Sizzling and Running, Not Whistling and Erupting

One of Aesop's more enigmatic fables is about snails. A farmer's boy is gathering snails. When he has two hands full he lights a fire and throws them on, for he intends to eat them. The snails draw back inside their shells and begin to sizzle in the way snails do when heated. " You abandoned creatures!" cries the boy. " How can you whistle while your houses burn?"

What can be the moral of this story?

The farmer's boy learns nothing. The snails learn nothing, for presumably they are already dead when the farmer's boy asks his cruel and foolish question. So it must be we who are to learn something.

Last night Pliny and Nostradamus were at Pliny's mum's, watching a documentary about the last days of Pompeii. Pliny thought she heard a heard the sound of plumbing. She though it might be coming from next door. Five minutes later she could still hear it, in the quiet bits. "Can you hear something like running water?" she asked. Pliny's mum did not reply, because she only had one of her hearing aids in. Nostradamus said," It's probably the sound of the volcano." Pliny didn't think so. After all who would know better than Pliny what that sounds like? She got up and went into the bathroom, where she discovered that her mum had left the hot tap running. " It was the tap," she said, earning a certain amount of admiration and gratitude.

Now the moral of both these stories is, I think, the same: People think kindly of those who are able to identify the proper meaning of a sound.

The Many Ex-Uses of Snails

Pliny the Elder: It is calamitous that your snails are disappearing. Snails are medicinal wonders of the natural world. If you read my works this is made plain.

Me: Oh dear. What are they good for?

Pliny the Elder: Google me and see.

Me: You lazy old Roman. Alright.......
( Later ) You say they increase the speed of delivery. Are you kidding?

Pliny the Elder: What do you think I'm talking about?

Me: I don't know. The mail?

Pliny the Elder: Fool! I'm talking about childbirth! A nice drink of snails and whoosh, Bob's your nephew.

Me: Wish I'd known about that years ago.

Pliny the Elder: Indeed. And furthermore, reduced to a pulp, snails may be used to treat burns, abscesses, and other wounds. Boiled and grilled over a fire and eaten with wine, they will reduce stomach pains. He who spits up blood will feel better if he drinks snails. They are good too for vertigo, fainting, and fits of madness.

Me: Oh yes, and it says here you should mix the snails with donkey milk.

Pliny the Elder: It would not surprise me if that too, these days, is hard to find.

Reporting the Snail

Pliny the Elder disapproves of my recent blogs. I have been lowering the tone, he says. There are better things to write about than putative yellow phalluses and better subjects for poems than his cure for constipation. Write about something instructive, he says.

Well, Pliny, I am going to. Today my subject is the snail. Yesterday Nostradamus and I went for an evening walk after the rain. The road was lined with puddles and fallen jacaranda flowers. The sky was full of dark clouds. Droplets dripped from the trees.

All at once I was astonished to see a snail on the road. I hadn't seen a snail for over a year. Until that moment I had forgotten that I hadn't. I looked for more snails. But there was only one snail on Avonmore Avenue.

I wondered if I should report the snail. People have been asked recently to report possums. I decided I should.

Little Person

Some weeks ago a Little Person fell into our garden. I assumed she'd come from next door so I placed her on top of the fence hoping that Christine would claim her. But Christine didn't.

After a week on the fence the Little Person fell down into our garden again, pushed by Christine or the wind.

I placed the Little Person on the outdoor table near the back door. She is still there. How she irritates me.

She is five centimetres tall, rather squat, with short black curly hair and brown skin. She is wearing a red baseball cap turned sideways, a short blue skirt, a green jumper and white shoes. Along the side of her left shoe are the words Little People. Her arms are raised. She carries a yellow toy aeroplane in her left hand and a big red and yellow paintbrush in her right. On her back is a large yellow backpack with yellow straps.

It is intriguing that she carries a plane and a paintbrush. That isn't what irritates me. It's the contents of her backpack.

Protruding, from her backpack are three long yellow objects. They do not look like bananas. You can't see the bottoms but the middles are fat with little folds, while the tops are rounded and even fatter. They are not icecreams. No one carries icecreams in a backpack. Each of the yellow objects is tipped with a purple spot. They look a bit like rockets. They look even more like giant yellow penises.

You can see why I'm irritated. I swear I won't throw the Little Person away until I figure out what those things are meant to be.

Three Bites at the Oyster

THE LITTLE OYSTER
I am a little oyster
All white and grey and pink
And full of good nutrition
I have heard that people think
With fifty nine trace elements
And quite a lot of zinc
I'm just a little oyster though
And don't care what they think.

DIVINE WELLNESS
"Hello dear, I'm calling up to find out where you are!"
"Oh! I'm just about to get into this oyster-bed-cum-spa,
It's meant to be relaxing and healthgiving; yes, bizarre!
And you get two dozen oysters and free access to the bar!"

FOR PLINY
The learned Elder Pliny knew
When constipated what to do
The following treatment worked just fine:
Oysters boiled in honey wine.

Sorry Pliny for putting that in
It has more gravitas in Latin.

Sadness of the Unenlightened Oyster

Pliny the Elder has presented me with a poem about Oyster Therapy:


Ostreae aquam dulcem fluvium amant
Parvae et rarae in mare
Optime in luce aestatis crescent
Non illuminatae lente tristitiae

This translates as:

Oysters love the fresh water of streams falling into the sea
In the open sea they are small and rare
They grow best in the summer where sunlight reaches them
If they cannot be reached by the sun's rays they grow slowly
And eat very little for sadness.

( Isn't Latin wonderfully concise !)


Thanks, Pliny, I will write you one tomorrow.

Oyster Therapy

Pliny is on a bus, facing the back. Her legs are sticking out into the aisle. She sees her socks and thinks that yellow and orange stripes don't go well with purple grey and blue. It is too late to do anything about this though. She looks out of the window at the shops passing by.

The bus stops. Pliny sees a shop called Divine Wellness, offering Pure Oyster Therapy. Pliny looks again. It isn't Pure Oyster Therapy, but Pure Oxygen Therapy. Pliny blames her eyes, and a careless way of reading.

She thinks she would prefer Oyster Therapy any day.