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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Reptilian reverie

Lif in Cold Blood (BBC1); Ashes to Ashes (BBC1)

When I was a boy my father and I used to spend our summer holidays collecting lizards. We’d prop a large bucket at an angle in a suitable spot, grease the rim with butter, put some rotting fruit at the bottom and wait for the lizards to get trapped. It’s the best way, otherwise they panic and shed their tails. Then we’d bring them back in our hand luggage in linen bags, which worked fine till the unfortunate occasion when a stewardess wanted to look inside and they escaped on the plane.

We kept our lizards (and snakes and crocodiles) in a shed in our garden — called the Lizard House — and they gave us many adventures. Once, on holiday in Menorca, we discovered that there lived on one tiny, uninhabited island about a mile offshore a melanistic (i.e., black) form of wall lizard found nowhere else in the world. The pedalo journey there against buffeting winds was horribly knackering. But oh the joy of discovering lizards so unscared of humans that they’d crawl all over you.

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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