restores their tangy taste ... and within a few hours the swifts etc started eating them again to everyone's delight except the poor old gnats. One of the most remarkable ones was developed to help Puffins .... around the UK Puffins were showing signs of respiratory problems so something had to be done. Within weeks the experts at the PARP had produced a handy nasal spray which did the job perfectly. It was marketed as Puffinsniffup ... or PUFFINSNIFFUP as it appeared on the label. ..which saved our lovely Puffins ! They even learned to self-medicate ... little spray-cans with tiny nozzles were pushed into the soil by each burrow, and the Puffins son learned to plug each nostril onto the tiny tube and press down to get a measured dose of puffinsniffup® and then go about their normal business of entertaining tourists. That's the power of Palindromic Medicine. Even Ferdinand de Lesseps, the brains behind the Panama Canal, hoped it might work for him .... on his gravestone it says .... A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA And as for the music, it's another of Death Cab for Cutie's killer songs. " Marching Bands of Manhattan" This is an acoustic version .... it goes to the heart and the head. I've also picked a words video so you can sing along ... ....... it's that sort of song. I was amazingly chuffed when I invented that PuffinsniffuP thing. And all the others. Sometimes, an idea just works, and grows . And you've got to catch them before they run away.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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