Tiny Kittens, Dead Lions and See-through Elephants.

In which I wonder what would happen if I tried doing Substack properly, and of course the answer immediately turns out to be 'animals'.

Hello again. Sorry this is so soon after the last one. If you think that’s bad, the worse news is that I’m thinking about sending one every week. If that is a far higher dosage of Finnemore than you consider to be necessary or bearable, then do by all means unsubscribe. I entirely sympathise. Alternatively:

The thing is, I only came here because my old newsletter server shut down, and I needed a replacement. But now I’m here, and now I’ve read a bit more about how it works, I wonder if it’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve been looking for recently: a quiet place to put the sort of miscellaneous bits and pieces I used to put on Twitter, before it became a sinister abandoned fairground, with an cross scratched on the gate to remind you to keep out.

Well, look, let’s give it a shot and see what happens. There’s a considerable chance I do it for four weeks, then once more, apologetically, about a month later, and then never again. On the other hand, every so often something like this takes, and becomes a habit. I’m four years into Duolingo, I’ll have you know. Still can’t speak French, mind, but it’s the streak that counts.

Tiny Kitten.

Photo by Ray ZHUANG on Unsplash

This morning, I looked through my to-do list, and for a split second got all excited when I saw the entry ‘Tiny kitten’… before realising that in fact it said ‘tidy kitchen’. The thing is - I wrote the to-do list myself. What on earth did the bit of me that allowed itself to be excited think yesterday me might have meant? Ok, even as I type that I am aware that the answer is clearly: it thought I might be reminding myself to find, pet and in general be delighted by a tiny kitten. Well, I haven’t done this, so it’s still on the list for tomorrow. Also, I haven’t tidied the kitchen.

Dead Lions

I saw this in the supermarket, and hoped it didn’t mean Tate and Lyle are changing their syrup tin logo, but I hoped in vain, because that’s exactly what they are doing. And who can blame them; but I’m still sorry; because every so often it comes up in conversation, and it’s always fun to tell the one person in the group who doesn’t know that the sleeping lion on the golden syrup tin is in fact dead. (You’ll have gathered that this is me seizing the chance to have that fun one last time.)

The reason for this is that there is a story in the Old Testament about some bees improbably building a hive in a dead lion, that the Victorians were crazy, and thought this was a good enough reason to pop an animal corpse on their tin of syrup, and that having done so, they decided to let the design bed in for 150 years or so before changing it. Which is why you can still buy today (though not in a month or so) a tin of syrup that looks essentially the same as the ones Captain Scott took to the Antarctic to show to the penguins.

Photo by Herbert Ponting, Copyright the Scott Polar Research Institute

See-through Elephants.

I am trying to get better at drawing elephants, for reasons which need not concern us. This week, I realised I cannot put off any longer addressing my profound ignorance about what on earth is going on inside an elephant. It turns out: mostly ribcage. But the thing I found most interesting is what’s going on in an elephant’s foot. Because you draw them (if you draw them) like flat-bottomed pillars, but they must have feet and toe bones in there somewhere. Well they do - it turns out elephants, like many quadrupeds, walk on what would for humans would be their fingers and toes… only they do it while ‘holding’ a melon-sized ball of fat. (Obviously it’s more complicated than that.) I think it would have taken me a while to guess that.

More of this sort of nonsense, but with me and the cast of Souvenir Programme actually saying it in front of you, possibly tomorrow:

This year’s John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme will be on Radio 4 at the end of May, and we’re doing try-out nights of new material (prudently scattered amongst reliable old material) live in Camden. Come along! The first one is tomorrow!

I think maybe I’m going to have to stop ending these ‘Love, The Airport.’ I know. It’s like the syrup tin thing all over again. Still, for old times’ sake:

Love,

The Airport.