A lunchtime stroll to take in some fresh air and sunshine today took me past The Tethered Goat, outside which No Good Boyo and his confederates were sitting around an upended packing crate which had once contained a steam-powered personal grooming device sipping their lunches of Champion's Abdication Special (except for Dazza, who was drinking lady's white wine from a lady's glass) and engaging in the sparkling, erudite conversation for which they are famed. As I hove into earshot, Dazza was explaining in the loud, ponderous tones of one well advanced on his lunch that "Social media, right, is like an animal with a huge tail which BASHES itself over the head." He accompanied this hypothesis with arm-flailing gestures which had his companions swiftly move their pints out of the way for safety.
Unwisely - for I was sober - I allowed myself to be drawn into a discussion of whether there are, in fact, any animals capable of this feat of self-flagellation. Kangaroos were proposed and then rejected on the grounds that their tails - being a balance-weight for their heads - would, if swung around into the vicinity of their heads, cause them to fall over amusingly.
I mooted snakes as being able to coil themselves around in such a way. "But do snakes have tails?" inquired No Good Boyo. "Well yes," I opined with a Mediaeval bestiary-writer's logic "A snake is basically just a tail with a head attached." There is a brief pause for thought as eyes narrow and creaking brains whirr. "Actually" explained Boyo in the manner of a scholarly authority laying down the law "Snakes are disembodied knobs used by lesbian animals to pleasure themselves with."
The conversation moved on to the Welsh floods ("Welsh people live on hills. The ones swept away were English caravanners") and some ghastly pimple or other in the cramped Celtic landscape from which Owain Glyndwr once sent a letter to the King of France offering to send over the King of England in two ships for prolonged torture, a plan which failed because Glyndwr's allies the Percys were - and I quote - "Shite".
Dazza suddenly woke up at this point, thinking that we had mentioned The Persians being Shi'ite. We then digressed into a feasibility study of whether the Safavid navy could have made it as far as the English Channel at the turn of the 15th century.
A side discussion involving the K-man then brought us back to evolution, and how many willies barnacles have. I then really did need to get on and beat a hasty retreat, leaving them to come up with an answer.
